Yesterday, with the help of an old college friend, Ted, his son Adam, and a former student of Sibylle’s, John, we moved the bulk of our stuff from the apartment to the townhouse. It was a long, hot day, but one that was ultimately successful. Along the way my car was backed into by a careless driver, there were tears, laughter, simple food that was made better for sharing it and the experience around it, and a sense of accomplishment.
Moving Pianos The triumph of the say was the successful moving of two pianos. We used the first trip with the truck as a dry run, to see if I could back close enough to the front door to drop the truck’s pull-out ramp onto the threshold of the townhouse. If I could then we could wheel the pianos on the furniture dolly from the truck to the living room. I was able to ease the truck back and over the curb with out disturbing the contents in the dry run so we all agreed that we would attempt the pianos on the second trip.
With Ted and John doing the majority of the lifting, and Sibylle and I guiding from the sides we were able to position the pianos onto the dolly and then maneuver the dolly up the ramp and into the truck. Once both were in place and strapped down we wedged a couple large, heavy-duty cardboard boxes in on the sides to prevent side-to-side shifting during the 7 mile journey to the townhouse. Because the truck listed its clearance as 11 feet, I avoided the lone railway underpass, which lists its height at 11 feet 4 inches. I didn’t want to take a chance that either measurement was optimistic.
With only a little maneuvering I was able to line the truck up on the doorway and drop the ramp perfectly on the threshold. We were successful in moving both pianos to their new home. The rest of the move seemed, to me, to be almost anticlimactic in comparison, except to say the Tad and John were invaluable help all day and well into the night.
Look Before You Back Midway through the unloading of the first load of furniture and boxes, I happened to be coming back outside in time to see someone visiting the neighbor back his mini-van into the side of my Lexus. Fortunately he only “lightly” bumped the car, but there is still some damage to the passenger-side rear quarter panel and the bumper wrap around on that side. The bumper is plastic and seems to have retained its original shape, although it is scuffed now. There maybe some of the outer layer of paint missing as well. The body panel is also slightly marred but again appears to by finish damage only.
Since the bumper is molded plastic the same color as the car I expect it’ll be several hundred dollars, perhaps a thousand, to replace it. The driver of the van was apologetic and readily allowed me to copy the information on his license and insurance card. He’d like to handle it without involving his insurance, which is fine with me as long as I am reimbursed for my bumper. I’ll have to take time out this week and visit the body shop for an estimate.
Tears and Laughter Early on in the loading process, with people going in and out of the door, one of the cats, Taz, disappeared. I couldn’t find her anywhere I looked. My heart stopped and I had this incredible sense of loss that nearly overwhelmed me. After several minutes of increasingly frantic searching she was located, safe and sound, inside the apartment. The sense of relief was incredible and left me in tears for a few minutes. I think the tears helped me to shed some of the anxiety and stress Sibylle and I have felt for the past several weeks as we prepared for the move. After I was done crying I felt better and more able to face the day.
When we dropped the ramp perfectly on the doorstep of the townhouse and knew we were going to get the pianos inside safely, there were smiles and laughter from all of us.
Friends Sibylle and I have been fortunate this summer in that we had the help of her friends and students when we her from Manhattan to the apartment here. And yesterday we were again fortunate to have help from one of my oldest friends, his son, and one of her former students. We absolutely could not have accomplished this move without their help. That they were cheerful, helpful, and willing the entire day was icing on an already delicious cake. That it was over 100 degrees the entire time we moved, and still past 90 degrees at 11:00 pm when we were finished for the day, puts their contribution to our lives in perspective. They are true friends, and we are indebted to them.
On Tuesday I received a status update email on my passport indicating that the overnight return delivery should arrive Wednesday. Late in the afternoon Wednesday I got a phone call from the local post office regarding the delivery. Because we are in the midst of moving, and not knowing how long delivery would take I erred on the side of caution and put the new address down for the passport delivery, even ticked the “care of” box on the form and filled in Sibylle’s name. The local mail carrier wasn’t buying it, resulting in the phone call. The postal agent who called said that the carrier wasn’t aware that I was living there, and further that there was no one home to sign for the delivery.
I explained that I had hedged my bet regarding the delivery and put the new address down in case we were fully moved from the current one before the expedited processing completed. I also asked that they hold the delivery there at the post office so I could swing by after work the following day to pick it up.
Yesterday, Thursday then, we went to the post office and I got my passport. It is now safely ensconced in the sock drawer with her passport.
Cost of certified birth certificate: $32 Cost of expedited passport: $189.50 Being able to go to Europe with Sibylle: Priceless.
