Sub Ubi

So, we’re moved in. That is, we have boxes in the house. Lots of boxes. Everywhere.

The move started on Thursday morning with my father and I heading out to pick up the truck. I rented a 24′ monster because I had no desire to deal with packing “efficiently.” I wanted to throw things in the truck, and have large amounts of space to spare.

The Echo and the moving truck prepare for their grand journey.

A 24′ truck is seemingly infinite.

Most of our stuff was in storage for the past six years; a move overseas and back will do that to you. We moved from Indiana to England/Wales, and the things that we kept were stuffed in boxes and mostly forgotten. In fact, almost completely forgotten—unpacking has been little more than a sequence of surprises (that, and a lot of washing).

Stuff packed n’ wrapped in storage.

Fortunately, most of our “stuff” was wrapped and palletized, so we just lifted pallets down, put them on the truck, and I unloaded the pallets. Hot and tiring, but reasonably quick work. We took off from home, arrived in Meadville without incident, and unloaded the bed. That was the majority of our effort on Thursday… which, to be fair, was enough.

Thursday morning, we had two big, empty rooms to unload into. And fortunately, Alex, Bob, Greg, and William (colleagues and students from the Department of Computer Science) were able to offer their help. Because of their inspired assistance, we were able to start unloading at 9:30 in the morning, and were done by 12:30. Absolutely incredible.

Staging Area I: The living room.

Staging Area II: Place Where a Table Goes

Now, we made quick work of it because Alex, Bob, Greg, and William were amazing. With their help, we had the entire truck unloaded in 3 hours. We staged the truck to our little carport, and then hand-carried the boxes into the living room and dining room. (Given that they don’t actually serve these purposes right now, we’ll just call them “Staging Area One” and “Place Where a Table Goes”.)

Now we have boxes everywhere.

Boxes in the kitchen.

Carrie, like me, wondering what is where.

Yesterday I sorted roughly half the boxes we had unloaded in the morning by moving them to their appropriate geographic location within the house (clothes upstairs, random things to the attic, etc.). Today, I finished that while Carrie worked on the kitchen (much washing of things), and after that, I sat outside and started stripping some of our furniture… so that we might have somewhere to put stuffs like clothing.

Stripping (destroying) furniture.

As it happens, I did all the things while stripping furniture you’re not supposed to. Fortunately, I can’t make the furniture look worse than it does now, so I’m certain the end result will be beautiful.

And, if you can’t tell, the Internets arrived yesterday as well.

The Internets. Used for email and the blag.

I’ll have to gush about the amazing, customer-friendly policies of Armstrong Cable at some later point. That, and talk about the joys of home ownership, like discovering that the drain in your shower leaks the first night you arrive, and having water drip down through your kitchen ceiling. AWESOME! As a result, I got to spend this morning pulling part of our ceiling down so the drain assembly could be replaced. Many thanks are due to Lenny, who came over and helped even though this was a bit outside of his area of specialty.

This evening, we had instant pizzas, headed into town for sundaes (it was a fundraiser), and then headed home for a bath… because we had to, what with the shower needing time to rest while the silicone sets up.

Tub. Reasonably great awesome.

Now, I’m watching the SpaceX rocket launch (over the Internets), and then it’s bedtime.

As seen on the internets:

While dropping a friend off at the airport today, Carrie noted that Cleveland Hopkins is permanently on an ORANGE alert, which indicates a HIGH RISK of terrorist activity.

I was digging through this blog looking for a Muppet version of the terrorism alert scale, which I thought I had linked to once before… and cannot find at this point. However, I discovered that in 2003 (yes, that’s five years ago now), I actually wrote about this:

Fear has long been the tool of tyrants and despots. It is a powerful mechanism for control, but any population made to live in fear will eventually wake up and realize that the thing they have been conditioned to fear has long since died, or that the fear has been stoked and fed by the very agents who are supposed to dispel that fear, and make their world a better place.

