Frank the shipping company truck driver rang us three times during the course of the morning to get driving directions to our house in Terra Linda. He obviously wasn’t from the Bay Area, as he ended up taking the wrong bridge and driving through San Francisco. I didn’t think the instructions were that tricky, but I guess if you are driving a moving truck and you’re in the wrong lane and you don’t see signs in advance enough, then you’re pretty much committed to driving in a straight line.

At around 9:30 the packing company people showed up to pack our remaining items – basically artwork and fragile items that we would rather get packed by experienced packers in special boxes. They were impressed that we had in fact packed everything else up ourselves on time. Apparently it is common for them to find people still madly packing, having discovered that it doesn’t pay to be  optimistic about the amount of time needed to pack. They left a pile of documents for the trucking guys (they still hadn’t arrived yet) and left us contemplating our boxes.

About 11:00 AM the guys from United showed up in an enormous truck, much bigger than the one that our stuff arrived in two years ago. They couldn’t figure out how to turn around in our short cul-de-sac, and after going backwards and forwards a couple of times up and down the street, they backed out to the cross street and then see-sawed around and came in backwards. Frank and his assistant Justin were efficient and capable, labeling everything with their own sequence of inventory numbers, and expertly packing our belongings into the truck like a jigsaw puzzle. It took about 6 hours to get everything out of the house, assembled in stages in front of the house, then packed into the truck.

I can now say that I have seen all our possessions take up roughly 1000 cubic feet in a rectangular volume. 

While I was using a comb on teasing the carpet pile back to a semblance of normalcy from where our furniture had rested for a couple of years, I did something to my right knee. I was kneeling, with my legs kind of splayed out to one side (tush on floor instead of heels), leaning forward, when something went “pop” and I felt a twinge, kind of like pinging your funny bone. I got up and waggled my leg around a bit, trying to pop it back to normal or something, but it didn’t seem to want to go. It wasn’t painful or uncomfortable, so I didn’t worry too much about it, and continued refreshing the carpet pile – only never using that particular body position again.

This evening after we’d made our farewells to Frank and Justin (making sure they had directions to the house in Las Vegas), we went out for one last meal at our friendly neighborhood Chinese restaurant (Royal Mandarin) and came home again, making up a bed on the floor with blankets and rugs.

Lisa did a mammoth cleaning effort on the kitchen floor, and I vacuumed.

I had packed some of our DVDs in my laptop case and I surprised Lisa by bringing them out and we selected “The Matrix” to watch. Having a DVD drive in a laptop is kind of cool sometimes.

We fell asleep before we finished the movie.