Moving: It's a *hiccup* Pain

by Sofie Couch

I’m moving. Everyone keeps telling me that moving across town is more difficult than moving out of state. Moving long-distance entails packing up everything at once in a truck, moving, then un-packing everything at once into your new digs. Moving across town lulls one into a false sense of ease.

“Oh, I’ll just load one room at a time onto the truck and move a little bit every day,” I told myself, feeling good about the money I would save by not hiring movers.

The reality of it is, however, that you can’t do that. I mean, how many days can you live without a kitchen? So brilliantly organized mother of two teens that I am, I moved us in increments – half a kitchen and one of three bathrooms first – which seems logistically sound. Afterall, you can live with half a kitchen and who needs all three functioning bathrooms in a family of four? We will improvise!

“Mom, where is my special conditioner?” my daughter asks.

I hand her the bottle of olive oil.

“What do you mean, we have a coffee maker, but no toaster? Where’s the toaster? How will I make toast without the toaster? And who packed bread, but not butter? This is dumb.”

In my own defense… well… there is no defense. This is dumb. Just load one truck with everything. Hire big burly hunksters to do the loading, and get everything to the new place at one time.

As I pull a toaster out of a box, I wonder, what did we do before toasters? I’ll tell you what we did. We were cavemen, nomads, who carried our homes on our backs. (I'm feeling that.)We were cooking our wooly mammoth over an outdoor spit. Two strapping teens turned that spit and if they wanted toast, then dad-gum-it, they poked that bread on a stick and stuck it over the fire to catch the drippin’s of the wooly mammoth. That’s what they did.

“You may have to improvise, dear," I respond to a kid request for a dust pan.

I put on a positive face and I tell them, “Improvise. Pretend we’re pioneers.”

So, fifteen across town trips later, we finally have a coffee maker AND a toaster at the new digs. If only I had remembered to pack the half-and-half to go along with my coffee. Heck. Who needs creamer. I’ll improvise since someone had the forethought to pack the 20 proof Irish Cream in that last load.

And writing? I found my laptop before the deadline for my “First Fridays” Classic and Cozy blog. What more could a girl want? From where I’m sitting, atop a suitcase filled with last season’s clothes, in front of my laptop, with a flashlight for a desk lamp, post-cross-town move, I’m feeling pretty smug. (Maybe the Irish cream has something to do with that.)