The Good Ship And True Was A Bone To Be Chewed When The Gales Of November Came Early
So, today is Moving Day. With the help of several over-the-counter pharmaceuticals (Thanks, VLW for the TheraFlu recommendation!) I managed 12 straight hours of sleep last night; not nearly enough to make up for three weeks continuous sleep-deprivation, but sufficient to get me through the day.
And I'm sure you're all sitting on the edge of your seats wondering how the day's been going, right? (Humor me, please. I could use a little levity right about now.)
Well, let's start with what's gone RIGHT so far - oh, wait. NOTHING has gone right so far.
Which leaves the following as "A Partial Listing OF What's Gone WRONG Today":
- The office movers apparently have never actually moved an office before, at least not one comprised of anything that weighs more than about 100 pounds. They can't take our regular household sized refrigerator or the largest pieces of office furniture.
- On top of that, the arrival time that I had scheduled for 9:00 a.m. turned out in actuality to be more like 12:00 Noon, which worked out somewhat seeing as how it was pouring rain for most of the morning anyway. The question now is, can they get back from the new site, pack up the remainder of what needs to go and then off-load it before 5:00 p.m.? My guess is, "probably not". So, how long in fact WILL it take them? Your guess is as good as mine at this point.
- As if that weren't enough, some of the pieces of furniture they were able to move won't fit through the doors to the rooms they're assigned (e.g. my new office desk). So, I'm going to have to disassemble a couple of pieces before they can be put into place, then reassemble them again. Not a huge task, just another thing to add to the ever growing List Of Things Still To Be Done.
- The phone lines went dead at around 9:30 this morning. That was expected, since they have to be switched off at one location before they can be activated at the other. Strangely however, the DSL line didn't go dead at the same time. When I called the phone company a couple of hours later, it turns out the service tickets for our three separate accounts hadn't been linked together, so the DSL switchover hadn't been scheduled until Friday! By the time I got that straightened out and got the deinstall/reinstall moved up to tomorrow, I got a call from our phone system tech who was trying to reinstall that end of things at the new location saying that: A of all.) all the phone jacks in our office need to be rewired because they're an old-style residential system that can't handle our multi-line system, and; B of all.) he doesn't have the equipment to do that kind of work, because it's going to require drilling through "hardpan walls" (there are no drop ceilings or fancy metal studs with convenient punch-outs through which to drop cable).
So, where did that leave me? The movers can't complete the move, the phone system company can't complete the install, my new office isn't even going to have a desk in it when I get over there, and I'm sitting in a half-empty office that currently looks like a complete and utter disaster area trying to juggle multiple calls on my cell phone - and it looks like it's going to start raining again any minute now.
Okay, maybe I exaggerated just slightly above; despite the continuous series of wild fires a few things have gone my way today: I found a professional office mover who, on less than 24 hours notice can pick up and deliver our larger items, and at the same rate as what I'm being charged by the other moving company. Also, after yet another call to the Business Services Dept. at QWest, I not only managed to get a second service order set up to install the DSL tomorrow, but they'll come prepared to drill in the additional phone lines as well.
As I write this, the movers are back for a second load, but they're going to leave behind most of the other file cabinets & desks. It's okay, I've already called the other movers and they can handle it within their window tomorrow morning.
And at least I've still got Internet access at work (that's also A Thing That's Gone Wrong, but one I can still use to my advantage.)
AND I haven't strangled anyone.
AND and I haven't gone completely bonkers.
AND AND after all the hubbub and insanity of the past several weeks I just now realized how quiet and peaceful it is here in the office right now.
Hm, maybe a little TOO quiet.
Like, the sort of quiet one might experience in the eye of a hurricane...
'Tis The Song The Sigh Of The Weary, Hard Times Hard Times Come Again No More
I didn't think we were going to make it - and it did in fact come right down to the wire. As of 10:00 p.m. last night the kitchen still wasn't completely finished and it was another sleepless night filled with thoughts of dread and dire vengeance.
At this point I'm so sleep deprived I've almost completely lost all sense of time: I drove a few miles north yesterday afternoon to attend a party at a friend's house that was actually scheduled for this evening. Tonight, I went back, was there for two hours and it felt like I'd been there all day. It's now 7:30 p.m. and I'm fully intending to crawl into bed as soon as I finish typing this.
This is the lesson I've learned about contractors: if you give them a deadline they will push you right up to it, within hours even. I think they get some perverse sort of pleasure out of watching their clients squirm and fidget and palpably vibrate just for the thrill of enpowerment it must give them; why else put another human being through that kind of torture?
