We are moved!

Well. Mostly. There are still things in the back yard and the garage of our old house, but Kip is gathering those up today. He had a walkthrough with our landlord last night and received only positive reviews. We paid cleaners to come in yesterday afternoon and make the place spick and span, so that was money well spent.

In addition to my teenage stepsons and one of their friends (the promised multitudes of strong teenagers never materialized, but we made do), my mother was here for the weekend, along with my sister Jennifer (who also lives in the Twin Cities) and my stepfather-in-law, who came up from the Rochester area with his pickup truck and was thus hailed as a hero. So we had a full house and many hands and muscles to help haul not just the household stuff from the house itself but another 7,500 books for sale from the basement. (Goodwill ended up with approximately 3,000 of the original total.) Fortunately, all those books ended up in our new garage (which has almost a three-car capacity). I optimistically predict we will be able to put actual cars in the new garage sometime in October.

We hired Two Men and a Truck Saturday afternoon to move the big stuff -- the two king-size beds, the china cabinet, the rolltop desk, the dressers, the huge sectional couch (known as The Green Mile), etc., etc., etc. My mother and sister and Andrew and I sat on the shrinking couch and watched two wiry guys wrestle those things out of the house. At one point, watching more and more mattresses came down the stairs and go out the front door, I came to the conclusion that either the movers were taking the mattresses outside and then passing them back in through an upstairs window to be moved down again, or else we were living adjacent to the Mysterious Mattress Portal, where beds never end.

(By this time, clearly, we were seriously punchy. Someone discovered a small bird figurine among Andrew's toys, which I perched on my sister Jennifer's knee; she looked at it speculatively and then asked, "Why do birds suddenly appear?" This killed me, though perhaps it wouldn't have been quite as funny in other circumstances.)

In our current house, boxes and bags and miscellaneous items, ranging from dog toys to cleaning supplies to empty Krispy Kreme boxes and McDonald's bags, are everywhere. Everywhere. Every. Where. This clutter was exacerbated on Sunday, Andrew's sixth birthday, when ripped-up wrapping paper and piles of new toys were added to the mix.

We had a birthday party for Andrew Sunday afternoon at a bowling alley (his request), where eight overexcited kindergarteners employed a variety of mostly unorthodox styles to propel their bowling balls down the alleys. Several of them slipped and fell because they wore only socks, the bowling alley having no shoes to fit their small feet; Andrew slipped and bonked his elbow, and once one of the kids got mixed up about which alley to use, and we had one minor altercation over a favored purple bowling ball, but otherwise everyone had a lovely time. Andrew got two strikes and two spares and was enormously proud of himself. The older-than-kindergarten-age gang (Kip, me, mother, sister, stepfather-in-law, teenage stepson and teenage stepson's friend) carted the leftover cake and all the gifts home, helped Andrew unwrap his new
Leapster (which he has scarcely put down since) and, the youngest member of the group thus happily occupied, returned to tackling The Basement, which by late Sunday afternoon was assuming the proportions and unpleasant characteristics of Megatron (those of you with school-age male children will pick up on that Transformers reference; for the rest of you, suffice it to say that Megatron is one bad, scary dude).

I store the books for sale on cheap fiberboard bookshelves from Menard's, a local chain of stores similar to Lowe's or Home Depot. The boards are slotted; Kip decided the best way to move them would be to break them apart, wrap the boards together with plastic (the same kind the movers used to wrap around dressers and desks to transport them), then shove them out the basement window to the front lawn, where available large vehicles were parked. All I could see from my position (which involved a great deal of bending and straightening as I pulled books off shelves and piled them into grocery bags) was a bunch of legs milling around on the lawn outside, and progressively sweatier teenagers hurtling down the stairs to grab two bags of books, then disappear back up the stairs. (It was decided earlier to use grocery bags because the books could be better kept alphabetized and because a bag of books is easier to carry than a box.) By early Sunday evening, Megatron had conceded defeat.

I am more thrilled than I can say to be living in a House We Own (aka a House the Bank Owns, But They Let Us Live There if We Send Them Money).