aft-gang-agley dept...

Everything went according to plan yesterday, with a slight delay in picking up the truck, up until the time came to actually load the thing at the storage place. Galina engaged three units - one large one with most of the stuff from the recently sold Pearland house - and two others that had been accumulating stuff the way an air filter accumulates dust.

Anyway, deciding to load a truck with personal posessions in the middle of the afternoon in June in Texas has got to rank among the truly Really Bad Ideas™ of recent memory, though the fact is that I would probably have continued to pack the 16-foot payload area if I had done a better job of stowing the stuff from the first, big unit, which I was barely able to pack in.

So Natalie and I gave up the effort for the day, drove to her place over here near the Galeria, ate dinner and went back to the apartment. The game plan is for me to repack the truck while Natalie's at work (and also to use the dumpster, since there was no place to dispose of stuff at the storage place). We'll then go back tonight, after the heat of the day, and empty the other two units. Obviously this puts me back a day in my original schedule, but the truck is not due in Durango until Friday, so there is no pressure in that direction.

A second not-so-obvious defect in my original plan was the part where I got only 3 hours of sleep after "yesterday's" final shift of my assignment. When we finally finished running around yesterday, I went to sleep and jumped, not fell, into the arms of Morpheus with a gusto that an old-time slapstick vaudevillian would have envied. Though I did rise briefly around 3:30 am, I decided against starting to work at that hour and successfully went back to bed.

I need to get dressed, after which maybe I can find a cuppa coffee somewhere around here (shouldn't be too hard... the density of Starbucks in this part of town is staggering).

Cheers...

Coffee, and other conundrums...

Finding coffee this morning was not as easy as I had imagined. Along the way, I figured I'd find a place that sells clothesline-quality rope/twine/what-have you, and struck out there, as well. Eventually, I would up walking to the Galeria, where I picked up a passable (and not terribly expensive) coffee at a kiosk called Puff-In, which features a puffin bird as a logo and decent mini-creampuffs as its stock-in-trade gimmick.

If nothing else, the walk to and from the Galeria was a good workout, though it was apparent there are a number of people strolling around the Galeria solely for the purpose of doing some mild cardiovascular exercise in a nice, air-conditioned environment. (In fact, I managed to navigate through the Saks Fifth Avenue store by following one such gentleman, thereby avoiding false trails that might lead to, say, ladies evening gowns or something equally elegant.)

The weather, which had been so horridly uncooperative yesterday, tacked and allowed me to open the truck and consolidate the stuff we took out of the large storage unit yesterday. I am now feeling a lot better about fitting the contents of the other two, smaller units into the payload area, with probably enough left over to accommodate a fairly large load of packaging material from U-Line, which has a depot not far out of my way north of Dallas.

Natalie came home during lunch and shuttled me to the local Home Depot for some clothesline, which I will use to create a cargo net of sorts to keep the stuff in the forward part of the payload area from shifting. We plan to return to Pearland tonight to empty out the remaining storage units. If I am fortunate, I'll get to sleep in time tonight to wake at around 3 am for the long trek home, including the stop at U-Line.

The major question to be resolved immediately is whether to take a nap before or after securing the load.

Cheers...