In July 2004 when the move from Illinois to Kansas was completed a considerable amount of stuff was in storage. Anticipating that a 2000 square foot house, with lots of storage and a generously large garage, wasn’t going to fit into a 1000 square foot apartment with very little storage room, I had a storage locker rented, and a U-Haul truck reserved the day the movers arrived with their semi. The plan was to have them off load some items directly onto the U-Haul so it could be taken immediately to the storage facility and locked away. This plan worked flawlessly until yesterday.
Sibylle and I are moving in to a townhouse where a queen-sized bed will fit far more comfortably than a king-sized. So we planned on pulling my queen-sized bed (mattress, box springs, frame, and headboard) out of storage and storing the king-sized one. After several weeks of delaying this task we finally had a pickup truck, and strong back in the form of a co-worker, yesterday to make this possible. The townhouse has a split staircase, you go up 5 steps to a landing turn 90 degrees to the left and continue up to the second floor. The ceiling over the stairs isn’t any too high, in fact it wasn’t quite high enough to fit the box springs through. It took considerable effort by all three of us, several tries, and strap cinched around the springs to compress them a bit, to squeeze through the narrow opening. Actually, in places the opening isn’t quite as narrow as it was before.
When we took the box off the springs early on in this ordeal I remarked that I didn’t remember the springs as having a turquoise blue color. I remembered it as being white. Much later, after fitting a 60-inch wide box springs through a 57-inch wide hole, I noticed that the mattress was also blue, had a large stain on it, and came from Sears, not Sealy. The dawning realization was that by not looking in the boxes 37 months ago before it went into storage, I had accepted the wrong mattress and box springs from the movers.
This would be comical if we hadn’t worked for thirty minutes to force the springs one inch at a time up the stairs and around the landing to the second floor. It’ll take a chainsaw to get it out of the house.
First thing this morning I called the Allied mover in Springfield that had been employed three years ago to see what, if anything, could be done. The mover was sympathetic and passed me on to the claims department. I’ve left a message with them and am very curious what they’ll say when the call back.
Of course this means that somewhere, someone else moved and when they took the boxes off the mattress and springs that were delivered by Allied their 20-year old, sway backed and stained, Sears model had magically transformed itself into a barely used 9-year old Sealy Posturepedic. And obviously they didn’t file a claim as their sleep solution had gotten considerable better in the bargain.
Since the beginning of August my weight has consistently been under 200 pounds. Moreover, for the past six days now it has been under 198; with a new low of 197.2 this morning.
Recently I started actively tracking my eating habits again, to see how much I was consuming in a day, and to show myself more concretely the snacking that has slowly been creeping back into my diet. My new employment situation provides free fountain drinks and I have been partaking. Also, I’ve been snacking more this spring and summer than I was last fall and winter. Writing down everything I was eating in a day showed me that I was eating on average about 2000 calories per day. Since my weight has been no more than 2 or 3 pounds above or below 200 since the beginning of the year, I think I can safely say that 2000 calories nicely maintains my weight.
When I started this project over a year ago my goal was to reach 200 pounds, as I couldn’t imagine losing more than 50 pounds of weight. I’d like to lose another 20 pounds, maybe 25, but I don’t have the same drive I did a year ago when I was very unhappy with my size, shape, and weight.
At the beginning of August Sibylle and I discussed in detail my financial situation and how it impacts us and our future. Disclosing the state of my debt and my on again/off again efforts to eliminate it wasn’t easy, but it was ultimately very good. We have a plan for addressing our debt and savings and future in place, one that is being very ably managed by Sibylle. The hidden benefit, or at least hidden until she pointed it out to me yesterday, is that since we discussed this I have been dropping weight again. From a high of 199 a week ago on the first to a low this morning of 197.2.
It seems that I set down more “weight” with our financial restructuring that I realized. I have to say that losing a few more pounds feels great but that coming clean and sharing the financial “weight” feels even better.
For much of the summer an underlying theme for us has been, “Find Mark’s Passport.” All of the drawers, closets, and hiding places in the apartment were searched and searched again. Numerous trips to the storage lockers were made, and dozens of boxes searched and searched again. A side trip to the emergency room was undertaken after I closed the car door on my finger. Finally after admitting that it was truly lost (perhaps stolen last October when I was robbed) I tossed in the towel and applied for a new passport.
There have been horror stories of people need a passport to travel and not getting one on time due to the backlog at the State Department resulting from changes in US policy regarding re-entry to the country after travel abroad. A ten to twelve week back log exists according to their site, so I paid extra, nearly double, to expedite the processing and return of my application.
This morning in my inbox a message from the State Department appeared, with this key sentence in the middle:
This means you should receive your passport on or about 08/08/2007.
Yay!
Yesterday, Sibylle and I spent most of the afternoon and some of the evening working on a new website for her piano studio. She has had sites in the past, and one weekend last spring I played around with some design ideas that resulted in a prototype site that never saw the light of day.
