Regrettably, there will be an indefinite delay before I can post any more of Somewhere Else Entirely.
I know we're nearing the end but Real Life just won't be denied any longer. The Twins are coming and I'm utterly, utterly exhausted. And they haven't even arrived yet!
It has been a bigger job than I imagined to clean up our house and make at least parts of it child-proof. We have so much stuff it is unbelievable! ...Or, knowing people, not unbelievable at all, thinking about it.
Of course, what we had overlooked was that when our son went off to New York in the first place, he brought most of his UK belongings back to us and stuffed them into the spare room... which is the one we're using for the nursery.
So, as well as tidying up the house we have had to find places for years of accumulated life, without the time to triage most of it and get rid of the rubbish. And we can't do that with his stuff, of course. That is his problem, not ours. I just rented a storage unit and stuffed all his belongings in there... and it's too small, of course.
I've relaid two floors and there are two others that should be done but now won't be. We'll need at least four child gates and probably six. Locks on the bathroom doors - up to now we have run a system whereby if the bathroom door is shut, it's occupied, but toddlers won't respect that. Shelves moved out of reach, anything with wires removed or relocated... I bet we've missed half of it but the girls will find it all out within an hour, I'll bet.
Arrival time is 09:00 in Southampton aboard Queen Mary 2 on Wednesday. I think that was the date and time foretold for the Apocalypse. I hope I'll still be awake by then.
Penny
Comments
Congratulations!
You have a son almost an adult if not adult already, but now twin daughters are approaching? Wow! Anyone in between?
Good luck!
Come to think of it, have I completely misinterpreted? A couple passages suggest that I did...
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)
Not mine, thankfully
The twins are my eldest son's.
I would refer you to this blog, although it is wordy.
His contract in NY is finishing and he has decided that, for reasons we aren't sure, he would prefer to bring his whole family back to Europe to raise.
Europe? Well, he's coming to the UK initially but he has contacts all over, so he may move on depending where the work takes him. At the moment nobody knows, not even him. It is his wife I feel sorry for, getting yanked to a new country with babies and no friends or relations nearby. Nearest is St Petersburg, Russia...
Penny
PS. I see that I have posted 33 chapters of SEE and a whole other story since I wrote that blog, which is a bit of a surprise to me. I guess you all might cut me some slack.
SEE Delay...
Congrats on the twins Penny!! We'll all be looking forward to the next SEE whenever you have the time and inclination to get it written right now you have much more important things to do!
You're A Much Better........
You're a much better parent & grandparent than I will ever be.
[Grand] Parenting
I have been over twice since the girls were born and I don't think I did too badly either time.
Of course, while I can't say that I've exactly been maternal, I'm sure my special nature has made it a little easier for me to help out as required. Unlike many cis-males I don't have any problem at all with babies, toddlers and most stages beyond.
I've changed diapers/nappies, fed, changed, wiped and soothed. They have even fallen asleep on me. Of course, now that they are fully mobile, and I'm a bit more worn out, it might be a different matter...
Penny
Wow
Penny has my sympathies at the job she is doing.
It reminds me a bit of when I had to move out of an apartment I had lived in for 19 years. It was not pretty moving out of a two bedroom apartment loaded with stuff and wound up renting two storage units to keep it all in.
The real hard part of putting stuff into storage is boxing everything up securely and tightly; a lot of work!
One never knows how long that stuff will wind up in storage so it is absolutely essential that be done because of one simple thing: mice.
Mice run rampant through most storage facilities at least in the US. I wound up having to keep my stuff in there for 5 years and when I finally bought a house and reclaimed my belongings there were a number of items covered in mouse piss and the unit was littered with mouse droppings.
However, since the vast majority of the stuff I owned was plastic bagged or boxed, they came out okay. Mice don't like plastic and I doubt 5 years of dust and stuff would have done my belongings any good either.
FWIW, by the craziest of coincidences, on the day I was moving the last of my belongings out of the storage unit, all of a sudden an alarm went off in the storage facility and I heard water running through the pipes for some reason. As it turned out it was January and having gone through a very bad cold snap, a pipe or valve had burst in the sprinkler system in the basement level where my unit was located.
