Why does everything take about seventy-five times as long as I think it should? I feel like I should be able to unpack and set up this house in no time flat, but no, it doesn't really work like that.
Friday night the Texas furniture finally arrived. Mostly intact, even. Arlene sent, among other things, two tables, which both had their leds removed for ease of transport (and lots of great furniture, and many thousands of boxes of stuff - the Purim graggers and old yamulkes from family weddings were my favorite). Arlene (or someone) thoughtfully put all of the hardware to re-attach the legs to the kitchen table in a bag and stuck it to the table top. Foolishly I thought that putting on the legs would take five, ten minutes at the most. Foolish.
It turned out that at some point along the way, the bag with the hardward ripped across the bottom. So now instead of eight screws, there was one. So the first step in table whole-ness was a trip to the hardware store. And while I was there, I picked up a hose and a watering can for task number two of the day.
With screws in one hand and drill with screwdriver bit in the other, I was all set. Except that all of these thing that purport to be modular are not, and some of the screws don't really want to go in nicely. But in the end, they all did, and the table is whole, and very useful in the kitchen, if a little big. It only took about an hour, including the trip to the hardware store.
The second task of yesterday involved planting bulbs and pansies in front of the house. The spade broke as I was planting the second clump of bulbs. This is why it never pays to buy the $3 spade. Next time I'll go for at least a $5 spade...
And today's time drain involved assembling shelves and cabinets. You know that always takes longer than it ought to. (Strangely enough, none of the pieces involved a hex wrench...)
But unpacking creeps along. I discovered my mugs and washed half of them. I unpacked the bathroom. I ironed curtains, found a spot for the TV to live, made and ate dinner at home, ate off of real plates and drank from a real glass. And opened many boxes and bags of one sort or another, and even unpacked a thing or two.
Now I am falling off my feet, but I will keep going so as to get things as in-shape as possible before Passover. Less than two weeks. No problem...
2 comments:
When I taught at an orthodox school, some of the girls stayed home from school for two weeks before Pesach to help clean the house and change over all the stuff...women's work, you know...
I'd offer to help if I didn't feel totally snowed under myself!
I sympathize. I usually forget to allow for time expansion in things like unpacking, but I'm pretty patient with things the minute I pick up a tool - too many similar lessons learned in lab/work situations. Dirk hadn't caught on to that yet, though, so he was getting incredibly frustrated yesterday. Time to take three 8"-wide CD towers and set them against the walls: in our wobbly house we had to shim them, no, bolt them to the wall, except the original mount plates wouldn't work, so I had to dig him up some others, and that was fine, except that when he screwed them onto the shelves, the board split so he had to glue and clamp it. 1+ hours, plus a 1.5 hour dinner break while the glue dried. Same song, different verse. Moving kind of sucks. I bet it would be better if we were moving into a place we just bought and planned on living for a while, though - am I crazy to assume that?
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