Tuesday

I got out of bed one hour and forty-one minutes after getting into it this morning. About half of that time I'd been sleeping. The moving contractor arrived just after eight and toured the unit looking at various piles of stuff. I told him which pile went where exactly once. An hour later, he returned with two Spanish-speaking movers, and proceeded to reiterate exactly what I'd said. Then they packed everything into boxes. It was efficient and smooth. Occasionally they would engage in small talk, but they never asked me a question about what possessions went in which boxes. After watching them do everything correctly for an hour, I left to grab breakfast and some badly needed coffee. They didn't need me; but ultimately, they weren't the problem. When I returned two hours later, they'd packed everything except bookshelves. Here's a story: while moving from México, as novices, we'd packed our freight first, leaving us no recourse later when we discovered that we'd almost doubled the allowable weight on our air shipment. Without another option we shipped overweight, which cost a staggering number of pesos. Today we weren't novices: max-out the air weight first and whatever leftovers could be easily absorbed into the bottomless freight shipment. But I wasn't around at that point. After doing this before, I'd expected to less widely misestimate the accumulated weight of things, sure, but what I actually did was over compensate. When I returned from breakfast, I discovered that the stuff I'd set aside as unaccompanied baggage amounted to only two hundred ninety-nine out of a possible four hundred fifty pounds. But any stacks I might cull the extra weight from--like all Sunshine's clothes, for example, or a better selection of books and DVDs--were already packed tightly in sealed boxes. [Cavin]