Luckily the sprinkler did not spray in my unit but it did in a lot of the adjacent units leading to a small river of water running downhill through the facility, headed out the door and to my horror I watched it stream into my storage unit. By that time I only had five boxes left to remove but due to an abundance of caution all those years ago, I had inner wrapped the contents with a plastic garbage bag so even through there was like an inch or two of water covering the bottom of the box, the contents survived.
As an epilogue, I remember watching as the facility manager, along with firefighters (who got the false automatic alarm I think) walked through the facility and opened and examined storage units. It was a mess, but it was interesting to see how other people stored their stuff. It was not pretty, with piles of clothing in a number of units which were now sodden messes well on their way to becoming piles of mildew. Not surprisingly, soon after, the front of the facility had a huge construction dumpster there.
So aside from storing stuff properly, make sure you get storage insurance if needed, especially for lower level storage, you never know what can happen. Ironically the facility was in the process of starting to require all renters get storage insurance, though I don't know how many did have it at that time.
Storage
Very fortunately, we have never been on the ground floor (US = first floor) of a storage facility. Thus we have been spared that sort of problem, though humping boxes up stairs is a downside.
The facility we are using now doesn't have sprinklers either. I have never heard of rodent problems, even though we are not far from an active canal.
The big issue we have is spiders, which although they don't chew holes in things can make a mess if they can find a way into the boxes.
One way I have protected a lot of the items in store is to use a big roll of shrink wrap to seal up electronics and other delicate items. I found this in... Staples, I think... and it isn't strictly 'shrink wrap' but more like cling film (US = Saran wrap). It is what they wrap around pallets to keep the goods on. The same roll has lasted us for about 15 years, now. Insurance, yes, we have that.
Penny
Spiders getting into boxes
Oh that. Yes that can happen of course. I forgot to mention that I was forced out of my apartment due to an unfortunate bedbug situation so my belongings were crawling with ones I got from some idiotic neighbors below me. So, as part of boxing up I had to seal the boxes all up tight to boot, using sealing tape, to prevent them getting out and infesting other folks too. That was a lot of work as that meant a lot of extra rolls of tape and a lot of seams to seal up. I sealed up my furniture in tarps and had to use a LOT of tape to seal those up in turn. Of course this had a knock on effect of keeping stuff from getting in also. Funny how symmetry works in nature ^_^.
FWIW, I found that boxing was the only way to go to maximize storage density and buying and using uniform box sizes help save money in the long run as one can store more stuff compactly and in a uniform fashion. I am sure I did it right as at the end of 5 years, there were no crushed boxes in stacks where I had used uniform stacking, still looking like the day I had put them in 5 years ago.
Oh and I wish I had units on the upper floor as the facility does have lifts to get stuff up and down.
Oh and the great thing of being 5 years on
The bloody bedbugs of course did not survive, no way they can hibernate for that long unless I had the misfortune of getting the Methuselah of bedbugs.
When I moved my wife down
When I moved my wife down from Detroit, we used plastic bins, rather than cardboard boxes. Waterproof up to the lid, and then wrapped stretch wrap film around the lid edges to seal off the breathing holes. Easily moveable, stackable, air moves around them to reduce seepage and condensation, and well worth the extra dollar or so over the cost of cardboard. We still have, and often use, the bins, so they weren't a waste.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Had some of that too
Unfortunately plastic bins don't handle high stacking very well when there is a lot of weight involved as I discovered much to my chagrin. I used those 'industrial' heavy duty ones too and they eventually cracked on me, causing entire stacks of them to fall. For some reason the bottom bins just did not like having 200 pounds stacked on top of them for long periods ^_^. I try to avoid hat as much as possible by reducing the amount I packed in there, which worked but at the price of less packing density.
So, a well packed and well organized cardboard box system is the best way to go imho, with the heaviest stuff on the bottom and packed fully. If one has a lot of books they should be on the bottom. Stuffing them fully such that there is no gap between the packed item and the top is absolutely essential for optimal strength.
Besides, I wound up filling a 10x10 and as well as one 15x10 storage unit and the cost to stack plastic boxes up to the ceiling was pretty prohibitive and as it turned out stacking was pretty difficult to do. Besides I am only a 113 pound female and those large plastic bins added quite a bit of weight. I deliberately chose the small/medium cardboard boxes as they ultimately provided better load bearing strength as there are more of them and the content weight to surface ratio is better.
