More Moving Pics

Hi! By "Moving Pics" I mean the act of relocating yourself, not like, emotionally-moving. Though there's plenty of that to be had, for my friend. Trying to settle in and find new routines, and finding time to do this picture sharing thing. Did you know we moved? Here's some more pics from that. This is more of a greedy record for ourselves, but I hope you still find it interesting.

While cleaning out to prepare for the move, we found this old fortune cookie um... Fortune. Seems like we've "used" it before, and we're about to use it again. I'll save you the hassle of zooming-in, it says "A good time to start something new."

This old phone was crammed behind the bed. This dust is about 15 years old! We did not keep this, and wound up tossing it. But we thought we'd get a picture in case we later found out it was somehow valuable. But I doubt it.

Okay, this was fun. When we picked up the handle, the un-exposed part of the phone retained its original color! The rest of it "yellow'd" with age! Neat. Science, right?

We found four bottles of wine hidden in a towel drawer. My friend doesn't have a p-problem! He doesn't even drink at all! That's true, these were bought for someone else, but we were not sure why they were hidden.

Skip ahead to after we packed up the truck and drove it across many states. Here's the storage unit! We've never done the storage-unit thing before, so this feels quite strange.

Ta-da! This empty space is mathematically bigger than the moving truck, so it should all fit, right?

Pour one out for our old faux-leather jacket. It was so brittle at this point, shaking it was producing a virtual rain of shredded bits. We have a lot of good memories about that jacket, and we did bring it down, hoping it was still good, but it was time to let it go. 

Do we need progress pictures of us filling up the storage unit? Of course!

Little bit more! This time, we had people helping out! We were super grateful, with my friend having filled up the truck all by himself.

It was time for a lunch break! We did not have Cook Out restaurants in New Jersey. The menu seems complicated but it's not really, once you get the hang of it.

The relatives helping us unpack the truck were about to pay for their own meals. Um... That's not how this works! You're helping us move a lot of boxes! We got the lunch!

Pulled PorK Sandwich, fries, and hush puppies. Yum. My friend was still plenty exhausted from packing the truck a few days ago, and probably enjoyed sitting down for a minute more refreshing than the actual food.

Hah. When we got back from lunch, some other guy had made a mess of the hallway! He was kind enough to quickly clear it out so we could move around his stuff. It was worse than this, but I still got a picture to share the small roadblock.

Okay, back to work! The extra people made it go pretty fast, honestly.

Good thing the unit is so tall! How did we fit all this on the truck?! The boxes are stacked soooo high!

One more friend showed up, and really Superman'd it up. That guy lifted the couch like it was nothin. And tossed boxes like a pro. Literally. This is about the finished pic. Now it's almost time for my friend to collapse. For a day or so.

Somebody had a clicker-tracker thing, and counted 259 boxes. That's not including the dressers and furniture things. If each box was around 19 pounds, that's about 5000 pounds of stuff! Is that right?

Triple-check that the truck is empty! We got it all out. The hand cart is theirs, so that can stay.

One last picture of the gas mileage display before we turn it in. There's a nice number letting you know it's 208 miles to Empty, which is higher than the 182 it started at. So we wound up giving them some free gas, dang. And the mileage count was lower than the 373 they allowed by about 50, too. We could have gone to the mall this afternoon, at least.

Another skip-ahead jump. We took a bus back up to retrieve the car we left. I have bus trip pics for later. These pics are the final tearful good-byes. We poured out all the squirrel goodies for our little neighbors. Looks like they took some nibbles on the corn cob we found a week ago.

A lone Ikea coffee table left in the bedroom. I guess that makes this a coffee table room, now? Get it? Since there's not a bed? Looks like our waterbed left quite the... Impression.

Some empty boxes and a whole bunch of clothes hangers left in the closet.

Three nice boxes. We tried to take them with us, but they were too big to fit in the car. Oh well, they're just boxes.

We tossed the shower curtain. Bye, bathroom! We didn't bother to clean this, we knew they planned on wrecking the apartment interior after we left.

The vacuum cleaner was quite dusty and we chose to leave it. It was probably still good though. Eh... Shrug.

A few tubs of detergent. See that bucket? Sometimes the toilet wouldn't flush all the way, and you had to fill a bucket to pour in to help. Yeah, it's gross. But I wanted to remember we did that. for the record, it flushed down the um, important things, but often left paper floating on the top.

A smaller Ikea table, and the microwave that was only 900 watts and we always had to do math when the instructions for frozen diners were done with 1000 watt microwaves so we needed to add time. It was quite old anyway.

Bye, kitchen! See that odd brown square? There was an awkward side-vent fan in the wall that was basically a hole to the outside with no sort of cover of any kind. We put a cardboard square over the hole, and it's been there ever since we moved it. The vent above the stove worked fine, why was there a hole in the wall?

We abandoned some glasses. Oh no! Star Wars glasses?! Yeah, they were awkward handwash-only kinds. And we already had plenty of glasses. It's not like we won't ever be able to get Star Wars glasses, if we wanted more of them.

That was almost a full tub of butter! Plenty of sauce packets left, too.

Ah, the Toaster Oven. Farewell, old friend. We had a great run together. Near the end there was a door-closing thing, but for the most part, you were still good and usable. We did not throw it away, but left it. Now we can imagine the Toaster Oven going off on adventures like Woody did at the end of Toy Story 4.

I really did like that futon. It wasn't the softest bed, but it was okay once we put the down matress liner on it. It was plenty comfy as a couch. We got our money's-worth out of it, over the years. And the glass coffee table was nice, too. Maybe those also found good homes. They were each in great condition.

This is about the spot we lived in, where the chair would have been at the desk with the computer on it. Looking over into the corner where the TV was. Good memories, I suppose.

The Verizon people said not to worry about this thing. I pleaded with them, to tell them they had equipment in the apartment still. And that the maintenance people would likely wreck it along with the rest of the apartment.

Here's more of the thing, on the other side of the wall. Verizon insisted it would be fine. They better not try and charge me for this, if it gets crunched. When they re-did the apartment upstairs, this closet was made smaller and this wall was destroyed. Hey! look at the corner! Is that a spider?!

One last rescue of a spider that was inside the closet, as it crawls down the side of the chair outside. We got it out. No way would the maintenance people have worried about a spider. Probably. We got you.

My friend can be pretty sensitive sometimes. One last look to say goodbye to the place he spent a lot of time.

The old doormat was ripped up but still hanging in there. No need to photo-edit the apartment number to maintain anonymity. We lived in 611. Not anymore.

There it was. It's quite far away now, but it's not like it's gone. We can go back and visit if we really wanted to. No need to get too sad about it, but maybe a little bit can be allowed.