Staggering Onwards
Well, other than the fact that all of my worldly possessions are currently outside in a U-Haul, I'm officially a resident of Vancouver now. And everyone is no entitled to smack me if I ever decide of my own volition to either move during the winter months or assist in any move during the later quarter of the year. This year its my own damn fault, and despite the fact that I would love to blame winter itself or the sudden blizzard, but the fact is that not only did we choose to move during the winter but we didn't plan things nearly as well as we could have, started late, and let our kindness to a couple friends come before our own needs in terms of the condition of our appartment so near the end of the month. Its honestly a miracle that we've made it, and the full story is below, in all its terrible glory.
Firstly, despite the fact that we were moving on the 30th, we didn't actually phone U-Haul for a reservation until about a week before the move. Mostly my fault actually because I'd spoken to them at the start of the month and asked what sort of time frame would work for a reservation and being told that anything up to a few days before the move would be kosher, but that a credit card would be needed to hold the reservation. Not knowing whether they would try for a pre-auth on my card, I chose to hold off until almost a week before hand to make sure I could drop a payment onto my card to free up some space for a large pre-auth.
And then the snow landed.
Not only did this mean that my thoughts were elsewhere, lost somewhere between the delight of having a real winter to look forward to and the pain of getting to and from work with my gout running on overdrive, but I was exhausted coming home every day because they've had me training people non-stop to try and make sure that they had someone prepared to take up my job. The snow also meant that half of the U-Haul fleet got snowed in up in Keating Crossroad, so when we called a few days before our move to secure one, we got stone-walled. And every moving service and rental company in the entire city was booked solid, so it literally took 8 -hours- to track down a vehicle, and to do so we had to book online and deal with having to wrangle everything out with both the U-Haul head office and the local locations so that we could be assured of -getting- a vehicle, because its one thing to speak with someone at a call-center in the deep south... its entirely another thing to take the confirmation number over to a local rental center and actually find that your vehicle is -available- and ready to go.
The second problem was having Azzy and Icarus staying with us left our appartment in perhaps the most hellish state it's ever been. I'll be very kind to poor Azzy by saying that I don't entirely blame her, she was in a pretty screwed up situation and not in the very best of head space when we invited the pair of them into our home near the end of October. But we literally had more than 2/3 of a city dumpster of trash left laying in our livingroom, and we chose to throw out more than 3/4 of our kitchen rather than push against the mountain of moldy plates, pots and cutlery.
I don't know what I think about it... I'm not angry, just gravely disappointed and perhaps feeling a little betrayed. But this move has been so fraught with frustration and stress that its going to take a week or more before my emotions come back online. At this point I'm basically dead, I've shut down emotionally from the stress and am basically running in zombie mode... The 'Hurr... clean... hurr... pack... hurr... move' sort of headspace you have to sink into when you're really hurting but are forced to stagger onwards or get buried under it.
But I suppose, onwards to the actual main course, the travesty of our move.
It took us eight hours of nail biting and phone calls to try and secure a vehicle, we weren't terribly off schedule when we began cleaning, but the sudden eight hour drive to secure some sort of transportation for our things derailed things entirely and left us both badly shaken. Myself I suppose especially, because Zack at least had a home set up in Vancouver already and could simply store his left over belongings and go 'home', but everything I had was sitting all around me, my entire life, and being financially responsible for our move -and- for supporting myself for a couple months in Vancouver means that rediculously expensive last minute options like hiring movers would leave me unable to support myself and in a great deal of trouble... Suffice to say by the time we had something reasonably ironed out, I was shaking inside for much of the evening, and only a portion of sleep managed to steady my nerves enough to shove myself down into zombie mode. But it did give me a weird insight into how my brain deals with stress... I found that the moment I laid down and started to drift towards sleep I rammed directly into the mental knot of grief and worry in my head, and a series of rapid dreams paved everything out in a relatively smooth manner... Not really 'lucid' dreams, but a series of stress-situations in a half-awake mental state.
