Thursday, July 20, 2006

I am a packrat.

I have a hard time throwing things away. I have a great time accumulating baubles and hoo-hahs.

When it comes to moving, this is not a welcome trait. When you move, you pay by an estimate of the weight the truck will carry. I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 long boxes of comics. According to, I have somewhere near 5,200 comics. This doesn't include my graphic novel collection. Or action figures. Or signed Noel Neill photos. Or Superman and Batman related videos. And my super cool statues, props, etc...

A lot of people are surprised we aren't planning to move into a rental place until we find a house. "Put it in storage" they keep telling me.


It's not that I can't bear to think of my comics living in Public Storage for a year or two. Rather, I'm much more concerned that if we rented, then bought a place and moved again, it would mean I would have to move all of this junk twice. That's a lot of heavy lifting without the help of the surly moving guys who we plan to hire.

Why surly? I have learned in my moves that the moving guys will hate me for moving what is essentially boxes and boxes of paper. Paper is heavy, Leaguers. Maybe not "box of lead" heavy, but it's almost water heavy. There's few things that runs a chill up my spine more than the look of desperation rolling over the face of the movers when they see my comics.

"Is that all books?"
"Comic... books?"
"Uhmmm... yes."

As much as they don't want to have to lift all that weight, I don't want for them to manhandle those boxes of precious, precious comics. Or my toys. Or, you know, my amazing statues.

Such is the fate of the mover who takes on our house. Sure, we're not exactly moving the Library at Alexandria, but I guess most people don't intentionally keep crates of paper around. Or books.

Dear Mr. Mover,

Please love my comics, too.

We met with our final realtor last night. The bottom line is that we should have sold last Spring if we wanted to make the big bucks. Now it's going to be a game of figuring out how to still make money, but price the house low enough that it can move faster than the other houses in our neighborhood. (our neighborhood has a total of 6 models, I believe, with 2 or 3 around our same square footage). So if we were to undercut everybody else, we might move our house a lot faster. I feel okay about that as I think all we're doing is beating everyone else already on the market to an inevitable sales point. On the other hand, we might also drive down the price of every house in our neighborhood.

Well, maybe they should have thought of that before they didn't talk to us for the past four years. Screw you, neighbors!

I just want to sell and go. Is that so wrong?

My boss posted my position yesterday. I was curious as to how the job would read, and while I would have flip-flopped the order of the responsibilities listed, I thought they came up with a surprisingly accurate description of what I do. Sort of. They didn't include the "Shadow Puppet Theatre" I like to do when the projector is turned on in the conference room.

The description also does not include that in April I was named the Assistant Fire Chief for my office. No, really. If our Admin Assistant is somehow unable to perform her Fire Chief duties, I am next on tap to usher my co-workers out of the building. Who shall convince the Director to get off the phone when the alarm goes off if not I? Because that happened back in February during an actual fire. Guy wouldn't get off the phone and there were flames in the elevator shaft. That, Leaguers, is dedication.

Jim D. has suggested I write a novel or meoir or something regarding the move. I have mixed feelings on this as I sincerely hope that nothing exciting enough to warrant a novel will happen during my move. Is it too much to hope for a smooth transition?

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