Moving Out -- Day One

Diary

The morning cardinal announcing his claim to my back yard, and a barred owl hooting somewhere. These are the last birds I will hear on waking for a very long time.

The movers were excellent, and waited indulgently on the hundred decisions they needed from me: Chicago storage (2 years) vs. Naarden vs. leave it in the house vs. take it in the car. I realized the car could not take all I wanted during my three months' corporate apartment campout--can I live without a rhyming dictionary? My desktop computer and monitor?--so I started shipping boxes of stuff. And so far as I know the movers labelled everything correctly--I won't know until three months from now when I unbox things in Naarden.

The temperature peaked at 87F/31C, and the three of us went through something like 12 liters of bottled water. The movers went much faster than I expected, and when they left at 6 I stayed to sort things I should have done earlier, instead of driving around Florida last Sunday, for example. I got to the hotel room at 11 and slept like the dead.