Arrival, pt 1--U-Haul

We made it!

A brief time line:

On June 30 (Thursday), we rented a U-Haul. This did not work as well as hoped. U-Haul was having an extremely busy Fourth of July Weekend. We reserved the U-Haul on Tuesday. Wednesday they called back and said we could only have the U-Haul for six hours, and we would have to pick it up South of Market, not on Judah Street.

SIX HOURS?

So we got the U-Haul, long story there already, and drove it home, loaded all our major furniture onto it (sweating, cursing, thank heavens the couch was already gone), and drove the thing to El Cerrito, unloaded (sweating, cursing), and then we had to return the U-Haul.

The kid who took it back from us glared at the furniture blankets and asked if we had folded them. "No," I said. "Would you MIND folding them?" he asked.

I folded the blankets.

Then we were in line waiting to pay, and realized that the kid had written that the odometer had gone up 4350 miles during the six hours we had the U-Haul. You get charged a buck an hour. The only thing keeping me from despair when I realized this was assuming that any sane person at the desk we were approaching would realize this wasn't possible--we would have had to go to Minnesota and back in six hours to rack up that kind of mileage, driving at a rate of speed reserved to experimental jets and the Knight Bus from Harry Potter.

But I was still a little uneasy, since the last friend of mine to rent a U-Haul was charged eight hundred unexpected dollars and only got her money back when she pointed out that she was demonstrably not the eight young men accused of returning the vehicle six days late, trashed. Still, all went well, the young woman at the counter apparently took the odometer report with a grain of salt.

We returned to base. We now had all our furniture out of the house, but EVERYTHING ELSE remained. My fella seemed confident that we could just move everything else in our overpacked three-bedroom San Francisco house in small loads in the van. I was dubious. But we drove back to our new house, where the bed was, and slept.

NOTE ON SUBURBIA: When we turned out the lights it was dark. Very dark. Not the dark of our normal bedroom with the lights out dark, but DAAAARK. We realized after a certain amount of shock that the problem was due to not having a streetlight in front of the house anymore. When you turn out the lights in Suburbuia, it is like camping in the bloody woods.

We slept with the bathroom light on.