Wednesday

I tried to get out of bed a little early today for two reasons. One, our little unit needed to be organized and neatened in anticipation of guests arriving tomorrow afternoon. This is very exciting. The same couple who hosted us in Brooklyn last May will finally be letting us return the favor here. Sunshine went out and bought an air mattress earlier in the week. There is nothing quite as cool as Coney Island in the District Area, but I am sure we will come up with something interesting to do. The house needed extra cleaning this week, on top of the scheduled housekeeping tomorrow, because our pack-out is so close we've been incredibly lazy about letting things stack up on the floor of what will be our guests' bedroom. But there was another thing, concerning the pack-out directly, that meant I needed to start cleaning earlier than normal. Today a man came from the moving company to assay the breadth of the job facing the movers when they show up on Tuesday. He had a long, carbonless sheet, pre-printed with columns of seven-point lists of things: bench, fireside or piano; Bookshelves, sectional; Cabinet, curio; Chair, arm or occasional. In México, we wandered around with these guys for an hour identifying what would go to Vietnam, what would languish in storage, and what we would be driven over the border in our car. Today there was no language barrier, no option for storage, and no option for the car. There was significantly less square footage, too; the moving company guy toured the house for only about eight minutes while ticking tellingly few checkboxes on his sheet, estimating our freight at around eight hundred pounds, and leaving before I finished washing the dishes I'd started before he arrived. [Cavin]