Moving Out Done?

Well, not really done. The stuff fit in the trailer, but not in our storage unit in Medicine Hat. We have a little family thing next weekend with Jodi's side, so I am taking Erika back down to Medicine Hat to stay with Grandma and Grandpa, and then me and Dad will move the stuff out of the storage unit and into another one, double the size. Fortunately, the new one is in the same storage complex. So, I thought we would be done Thursday, but I guess not.

The move itself was pretty crazy. The piano needed to be dealt with, of course, on the day we move out. The movers came and picked it up, and then we hopped in the car to follow them to the drop off location. The place turned out to be a fourplex, and I had no idea which one we were supposed to drop the piano off at. So, being the smartie I am, I just picked one and ended up walking in on some large lady, not adequately dressed, making beef stroganoff and her pitbull barking its ugly face off. She seemed pretty surprised. Anyway, after apologizing profusely, I phoned Megan (which I should have done in the first place) to figure out the right unit of the fourplex. The snow drifts on the sidewalk up to the door ranged from 2 to 3 feet, so the movers said they couldn't do it, and took off. I figured I would shovel the walk so it was ready for the actual delivery, and it took about triple the time I thought it would. We finally got home and my Dad was waiting to load the trailer and we dove right in. The trailer was really slippery and I think it was -36°C when we finally finished at 7:30. After a little more cleaning and loading of our car and Dad's truck, we were done for the day, with no real end in sight.

Thursday we slept in longer than we wanted, but managed to get everything packed by 9:00. Now, remember the story I told about the walkthrough, and how things were set up to go bad? Well, everything that could have gone bad, did. They completely tried to get every penny they could from us, and because I signed the original walkthrough, we really couldn't do much about it. We got 'in trouble' for things like dirty walls, the outside of our door being dirty, dirty light fixtures, and my personal favorite: the heat vents being dirty. We actually took the vents out and put in new ones for the duration and then put their's back in, so they were complaining about their own poor quality cleaning on that one. What really gets my dander up is they have no maximum they can charge for damage or cleaning. For other rentals we have had over the years, they can keep your damage deposit and that's it. Of course, because we are in a student residence, they can charge above the damage deposit, and unless you pay whatever they want, you can't order any transcripts or sign out books or any other university service. There has to be some rule against that. Anyway, we got to Medicine Hat at about 6:30 pm and finished unloading what we could at around 9:00 pm.

The next morning, I went out to the car to go to the spectacular Medicine Hat mall, and I thought "the car kind of smells funny. A little sweet. Hmmm...". Well, turns out I left the bottle of Kriter - champagne me and Jodi have saved since our wedding night - in the trunk of the car, and it exploded. So I tried to get the stuff out, but the smell lingered. We had to get Ziebart to steam clean it. It smells ok now.

We are now at Jodi's mom's place for the next couple of weeks. Well, sort of. Tomorrow I am heading to work for a couple of days in Edmonton, and then Thursday I am taking Erika to Medicine Hat, and on the weekend we have that family thing at Red Deer.

Sorry about the novel, apparently there's been a little bit going on. Here's a nice picture of me in the hotel room getting ready for my interview in Freiburg 6 weeks ago.

Jeff