My Crumpler Wife Saved Me
We just moved houses. I’ve moved houses plenty of times. Eight times to be exact. So, I’m no stranger to the process and great joy of the move. I don’t mean the joy of the actual arrival at the new house, I mean the sarcastic joy of the actual move process.
Being a Folder, I’ve approached moves very systematically in the past. My first wife (if she were speaking to you/me), would tell you a really funny story about our first move where I decided to try and facilitate the move by placing big colored circle stickers on each box and then had a big colored circle sticker that I put at the entry of each room in the new house. My theory was simple: blue boxes go to the blue room; red boxes go to the red room. This should be so simple for the movers! The one thing I didn’t see coming: one of the two guys was color-blind. Damnit!
The next move, I got even craftier! Not only did I use colors, but I used shapes too! Now I knew that if a guy was color-blind, there was no way he couldn’t match shapes! The process worked but was a ridiculous amount of arts and crafts effort. But hey, I am an extreme Folder so I loved coming up with my process.
In my last move prior to this one, we had quite an adventure. That move is way too long of a story to explain here but let’s just leave it that we had the movers store our stuff while the house was being built and when it came time to have it all delivered, they changed their phone numbers and disappeared. Nope, didn’t see that one coming!
Needless to say, when this most recent move was coming up, I was less than excited. The only positive I saw was that this move was only one mile away so I convinced myself that based on all of these previous experiences, the best thing was to use a mover to relocate the furniture but for us to use our fancy new minivan to move all of the other household stuff. This may have been a moment of delusion, denial or plain old insanity, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Well, the furniture move went smoothly, but then I stood there and stared at all of the stuff that yet again we somehow accumulated. My Folder brain started imagining all of the ways I would need to strategically pack each item in each room to make the most logical organization for transport and unload. My wife…my CRUMPLER wife…came to my rescue. She booted me from the old house and left me in charge of getting the new house set up with the various service providers and curtains and other joys. She took hold of the reins and just threw whatever she could into whatever boxes and bags were available and within reach. Toothpaste with speaker wires; knives with hats…it didn’t matter. As the USPS says, “if it fits, it ships!”.
I’m the guy at the grocery store who puts all of the refrigerated items in bags together. Veggies with veggies. Meats with meats. Canned items with canned items. I don’t comingle. Does it make sense? I think so. Would that same approach have taken five times as long? ABSOLUTELY.
She got us in the house with an amazing effort and an eye on the big prize. And I lover her for it. She truly saved me on this one!