THE SONIC BOOMER
Two weeks ago, I arrived in Orlando to help my daughter Jen and her family get set up in their new home.
The first week was super fun because the closing was delayed. While Jen was at work, I got to loll around the pool at her temporary apartment, eating all her snacks and playing an interesting new game I found on my phone.
The second week was a lot less fun, mostly because of the “stuff.”
The week actually began the Friday before at 1 p.m. sharp, when papers were signed, keys were handed over and the horrors of unloading a 40-foot rental truck began.
The trouble with a 40-foot rental truck is that it is not only quite long, but it is quite tall as well. There’s room for a lot of “stuff” in there if you pack it properly. There’s room for even more stuff if you start getting tired at the end of the day and begin flinging random things like hoes and rakes and brooms and mops and the kids’ bicycles up on top of the properly packed stuff. This was the case with Jen’s truck, as it had been packed during a 101-degree day in Kansas City and was being unpacked during a balmy 93-degree day in Orlando.
In addition to the truck, there was an attached trailer upon which was perched a small recreational vehicle jammed full of more stuff and Jen’s SUV, which had been filled to the brim with all the “stuff” from the apartment. (The furniture stayed, a blessing for which I am eternally grateful.)
As the house needed to be deep-cleaned first, the “stuff” ultimately required the renting of a large storage unit and that, in turn, meant that some stuff stayed, some went into the garage, some went into the shed and some went into the refrigerator at Jen’s office. This stuff was sorted and re-sorted and brought back to the house if needed, and lost in the garage and forgotten forever in the shed.
To make things even more exciting, the previous owners (four siblings in their 80s) had decided to “gift” Jen’s family with items that were no longer of use to them. These fabulous items included planks of wood, boxes of nails, old tires, a microwave, a huge sofa (with matching love seat!), two unbelievably heavy desks, five pressed-wood bookcases (upstairs, of course), four barstools and three chairs — including a pale blue velvet recliner that, in addition to being butt-ugly, would dump you onto your head if you tried to sit in it.
It’s hard to mop floors with that “stuff” lying around, so it had to be carried out.
The injuries incurred while moving this “stuff” (although by now I was using a different word to describe it) included a possible broken leg requiring a trip to the ER (only a massive contusion, thank goodness), a twisted neck resulting from a fall down the truck ramp and a bump on the head from walking into a door frame — although we think that one was merely a ploy to get released from further assignments.
Best of all, we had rice for dinner and shared a spoon to eat it. Nothing else could be found among the !@#$%^& stuff.