I titled the post Orange alert, my ass. I was an angry young man back then; now, I’m just young. And much better looking. And very self-affirming, with a great sense of humor. And I’m still amazed by the persistent culture of fear-mongering that has taken root in this country.

PS. I found it! The muppet terror alert level indicator can be found at http://www.geekandproud.net/terror/.

I think this thing is hilarious.

The last few weeks have been… action packed. This would seem to be as good a description as any.

The shipping pod arrived on Tuesday, and we had it packed by dinner time.

On Wednesday, the pod went away, and so did we. What followed was an excessive amount of driving over the next few days that left us wondering just how many weeks (so it seemed) that we had been in transit from our comfy basement in Needham. We drove from Boston to the Atlantic Highlands, NJ, then up to Rosseau, Ontario, down to Waterloo, and finally to Columbia Station, Ohio.

Our first destination was a trip to northern New Jersey to be with family. I got a very nice picture of Carrie while we were all gathered together.

We then traveled on to Rosseau, Ontario to see many friends and bear witness to the Christening of Dave and Teena’s new daughter. While leaving at 05:30 did mean that we’d miss traffic north into New York city, we failed to consider that it would mean we’d hit heavy traffic at the border (people from Buffalo apparently like to go up into Canada for the weekend), and we didn’t know that Toronto at rush hour is absolutely foul. Our drive took 17 hours, which is only 1.7 times longer than Google said it would take. We no longer have any reason to ever want to drive into Toronto again.

We had one day “off” on Saturday, and on that day Dave and I went sailing in a small sailboat. This was my first time sailing, and it was a lot of fun. Dave smashed both of his big toes, and as soon as we launched off the dock, we were dumped in the lake and lost our tiller. Dave re-mounted the tiller in the wind-whipped chop, we climbed back in, and successfully tacked along the shore to our picnic destination. Of course, the picnic site was in a sheltered area, so we just dumped ourselves from the boat again to park it… or whatever you call the destination-management process with little sailboats.

Sunday saw us driving down to visit Robin and Meg and the newest member of their family. Monday we then embarked on the final leg of the journey, which took us from Waterloo back to my parents’ house in the Cleveland area. All told, it was 1400 miles of driving in six days.

At this point, our little Toyota Echo (which was getting upwards of 40 MPG on the highway! hooray!) is now in the shop. On the drive, it developed a bit of a growl in the front end, and it looks like both the driver- and passenger-side wheel bearings want replacing. Badly. And, the drive shafts are probably going to go, too, just because it’s a good idea, as they’re tired too, and they had to be removed as part of the operation anyway.

Today, the pod arrived, and we unpacked it. Now, we reserve a truck, and hopefully conduct a move at the end of the month.

We have two trips to make out to Meadville before we move, so there’s still more driving to be done. All told, I’d say that buying a house and making a move in under two months is a reasonably distracting and time-consuming thing, and fitting ceremonies of both death and birth into one week can be a bit draining. But we’re home now, and there’s ice cream to be had.

PS. If you’re a friend or family, and you’d like to be notified when I post new pictures to the photo galleries I’ve set up, please drop me an email and let me know. My photos are password protected (to keep them off the Internets at large), but they’re not terribly top secret. The galleries are located at http://sububi.smugmug.com/, a photo hosting/sharing site that I’ve decided to experiment with for the next year.

PPS. If you’re of the European persuasion, here’s a route of equivalent distance in the UK. It takes you from Canterbury, up around London, to Cambridge, Birmingham, down to Oxford, Reading, Bristol, down through Exeter and Plymouth, up and around to Southampton, up to Bath and over to Cardiff, up along the Welsh coast through Aberystwyth to Bangor, through Colwyn Bay on to Crew, up to Liverpool, on to Manchester and Leeds, up along the east coast to Edinburgh, over to Glasgow, and then ending on the coast (because we like the seashore) in Prestwick. Admittedly, it would be much prettier from Leeds to go up through the Lake District; it comes out roughly the same, but we’d end on the east coast of Scotland, which is rather striking.