Packing has resumed after a pause. In the meantime other stuff has been happening. New hinges have been ordered and arrived, so the hall pantry doors, once removed for painting and briefly won't swing back and boink me, can finally shut properly. While the doors are off, I can pull non-food items out and pack those, at least the ones which won't be used soon like napkins, paper towels and garbage bags, or left because they go with the house, like the special chandelier bulbs. Lordy, do we have garbage bags! And lordy, will they get used in the next two months!
The framed pictures are off the walls. They've been waiting for the right sized box, which we now have, thanks to seeing a new refrigerator being unloaded next door and asking the truck driver for its box. They've been waiting for spare cardboard to pack between pieces too, which we also have in abundance thanks to those same new neighbors, ready to relieve their garage of stacks of empty once-used boxes. They actually bought a bunch of them for their move, and now are giving them away. Their end goal is parking one of their vehicles in their garage. In turn, the boxes have been waiting for a box cutter, since ours disappeared a few years back. I finally went shopping when there was an employee in the store who knew where they were kept and had the keys to unlock their anti-shoplifting case. The one I bought comes with 5 extra blades. It should last long enough to turn a lot of those large boxes into sheets of cardboard, both to separate the pictures and take up space to fill the box so things don't heave back and forth in transit. This I needed stronger packing tape for, so I ordered that. A short wait for it to arrive was minor. The packing peanuts I also ordered, 8 cubic feet, non-static, took a month. Glad I ordered those ahead of time.
Do I sound like I'm full of excuses? So be it.
Those packing boxes from next door have two more advantages. One is wide and long enough to pack Steve's walleye mount in while on its driftwood. Separating the two is NOT an option. Plus, more importantly, it will have plenty of room for packing peanuts to fit in around it and keep it safe on the trip. Or at least that's what the guys announced one night. They're the ones who measured, or at least I assumed they did. I'll have to pack it first, now before I start cutting up other big boxes for the pictures. We'll miss it on the wall for a few months, but it will be nice having it properly packed.
Another box is tall enough to pack my X-mas tree in, the one I made for the contest last year in the club, which won. While it is short for a tree, it is fastened to its stand in one piece and has to stay vertical. It was our only tree this year, the old artificial white one going away in our last garage sale. Meanwhile Rich came up with a stand for Steve's bubbler lights, and I've promised Steve we'll get a new artificial tree in the new place. That box also contains the wreath of giant jingle bells for the front door and those bubbler lights, though one of the strings will be tossed and the lights kept as spares. The insulation on the cord is so old that when I took them down I noticed bare wires showing. I'm thinking we got really lucky there! In a way it's a good thing to have to toss it, because we had two more lights broken this year and the only one I found for sale cost $35 plus ridiculous shipping , and there's no way I will ever buy a bulb for over $50.00! Not a whole string, even! Just because the seller claimed it was antique does not make it worth it. I just bought more strings about 20 some years ago. I want to believe they will be out on the market again some time, despite tiny LEDs being popular. But I have no guarantees. So we needed to give them extra special packing care, meaning that box also had to wait for the packing peanuts.
The reasons for getting the non static kind are not just that I hate unpacking a box and finding them stuck all over me, but for the next job they have: my second laptop, and the printer which it's the only computer programmed for. It's an old one, that laptop, even older than this one from 2013, but so's the printer, workhorse that it remains. I have a couple papers to update and print out first. Then in a box they go, with cords, toner, paper tray, stray discs which that computer still reads, and packing peanuts. The reams of paper are already packed in a small but very heavy box.
I trust that the 8 cubic feet will last for the job. X-mas is already packed. but that only took about a foot of them. The walleye comes next as that's the most fragile of them. The printer comes last because if I run out there are lots more packing materials and box fillers around if fragile isn't your top concern. For example, Steve and I will be pulling clothing out of our closets to use. I figure we can get by for a few months on about half the winter and half the summer things we have here, plus once we get north again, what's been left there so we have much less to haul in the car each way. There will be even more room for clothes in the car this last trip because there's no dog who needs both her supplies and room to move around in during the trip. Even so, clothes will need to be packed for shipping, so why not around, say, kitchen ware? We'll plan much better to buy just what we'll eat that last month or so, plus some staples for the road like water and dried foods. We have collapsible stackable crates, heavy duty, which are a perfect fit in the car, and once those are loaded we have bunches of reusable heavy shopping bags to stuff more soft goods in to fill the car nearly to the top. Even with a dog we do that every trip. Anyway, an extra dozen sweat shirts. pants, blouses, and so forth can wrap around kitchen ware, extra mugs, bowls, measuring cups, pans used twice a year, etc..
There's also the need to go through all the paper we no longer need, like old medical and financial documents. When I was still working, each year's records filled an expanding file folder. Once I ran out of those, rather than buy more for less reason since I was no longer needing to file but still keeping records, the records were stored in plastic bags. It's time to cull, and that means getting rid of certain numbers one doesn't want spread indiscriminately through the world for identity theft. Steve has a shredder. An actual, working shredder. We also have lots of paper sacks as well as plastic ones. This past week Steve has filled two sacks worth of home-made excelsior. I had him put it in paper sacks so we could put it to the curb on recycling days, since our regular container is nearly always overfilled already. Then I figured it was great packing material, so long as its' in a container giving it form, like a huge zipper bag or a tie-able grocery store bag, depending on the empty space needing to be filled.
My peanuts were late arriving by two weeks from stated arrival date, and I was getting impatient. So, just after going around behind Steve and picking up all the little single pieces which had fallen on the floor, since his back hates bending that far for long enough to do the job, now I was making new messes transferring the excelsior to new closeable plastic bags for better use. Some will go under the walleye on both ends to keep it more horizontally balanced over the driftwood during shipping. Tilting as peanuts shifted would not be helpful. No, we're not recycling the excelsior, or at least not yet. Once we can unpack, then we'll work it out. I'll make sure to keep and pack the flattened stack of paper bags for the end of the move. Those can be hard to come by these days.
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