We weren't expecting Clinton until 6:30pm on the night of the 29th but U-Haul couldn't guarentee us a truck on the 'morning' of the 30th, so we had to ask them to get something together for us on the night of the 29th to ensure that we would -have- the truck for the morning of the move. They could only offer us a smaller vehicle and an attached trailer for the night of the 29th, but of course they also close at 6:00 in the evening, a half hour before our driver was due to arrive! So we had to lean on the hospitality of Meiki and Engel's father who drove Meiki and I out to the U-Haul office way out in Langford so that I could pay for the truck and have Meiki drive the truck and trailer back into the city to our appartment. Let me tell you that if I ever have to move with a rented U-Haul again, I'll be reserving it a month in advance from a regional office with a dedicated parking lot. Meiki and I got out into Langford to find a tiny little convenience store run by an older Chinese lady and her daughter and a small parking lot behind the building... A parking lot that was gravel laid atop of grass, and still had nearly a foot of snow across the length of it. It took us three hours to get out of that lot. Three stressful hours of pleading with the parking lot to let us have our truck so that we could go home, and a few hard lessons about how fucking ill-prepared for slippery roads U-Haul trucks are. They're rear wheel drive, and equipped with perhaps the poorest all season radial tires that I've ever seen, even a quarter inch of slush under the tires will cause them to spin freely, and because the trucks don't have traction control if you get one wheel atop an icy patch you can't use the traction of your other back wheel to spin you to the side onto a dry patch... you just sit there with one of your wheels spinning freely.
After three hours of trying to push the vehicle, trying to put gravel under the tires (which would work splendily on a paved lot, but just eats a hole in a gravel and grass lot), trying to wedge wooden blocks under the bases of the tires and so forth, we finally managed to get the chinese lady running the store to dig us out some cardboard and managed to coax the truck over to the trailer... only to find that the connectors for the trailer require some sort of adapter... which the chinese lady was more than happy to -sell- to me for $20... at least until I immeadiately pulled out my cellular to bitch directly to U-Haul about the fact that they would knowingly rent me a truck and trailer combination and force me to -buy- an adaptor that costs as much as a one day rental of the trailer, just so I could use it... She promptly coughed up a 'used' one she had on site, and despite the fact that it was flakey and barely worked... it was enough to get us out of the lot and onto the road, and the drive home was thankfully without issue. At this point, Zack and I were both really worn out, I think you could add the number of hours of sleep the both of us recieved in the past 24 hours on one hand, so I took a nap for a few hours because the bus taking Clinton into the city was -very- late, to the point where he wasn't into the city until nearly 1am.
I picked him up in the U-Haul from downtown, and picked us up some pizza. The bastards wouldn't deliver it to us or offer any sort of discount on picking it up, because the weather had worsened considerably and the roads were to icy for their drivers to safely deliver. Which makes me glower, since I had zero experience with larger vehicles and was driving around a one tonne truck with bald tires and had very little trouble getting around... But I'll admit that it was -very- slick in some places and we had to take it really slow, we acually had the truck fish-tail on us a couple times, which is quite the feat in a vehicle with rear wheel drive. Evidently my fathers winter driving got stuck somewhere deep in my skull, because I managed to correct our major skid without any trouble at all despite the fact that I've never driven much in the winter, and never with a rear wheel drive vehicle.
But all this left us with a half-clean house and only 3/4 of our belongings packed at 3am. Clinton was totally wasted from his day of travel, so we let him sleep a little while we did a bit of packing and got his help to try and drag the hide-a-beds downstairs. Let me tell you... I will never own another hide-a-bed, even if someone's holding a gun to my head when they offer it to me. They weigh a metric tonne, enough so that even two people have a great deal of trouble moving one through any sort of tight space. Which means in an appartment they're fucking murder trying to squeeze through all of the doorways, I should think that each of the two took us more than a half hour just to move downstairs.
Suffice to say that by the morning we weren't doing very well... By the time seven had rolled around we were barely half done and hadn't even begun to clean the appartment, and on top of that we had a bunch of things that were basically garbage, but that we didn't have any was of disposing of and hadn't previously arranged any sort of disposal for. So by the time 8am rolled past I was frantically phoning junk removal companies to get some serious emergency help. I managed to get in touch with Pete's 'Haul A Day' who were very professional and -really- well prepared, if you are ever in need of junk removal on short notice, call them immeadiately. I left a message at eight, was called by nine and they -squeezed me in- for ten. They showed up with a -crew- of burly young lads and had all of our junk decimated in less than a half hour, the price was a steep $265, but I was desperate and they were worth every cent in comparison to a pathetic company like Got Junk, which probably would have charged me $400+ for the same ammount of work, and couldn't accomodate me on short notice.