Also since I had to lug those same boxes down two flights of stairs from my third floor apartment, lug them another 60 feet using a hand truck to my car, the extra weight is not a good thing. Plus I had a Civic which again favored smaller boxes.
Finally, for me to be able to stack stuff up to 7 boxes high was quite a chore I assure you without having to deal with large filled storage bins that potentially can get even heavier because you get to fill them with even more stuff.
Large? I didn't say anything
Large? I didn't say anything about size. We had a _few_ large ones, for big items - those went on the bottom row. The bulk of them were 18 gallon totes, which were a great size for holding pretty much everything. They stacked up about 6 feet tall without a problem, and fit into the car (and moving van) without a problem. The really big items also tended to be light, just bulky, so they weren't too hard to move the big bins.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
I had 12 gallon bins
Again, I had my stuff in for 5 years and the ones that could not take the load wound up with cracked lids. I was using those industrial flip-top crates which seem pretty rugged but apparently not so much when faced with long term storage. I am sure for a moving trip what you did was fine.
Oh and I am only a 113 pound female
So upper body strength was a real problem and a 72 quart box for me is pretty bulky as I had to stack heavy items by climbing a step ladder.And a Civic is a pretty small car.
On the plus side I was pretty fit by the time I got it all done :)
Besides, I could not do all the moving and had to hire folks for the really big and heavy stuff life furniture. When I had them put the stuff into my storage unit they saw my efforts and had assumed that some professional (them) had packed and stored it. I had to correct that mistaken assumption :-)
Oh and I could not do bulky but light
I had to keep mass density high. For me a 40 to 60 pound box was pretty heavy ya know as it is about half my weight.
I hate those things. Those
I hate those things. Those flip top 'fixed lid' containers are crap. They shatter very quickly, because they're made of a much more rigid material, and it degrades fast. Ours are about 10 years old now, and still doing well. Some of them were in storage rooms for three years, then in the attic (In houston) for another three years), and the rest have been in the garage (again, in Houston) for the whole time. (Sterilite, snap on tops)
I understand the not being able to carry much. My mother was smaller than you are - these were decent for her to use. The stacking was the whole point of getting the small ones. Keeps the individual weight down for handling and stacking. Just because I could fling them around doesn't mean that _everyone_ that had to get into there could.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Have fun!
SEE can wait a while and perhaps you'll have an entirely new perspective when you start up again. Post a blog now and then to let you fans know you're still around.
I'll still be around
I'll still be around, but I probably won't have time to write - or to read anything that is too long.
I'll try to drop by every day, but that will depend on circumstances, of course.
Penny
Panic Attacks
It would appear you are in the middle of a full blown panic attack. Step back a moment and truly look around. Is there any obvious item or space requiring your attention? I'll bet not.
We are/were a military family and although not used to relocations, we have been jerked up by our collective heels and thrown around the world. Don't worry about the kids. They're rubbery little critters and rebound faster than you can mix a drink. It didn't matter where we wound up, our kids soon had the UN at the supper table.
Ease up and just make your home human tidy and everything will work out from there without sponsoring a gigantic ulcer.
Enjoy the kids as they are just passing through and stop talking this nonsense about ending SEE. There are too many additional stories to be told in this universe.
Best,
DJ
No, no panic here
Just the sound of chickens coming home to roost. We have boxes in the front room that were packed by Pickfords 13 years ago. Some more in the garage, thinking about it.
A lot of this ought to have been done many years ago, but, you know? Real Life happened and other things took priority.
Still, we needed some kind of immovable deadline to get us off our butts and sort some of it out. Things have been done that needed doing. (Other things, well... let's wait and see.)
There's still a way to go before we even have somewhere for the parents to sleep, but we'll be there by the time they arrive.
And in case there's any question, we know that we'll be looking after the twins for several days while their parents get themselves sorted out. They may be moving on, but maybe not. As Grandparents, we are here to help and we expect to do so.
However, thank you for your concern. It is most appreciated.
Penny