Friday, October 22, 2010

Transporter

Thursday turned ended up as more of a Thriday. It's the artifact of bridging together one super busy day with the next, via a 6 hour timezone transfer.

I think Sue and I were better off not knowing what lay ahead of us when we woke that morning. It wasn't much of a good night's sleep to begin with. Sleeping on a deconstructed cardboard box, packing foam and coats from a forgotten closet, we woke sore and boney. I think the only reason we slept at all was that Wednesday we had spent the entire day getting the 16' PODS trailer loaded, closed, and adieu'd.

Thursday was all about leaving the island, getting the van to leave the island too, and coping with the realization that our house really needed a 20' trailer and so we still had about a thousand pounds of miscellaneous possessions lying around the house to deal with before we left.

Sue and I had our routines down. I was the burly box loader, junk transporter, and Sue was the game-master organizer, packer. We divided our remaining possessions in the ex-home into 3 piles: junk, parcel-post, and give-to-friends.

I spent the better part of the morning turning the family van into a Sanford and Son extra. All the passenger interior seats folded in, I stuffed the vehicle to capacity. Wooden tennis rackets, unmatched athletic equipment, broken tiki torches, gloves without mates, video equipment from the pre-wireless era, world in a blender. Then, all my half cut lumber, particle board, a desk and two sawhorses twined to the roof rack on top, I finally headed off to the dump.

Sweaty, and red dirt glazed, I returned from the Kapolei dump to gather the twenty or so boxes that Susan had labored to assemble for posting. Cumbersome, I leaned into four handcart loads to get the parcels from the van to the counter.

By the time I got back to the house, it was already three o'clock. The timeline had crumbled. Things got messy, and I ended up going straight from the house in my junk clothes to get the van delivered to the pier where it was shipped minutes before they closed. Friends from work shuttled me from the Sand Island Pier back to the airport area.

While that was going on, our friend Ceci Adams chanced by the house, and saw that Sue badly needed help wrapping up and getting to me at the airport. She quickly canceled all her other plans for the evening and made it happen.

Fortunately, it was an evening flight. We had time to rendezvous at the airport and get dinner together before we left. Fifteen hours, two connections, and some cat-naps later we arrived in Baltimore.

No comments:

Post a Comment