At this point we embarked on the uphill battle of a lifetime, packing and cleaning as rapidly and effectively as possible with a lot of help from Clinton, who has been a life saver through this entire process. With a bit of choice negotiations with our landlord, I got us an extra hour or two of cleaning time, and we managed to get nearly everything to an acceptable level of clean. Whether Ron was being overly kind, or isn't very perceptive, things worked out -really- well and it looks like I'm going to be getting almost all of my damage deposit off, minus a fee for cleaning the stove... I think part of it is that I was -really- candid about the few things I knew he was bound to notice, and then allowed him to do the rest of the inspection. But now I have a piece of paper in my hand that says I'll get getting $250+ back... providing Devon doesn't try to fuck me in the ass. You see, when I spoke to Ron he informed me that the people at head office told him that there was someone -else- on the lease with a claim to the deposit. But when I took over the lease from Robert, our landlord at the time told me that Rob was the -only- primary lease holder and the only one with a claim to the deposit, and after he signed it over to me, I paid him out. All of the paperwork -I- have says that now leaves me as the sole holder of the lease, but head office of Devon is telling me legally they're going to have to split it down the middle and try to track her down... Even if its only $125, I'll take them to arbitration if they even try it.
Now... at this point I've been up for more than 24 hours and my poor shoes have been wet ever since I stepped outside into the slush. So my feet have been frozen and my gout's going nuts. Zack's been pushing hard through the entire day hopped up on pain killers chop the pain from his abcessed tooth down to a managable level. We move out towards Vancouver with me on the bus and Zack and Clinton in the U-Haul and the moment I get onto the road they get stuck in the parking lot of the appartment and beyond my reach. Thankfully having Lisa at only a text message away kept me mostly sane for the journey towards the ferry landing and Clinton managed to shovel the snow out from around the truck's tires to get it moving... And despite the fact that the weather was terrible on the Vancouver side they managed to get it all the way to Lisa's house... and promptly got stuck on the -terrible- roads around her home, wedged the U-Haul in the middle of the intersection, and were forced to leave it there for the night with its flashers on...
But there is light at the end of the tunnel...
When I called U-Haul they were very understanding about how much trouble we've had with the truck and told me that I could take it in as much as two days late without having to worry about late charges on either the truck or the attached trailer, and they let me know that if it gets badly stuck and we can't get it out ourselves they'll send someone out to tow it for free...
We've unloaded Zack's life into the house... mine comes tomorrow, I really hope that the pain in my limbs fades though. My arms hurt so badly that it was hard to open a coffee creamer at lunch this afternoon and I walk like an elderly cripple, perhaps one more night of good rest will make things better... I'll be online to chit-chat once I get my computer up and running in the next couple days.
Take care all!
Firstly, despite the fact that we were moving on the 30th, we didn't actually phone U-Haul for a reservation until about a week before the move. Mostly my fault actually because I'd spoken to them at the start of the month and asked what sort of time frame would work for a reservation and being told that anything up to a few days before the move would be kosher, but that a credit card would be needed to hold the reservation. Not knowing whether they would try for a pre-auth on my card, I chose to hold off until almost a week before hand to make sure I could drop a payment onto my card to free up some space for a large pre-auth.
And then the snow landed.
Not only did this mean that my thoughts were elsewhere, lost somewhere between the delight of having a real winter to look forward to and the pain of getting to and from work with my gout running on overdrive, but I was exhausted coming home every day because they've had me training people non-stop to try and make sure that they had someone prepared to take up my job. The snow also meant that half of the U-Haul fleet got snowed in up in Keating Crossroad, so when we called a few days before our move to secure one, we got stone-walled. And every moving service and rental company in the entire city was booked solid, so it literally took 8 -hours- to track down a vehicle, and to do so we had to book online and deal with having to wrangle everything out with both the U-Haul head office and the local locations so that we could be assured of -getting- a vehicle, because its one thing to speak with someone at a call-center in the deep south... its entirely another thing to take the confirmation number over to a local rental center and actually find that your vehicle is -available- and ready to go.
The second problem was having Azzy and Icarus staying with us left our appartment in perhaps the most hellish state it's ever been. I'll be very kind to poor Azzy by saying that I don't entirely blame her, she was in a pretty screwed up situation and not in the very best of head space when we invited the pair of them into our home near the end of October. But we literally had more than 2/3 of a city dumpster of trash left laying in our livingroom, and we chose to throw out more than 3/4 of our kitchen rather than push against the mountain of moldy plates, pots and cutlery.