The site we began yesterday is farther along in just a few hours than the previous one, and it (hopefully) will be going live very soon now. As with many other activities we’ve shared in the past year, we discovered that working together on her business is something we do well. I thoroughly enjoy the design process as well as the nuts and bolts of CSS and XHTML. She is an excellent client who knows what she wants and doesn’t want, and is willing to say so. We were able to iterate through several changes to the site resulting in a layout we are both pleased with.
I’ll announce the launch of the site in a day or two, once we get the last wrinkles worked out.
One of the activities that occurs as two people begin to merge their lives is the redistribution of responsibilities. Where before you were responsible for everything, now, suddenly, there is another set of hands to accomplish what needs doing. Sometimes one or the other of you will setup to the mark and say, “I’m going to take care of this or that.” Other times you just start doing that chore or activity and it becomes yours. Perhaps the most difficult thing (at least for me) is to say, “This is something I can’t do well, would you please do it for us?”
In my case the activity is managing finances. It is not something that I’ve ever been good at, and it has led to difficulties in the past. Fortunately Sibylle is good at it and moreover, likes doing it. We spent quite a bit of time this week, culminating in a new spreadsheet last night, working out our long-term strategy and short term tactics to get our spending and debt under control. Sibylle is thorough, organized, and anal about money - exactly what we need. That I can rely upon her to tend this vital aspect of our combined household means a great deal to me. That I was able to confess my inability to do it justice in spite of the real or imagined social and family expectations that I should be able to do it, was a tremendous relief.
The colophon has been updated for the first time in a year, and I’ve removed the script that displayed random titles on the home page. Henceforth the only title will be, “zanshin.net: because not enough sites start with the letter Z.”
Also, I’ve been cleaning up the tag order on some of the ancillary pages, putting the footer inside the page container where it belongs.
Later this month Sibylle and I will be taking up residence in a townhouse in the neighboring suburb. In my entire life I have never lived in anything but single story dwellings. This is not to say that I haven’t lived in buildings will multiple floors, it is just saying that my dwelling has always had just one floor. (My parents house has a basement, but that’s their dwelling.)
I’m looking forward to living on multiple floors, after all, I have multiple virtual desktops on all my computers to segregate or group activities. Why shouldn’t my dwelling have divisions too? As Sibylle puts it there are public rooms, semi-private rooms, and private rooms. Having a staircase makes for a nice division between the public and semi-private areas of the house and the private areas.
The other aspect of the townhouse that I’m looking forward to is wooden floors throughout. Carpet is certainly nice, but much harder to keep clean - especially with cats in residence. As one of our cats requires twice daily insulin injections I’ve spend a fair amount of time in close contact with the carpets in the apartment and I am looking forward to a flooring surface that isn’t a magnet for every particle of dust, dirt, hair, skin cell, et cetera, that drifts down from above.
The last aspect of the new dwelling that will be wonderful is exposure other than north facing only. The apartment has openings only on one side, and that side faces north. Actual sunshine coming in will be marvelous.
As a resident of various cubical farms though-out my career, and more specifically, as a user of computer keyboards, I suffer from muscle spasms in my upper back periodically. The strain of holding ones arms up in the typing position for hour after hour, day after day, takes a toll on the large muscles in your upper back.
In my case I get a large knot or trigger point just to the right of my spine about mid-way down the right shoulder blade. Over the course of two or three days this spasm grows in intensity resulting in reduced flexibility and range of motion and disrupted sleep. Motrin or Aleve can dull the pain but don’t really release me from its hold. Laying on a tennis ball or similar object can sometimes flatten the muscle, forcing the knot to let go.
On Sunday I developed the latest of these knots and tried a muscle relaxant instead of regular pain killers. Sold under the name of Flexeril, it is really called cyclobenzaprine. It effectively knocked me off of the evolutionary ladder for a couple of hours. The first two hours after taking the pill were okay. The pain was still there, but perhaps diminished somewhat. Then we had dinner. Within minutes of eating I was incredible tired and unable to think straight. I laid down on the couch and, according to Sibylle, didn’t move again. At times I was hardly breathing. This stuff just knocked me out.
I vaguely remember her coming to see me and talking to me. She said my responses were nonsense and garbled. I had a very vague sense of unease but no way to express it or even really focus on it. After crashing for an hour or so I started to wake up and could talk again. Within a couple hours of eating I was upright and moving around. My guess is that the combination of cyclobenzaprine in my blood stream, and the sudden concentration of blood in my abdomen as a result of eating was enough to put me under.
Whatever the cause I will not be taking cyclobenzaprine ever again. That a pill so tiny could have a huge impact is amazing. Frightening.