First, if you're a yankee, Happy 4th. If not, I hope your Monday's going well. May we all eat well and enjoy the day. I, poor patriot that I am, don't even know if the city's setting off fireworks tonight or if they did it last night. We have, however, hears all the fireworks they're setting off at the nearby lakes since Wednesday.
*bad segue*
Moving is stressing me out. In fact, anything with a brown cardboard box is stressing me out. It started on Thursday when my boss called me. Now, for the record, I work for a small, niche publisher at my university that puts out books related to Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Russia (former Soviet Block). I work in editorial, preparing manuscripts for print, occasionally dealing directly with the printer in lieu of my boss. So when he called and asked me help do the beginning-of-the-fiscal-year inventory, I can't say I was thrilled. And I sure wasn't ambivalent. But I agreed because the "team" is a little short-staffed right now (long story, but temporary), and my boss was kind enough to hire me through the summer when I'm leaving the university as a student.
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Courtesy of Future Perfect Publishing.
Our stacks don't look that neat. |
Friday, July 1. Seven hours of doing inventory. This did not include the back room full of boxes of books. This did not include going to the warehouse to calculate our holdings over there. Nope. This involved me standing on a step stool, reading off three digits from the book's ISBN, counting the number of books on the shelf, and reporting the number to my cohort with a clipboard, who then checked off the number on a spreadsheet. Oh, and at four, we moved on to some "donated" boxes of our books (another long story) that then involved finding each ISBN (not as clearly marked as they are on the shelf) and adding +1 to the total. *sigh* I didn't get home until 6:30.
Saturday was moving day for some good friends, so I went to help. I hadn't planned to originally, but I'm glad I did, because when I got there, it was the couple and one other person, trying to load the couple's life into a 10ft Uhaul. A couple more people joined the team over time, but we never had more than six active players. Three Uhaul trips and some "3D Tetris", as my friend coined it.
So we're in July. Soon comes August. My husband and I officially have 4 weeks until our lease ends and 5 weeks until our new lease begins. We have to box up our lives and figure out where to store it all for a week. Can we say, not fun? I'm thinking the easiest thing at this point is to rent a POD, but one-month's rental costs more than one-month's rent for my apartment (the old one, anyway), and I don't think that's reasonable. We're looking into other options, such as short-term storage, keeping various boxes in friends' garages, etc.
Seriously, boxes are stressing me out right now.
I'm trying to keep my head above water in terms of managing blogging, writing, working, and general family duties. I suppose this is nothing different, but I don't have a set schedule for myself, and I can't really create one when we'll be packing and scrounging up a place store everything.
Anyway, happy 4th again. We're grilling in the backyard.
What are you doing this fine Monday, July 4?
Do you have any create space ideas for me for a week's worth of homelessness?
Any ideas on what I can do to make the boxes less scary? :)