I don't know what I think about it... I'm not angry, just gravely disappointed and perhaps feeling a little betrayed. But this move has been so fraught with frustration and stress that its going to take a week or more before my emotions come back online. At this point I'm basically dead, I've shut down emotionally from the stress and am basically running in zombie mode... The 'Hurr... clean... hurr... pack... hurr... move' sort of headspace you have to sink into when you're really hurting but are forced to stagger onwards or get buried under it.
But I suppose, onwards to the actual main course, the travesty of our move.
It took us eight hours of nail biting and phone calls to try and secure a vehicle, we weren't terribly off schedule when we began cleaning, but the sudden eight hour drive to secure some sort of transportation for our things derailed things entirely and left us both badly shaken. Myself I suppose especially, because Zack at least had a home set up in Vancouver already and could simply store his left over belongings and go 'home', but everything I had was sitting all around me, my entire life, and being financially responsible for our move -and- for supporting myself for a couple months in Vancouver means that rediculously expensive last minute options like hiring movers would leave me unable to support myself and in a great deal of trouble... Suffice to say by the time we had something reasonably ironed out, I was shaking inside for much of the evening, and only a portion of sleep managed to steady my nerves enough to shove myself down into zombie mode. But it did give me a weird insight into how my brain deals with stress... I found that the moment I laid down and started to drift towards sleep I rammed directly into the mental knot of grief and worry in my head, and a series of rapid dreams paved everything out in a relatively smooth manner... Not really 'lucid' dreams, but a series of stress-situations in a half-awake mental state.
We weren't expecting Clinton until 6:30pm on the night of the 29th but U-Haul couldn't guarentee us a truck on the 'morning' of the 30th, so we had to ask them to get something together for us on the night of the 29th to ensure that we would -have- the truck for the morning of the move. They could only offer us a smaller vehicle and an attached trailer for the night of the 29th, but of course they also close at 6:00 in the evening, a half hour before our driver was due to arrive! So we had to lean on the hospitality of Meiki and Engel's father who drove Meiki and I out to the U-Haul office way out in Langford so that I could pay for the truck and have Meiki drive the truck and trailer back into the city to our appartment. Let me tell you that if I ever have to move with a rented U-Haul again, I'll be reserving it a month in advance from a regional office with a dedicated parking lot. Meiki and I got out into Langford to find a tiny little convenience store run by an older Chinese lady and her daughter and a small parking lot behind the building... A parking lot that was gravel laid atop of grass, and still had nearly a foot of snow across the length of it. It took us three hours to get out of that lot. Three stressful hours of pleading with the parking lot to let us have our truck so that we could go home, and a few hard lessons about how fucking ill-prepared for slippery roads U-Haul trucks are. They're rear wheel drive, and equipped with perhaps the poorest all season radial tires that I've ever seen, even a quarter inch of slush under the tires will cause them to spin freely, and because the trucks don't have traction control if you get one wheel atop an icy patch you can't use the traction of your other back wheel to spin you to the side onto a dry patch... you just sit there with one of your wheels spinning freely.
After three hours of trying to push the vehicle, trying to put gravel under the tires (which would work splendily on a paved lot, but just eats a hole in a gravel and grass lot), trying to wedge wooden blocks under the bases of the tires and so forth, we finally managed to get the chinese lady running the store to dig us out some cardboard and managed to coax the truck over to the trailer... only to find that the connectors for the trailer require some sort of adapter... which the chinese lady was more than happy to -sell- to me for $20... at least until I immeadiately pulled out my cellular to bitch directly to U-Haul about the fact that they would knowingly rent me a truck and trailer combination and force me to -buy- an adaptor that costs as much as a one day rental of the trailer, just so I could use it... She promptly coughed up a 'used' one she had on site, and despite the fact that it was flakey and barely worked... it was enough to get us out of the lot and onto the road, and the drive home was thankfully without issue. At this point, Zack and I were both really worn out, I think you could add the number of hours of sleep the both of us recieved in the past 24 hours on one hand, so I took a nap for a few hours because the bus taking Clinton into the city was -very- late, to the point where he wasn't into the city until nearly 1am.
I picked him up in the U-Haul from downtown, and picked us up some pizza. The bastards wouldn't deliver it to us or offer any sort of discount on picking it up, because the weather had worsened considerably and the roads were to icy for their drivers to safely deliver. Which makes me glower, since I had zero experience with larger vehicles and was driving around a one tonne truck with bald tires and had very little trouble getting around... But I'll admit that it was -very- slick in some places and we had to take it really slow, we acually had the truck fish-tail on us a couple times, which is quite the feat in a vehicle with rear wheel drive. Evidently my fathers winter driving got stuck somewhere deep in my skull, because I managed to correct our major skid without any trouble at all despite the fact that I've never driven much in the winter, and never with a rear wheel drive vehicle.
