Meet the New Hovel; Same as the Old Hovel

As you know we lived in a one bedroom efficiency for six weeks while we were in-between places. You would think that would be all kinds of awful but actually it was just fine. It was sort of like living on the set of The Honeymooners, except instead of Ed and Trixie as neighbors, we had a revolving cast of rejects from Jersey Shore walking around bellowing their opinions of things at one in the morning. I think maybe Marriott should change their slogan from “Live Like You” to “Live Like You, You Drunken, Shirtless, Hallway-Wandering Weirdo”. 

The boy dealt with living in a hotel for that long like a champ, sometimes sleeping in the bed, sometimes sleeping on the floor (his choice).  We ate out a lot and took advantage of fun stuff in the area but by the end the adventure had obviously run its course, and you could sort of tell that he wasn't necessarily buying the whole "you will eventually get all your toys back" line his folks were feeding him anymore.

Months before we moved, we (well, mostly my wife) started the process of packing up all of the files and books and attic fodder we owned and we (well, mostly I) hauled it to The Least Secure Storage Facility in the Whole Wide World (more on that later).  Now, we consider ourselves very "flat surface" people - we don't see the need to cover every square inch of horizontal and vertical space with knick-knacks and bric-a-brac to the point where it looks like we are living inside a wedding cake decorated by unsupervised kindergarteners. That said, we still managed to fill 2,000 cubic feet of storage facility space with, like, forty-seven dollars worth of stuff in boxes. 

Ah, yes, the boxes. Friends of ours had finished moving recently and my awesome wife scored tons of free cardboard boxes from them.  She even did most of the packing because, not to put too fine a point on it, she is awesome.  I think, though, that the awesomeness is tainted with juuuust the smallest smidge of evil. 

Let me explain.

These boxes were used but clean and strong - not the flimsy, roach-infested treasures you can rescue from the back of your local liquor store.  Great, right? Well, not really.See, "used" here means "previously-labeled-and-sometimes-relabeled", so a box that might be Sharpie'd SERVING PLATTER - FRAGILE might actually contain ONE HUNDRED POUNDS OF BOOKS.  After the third time blowing most of my intestinal tract out my backside I learned my lesson.  I girded my loins appropriately, approached the next box like an Olympian dead-lifter, and nearly launched a box labeled BOOKS - actually containing FOUR WINE GLASSES - into the ceiling fans.

Serves me right, really.  I should have helped pack more...

(To Be Continued...)