Wow. . .

It's been quite a week. Every muscle in my body aches; I have bandaids on my fingers and I may have done some permanent damage to my poor back, which has started buzzing intermittently. I haven't had internet since last Saturday and I won't have it again until Monday but despite the deluge of waiting emails in my inbox from Barack Obama, Joe Biden and pretty much everyone in their families and campaign staffs, the election apparently is proceeding apace without me. The dogs have adjusted to their new digs, more or less, and have only gotten out of the gate once. Young M has created a groovy pad full of boys playing video games in what I had fondly thought would be a family room (meaning I could watch movies and knit in there without being ambushed by laser gun wielding aliens and stray McDonalds bags, oh well) and the QOB's room has somehow become the nicest place in the house. I've spent buckets of money that I can't even think about or I'll become catatonic on movers and there are big gaping holes in the drywall where first my friend C and his friend M and then eventually a totally sweet hungover plumber went searching for the cause of the ongoing puddle in the aforementioned "family" room. That leak is at least temporarily mended, though and all the plumbing works, which means that hopefully the QOB won't go wandering loose around the yard in the middle of the night again looking for a place to pee.

My mother's house is completely empty and handed back over to the retirement community from whence it came. That was tough and I cried a bit while I cut some of the last cosmos and daisies to take home. My old house needs about two or three more hours of trashing out, mostly the yard and garage, and then it too is gone, gone, goodbye.

However. Let us get to the angry part of our post. Two Men and a Truck are the worst moving company in the history of the world. They are nasty, rude, uncooperative liars. They showed up at my house last Saturday and refused to move my stuff on the grounds that, get this, my stuff was too dirty to move and might well be a health hazard from which their truck would never recover. They were particularly alarmed by the state of my old futon, which has, yes, water stains on it from being under a window. Ooooh, water stained canvas. They said my house smelled, which actually it did, since the cat had chosen the moment before their arrival to take a horrific shit in the litter box which was not, alas, completely clean yet since I was shamefully and, I would think, sensibly planning to clean it out just before it went into my car along with the cat in her carrier and the dogs for their move to the new house. But they are delicate flowers, these movers, and the combination of the smell of cat shit, the water stains and the dust on my boxes in the garage proved too much for them.

So all my planning fell by the wayside though because Two Men and a Truck, who are assholes, shitheads, evil, sucky and horrific, refused to do my move. Two Men and a Truck SUCK. Let me also point out that I had arranged the initial move, the one that fell through, weeks in advance and then got a phone call from them asking me to change my moving date since they were overscheduled and offering me nothing in the form of compensation for that, which I thought was weird as hell and they were not polite about it either. And, I would also like to mention that the movers on the day of my move slipped up and admitted to me that they did have another job that day even though I had told them it was going to be an eight or nine hour move.

Since I had no choice, I sent the moving company from hell on over to my mother's house to move her stuff, knowing that they could not possibly, in a thousand years, say that it was dirty. My mother was the cleanest person on the planet and her influence has lingered on. But guess what? Two Men and a Truck worry about their precious truck: they didn't want to take any used boxes because, I guess, liquor store boxes might be infested with dangerous drunken bugs which could escape into the truck. They also do not move plants, although I had specifically told them when I called that there were a lot of large and heavy plants to be moved. We moved all the fucking plants ourselves. We moved a LOT of things ourselves because Two Men and a Truck left the couch upside down on the wrong side of the house and then claimed it wouldn't fit through the door, which it did, just fine. They left everything they touched in chaos.

At any rate, I put out a desperate call for help and was rewarded by my amazing friends and members of the BlogAsheville community who totally rescued my Saturday. Then, I went to Craigslist where I found this posting and that turns out to be two fabulous, efficient, sweet guys named Randy and Jeff who I recommend wholeheartedly and without reservation for all your moving needs. They're so great that I called and had them come back on Wednesday so we could finish all the moving from my mothers house that the evil moving company from had screwed up and also move stuff (left in the wrong places by guess who) out of the garage and back into the garage and upstairs and downstairs and jesus, in my lady's chamber. It's been insane.

However, though, the end is in sight and I think there might be a light at the end of the tunnel and I'm even starting to think there's a vague possibility that that light is not, in fact, an oncoming train. Knock on wood. Knock twice, hard.