But all this left us with a half-clean house and only 3/4 of our belongings packed at 3am. Clinton was totally wasted from his day of travel, so we let him sleep a little while we did a bit of packing and got his help to try and drag the hide-a-beds downstairs. Let me tell you... I will never own another hide-a-bed, even if someone's holding a gun to my head when they offer it to me. They weigh a metric tonne, enough so that even two people have a great deal of trouble moving one through any sort of tight space. Which means in an appartment they're fucking murder trying to squeeze through all of the doorways, I should think that each of the two took us more than a half hour just to move downstairs.
Suffice to say that by the morning we weren't doing very well... By the time seven had rolled around we were barely half done and hadn't even begun to clean the appartment, and on top of that we had a bunch of things that were basically garbage, but that we didn't have any was of disposing of and hadn't previously arranged any sort of disposal for. So by the time 8am rolled past I was frantically phoning junk removal companies to get some serious emergency help. I managed to get in touch with Pete's 'Haul A Day' who were very professional and -really- well prepared, if you are ever in need of junk removal on short notice, call them immeadiately. I left a message at eight, was called by nine and they -squeezed me in- for ten. They showed up with a -crew- of burly young lads and had all of our junk decimated in less than a half hour, the price was a steep $265, but I was desperate and they were worth every cent in comparison to a pathetic company like Got Junk, which probably would have charged me $400+ for the same ammount of work, and couldn't accomodate me on short notice.
At this point we embarked on the uphill battle of a lifetime, packing and cleaning as rapidly and effectively as possible with a lot of help from Clinton, who has been a life saver through this entire process. With a bit of choice negotiations with our landlord, I got us an extra hour or two of cleaning time, and we managed to get nearly everything to an acceptable level of clean. Whether Ron was being overly kind, or isn't very perceptive, things worked out -really- well and it looks like I'm going to be getting almost all of my damage deposit off, minus a fee for cleaning the stove... I think part of it is that I was -really- candid about the few things I knew he was bound to notice, and then allowed him to do the rest of the inspection. But now I have a piece of paper in my hand that says I'll get getting $250+ back... providing Devon doesn't try to fuck me in the ass. You see, when I spoke to Ron he informed me that the people at head office told him that there was someone -else- on the lease with a claim to the deposit. But when I took over the lease from Robert, our landlord at the time told me that Rob was the -only- primary lease holder and the only one with a claim to the deposit, and after he signed it over to me, I paid him out. All of the paperwork -I- have says that now leaves me as the sole holder of the lease, but head office of Devon is telling me legally they're going to have to split it down the middle and try to track her down... Even if its only $125, I'll take them to arbitration if they even try it.
Now... at this point I've been up for more than 24 hours and my poor shoes have been wet ever since I stepped outside into the slush. So my feet have been frozen and my gout's going nuts. Zack's been pushing hard through the entire day hopped up on pain killers chop the pain from his abcessed tooth down to a managable level. We move out towards Vancouver with me on the bus and Zack and Clinton in the U-Haul and the moment I get onto the road they get stuck in the parking lot of the appartment and beyond my reach. Thankfully having Lisa at only a text message away kept me mostly sane for the journey towards the ferry landing and Clinton managed to shovel the snow out from around the truck's tires to get it moving... And despite the fact that the weather was terrible on the Vancouver side they managed to get it all the way to Lisa's house... and promptly got stuck on the -terrible- roads around her home, wedged the U-Haul in the middle of the intersection, and were forced to leave it there for the night with its flashers on...
But there is light at the end of the tunnel...
When I called U-Haul they were very understanding about how much trouble we've had with the truck and told me that I could take it in as much as two days late without having to worry about late charges on either the truck or the attached trailer, and they let me know that if it gets badly stuck and we can't get it out ourselves they'll send someone out to tow it for free...
We've unloaded Zack's life into the house... mine comes tomorrow, I really hope that the pain in my limbs fades though. My arms hurt so badly that it was hard to open a coffee creamer at lunch this afternoon and I walk like an elderly cripple, perhaps one more night of good rest will make things better... I'll be online to chit-chat once I get my computer up and running in the next couple days.
Take care all!