But, whatever. It's done. There are still a handful of tiny details to complete, little bits-and-pieces that only someone who's been staring at that same spot on the wall for three straight months would probably even notice. But, from a purely functional perspective, those can be dealt with.
It's done, over, finito and we start moving at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow. , Only of course, it's not done, and probably won't be for weeks, for however long it takes us to settle in and work the kinks out of the new space, the ones I hadn't even thought of.
Enough from me. The TheraFlu is almost gone. Time for bed.
Things are starting to get close to the wire for both of my major projects. The new space is maddeningly close to being finished; the kitchen sink, dishwasher & counters should be completed by tomorrow latest, then there are a couple of tiny build-out projects that - hopefully - will be done before the weekend. Then, I've got a small amount of touch-up painting and a couple of minor projects to complete this weekend before Moving Day on Monday. But as of now, we're about 98% of the way to having the new space completed.
I've finally begun packing up my office, which isn't going to take me very long, but there's also a great deal of sorting, trashing/recycling and packing up to do in the main office as well. Fortunately, my co-workers are handling most of this, but I still have to go through things in storage to decide what we have to keep (financial records mostly), and what we can toss. What's time-consuming is that I'm having to make some sort of trip - to the office supply or hardware store, over to the new space to deal with a delivery - just about every day, so between that and the normal day-to-day work that still needs to get done AND walking people around the office to show them what we have available to "take away" (e.g. the book case in my office that was moved out not ten minutes ago) I just haven't had much time to devote to this part of the move.
Still, things continue to move in a forward direction and despite the rampant insomnia that's been waking me up at around 4:00 a.m. every morning for the past week, I'm feeling reasonably confident that we're going to pull this off - not necessarily without a hitch; that would be too much to ask - but well enough that we should be more-or-less business as usual by mid-week.
Down Here All The Fish Is Happy As Off Through The Waves They Roll
Dear Bloggie Friends:
I'm afraid the time has come. I've waited, with patience and hope, but it's been more than three months now in some instances, and your blogs have remained un-updated. I know, I know, I've slacked quite a bit myself. "And besides," I hear you say, "all the cool kids are Twitting and Tweeting, and FB'ing like crazed hyenas, and the long-form blog has become so much work! All that typing! All those letters!" That plus your 587 "friends" have to come TO your site to read it, rather than you just thumbing what you had for breakfast and "KA-POW!" The entire Netiverse instantly knows what flavor Cap'n Crunch it was.
And so, it is my sad duty to inform you that some of you have been declared "Lost At Sea", and I've moved you to the bedrock sea bottom of Davy Jones' dead link locker.
I'll check up on you once in a while, just to see if you float back up to the surface. But for now, sleep peacefully with the fishes my friends.
Boy, You Got To Carry That Weight, Carry That Weight A Long Time
Stepped on the scale this morning and it finally registered below 210 lbs. - just barely, but that particular milestone has at least been achieved.
I've been on something of a plateau the past few weeks, with a bit of see-sawing to boot, and needless to say the frustration level has been palpable. I feel like I've cut out 90% of the bad stuff - leaving room for the occasional adult beverage, but skipping most other "treats" - I even turned down a Diletante chocolate truffle today, just on principle. And although I'm not keeping obsessively diligent records, I've feel reasonably confident I've reduced my daily caloric intake by roughly 25% to roughly 1,800 calories per day.
Not to make excuses, but, there are a few things going on right now: the office move (which has turned into a much bigger undertaking than I originally anticipated, what with having to be more closely involved in supervising the build-out of the new space than I had intended), plus simultaneously planning the fundraiser, among others, that have stressed me out to the extent that I've probably been somewhat less diligent about monitoring my intake as I should have been (I think that rack of short-ribs I cooked at the recent Theatre Retreat a couple weeks back was the harbinger of my temporary downfall).
I seriously doubt I'm going to hit the 200 mark by my birthday, as I had hoped (now projecting that'll happen sometime around the 18th of November - just in time for Thanksgiving, yay!), but at least I'm once again trending down.
And, as of today I'm 1/3 of the way to my goal, and actually still achieving a reasonably good loss rate of about 1 2/3 lbs. per week (slightly less than my initial goal of 2 lb. per week) despite the two week stagnation. So, if things remain on a steady course and I don't run into further impediments, I should be down to my overall goal of 180 lbs. by Valentine's Day.
