I was kicking myself that I didn’t check in with Frick and Frack first thing the morning after I met him.
Everything with the move from Sarasota to Miami had to be orchestrated perfectly, but I waited until the late afternoon to call my do-it-yourself moving team. (Darn.) I wanted to see how the loading process went, but I didn’t want to micromanage the guys or seem too bitchy.
But when Frick finally took my call early that evening, he said he had a “family emergency” that day, and so he and Frack were going to just “quickly load” our stuff early the next morning. He was confident that they would be able to leave Sarasota no later than noon, which meant they’d be at our new place by 4:00 at the latest.
I couldn’t believe this news!
I had witnessed how long it took to shove all of our stuff into our storage unit the first time, so I knew that Frick and Frack were greatly underestimating how much time it was going to take to load their truck. But what could I do about it now?
I had to trust that they were better at this job than they appeared. I had to let it go because fretting over it was going to waste the last bit of energy I had left in me. But loading up, driving the truck over, and unloading all of our things in one day was going to be brutal.
That was the only thing I knew for certain.
Of course the next morning, Frick called me with the news that “some of our stuff wouldn’t fit in the truck.” I got the inventory of things that they couldn’t get into the truck, and most of it, I realized I could live without.
But Lou was already bummed about all of the losses he’d had to accept during our first move, and so he was really unhappy to hear that more of his stuff wouldn’t be moving on into the next phase of our life. I felt bad — I really did — but I needed Frick and Frack to get on the road, so I signed off on the items they were leaving behind, and I pressured them to hurry.
Lou was still running a pretty high fever, so in a way, it was a blessing that I was able to be with him for most of the early part of the day. It felt awful to leave him alone when he was so down, but we had to be stronger than our circumstances. It was getting really discouraging for him to be sick all of the time, but I really needed him to concentrate on getting better. So that afternoon, Lou had to stay behind in the hotel on his own one more time… Without a helper.
As for me, I was also facing one more effort on my own — but of course, I had Frick and Frack as my “helpers.”
It was a very small consolation that Frick and Frack managed to beat the worst of the Miami rush hour traffic by thirty minutes. The truck rolled into our new place around 4:30 or so, and Frick and Frack looked absolutely beat. Frick seemed a little miffed by how much stuff we had, but I really couldn’t apologize for his miscalculations. We just had to hunker down and get the truck unloaded — and we had a lot of work to do.
I hadn’t been up to our unit yet, so while Marlin helped the guys position the truck as close to the freight elevator as possible, I went up to our place to turn on the AC. It was still light outside, but it was quickly getting darker. So imagine my alarm when I flicked the light switch in the kitchen, and nothing came on. I tried every switch on the bottom level, and nothing happened. Then I tried the AC — and it was dark and quiet, too.
I felt my blood start to boil as my patience ran out. Lou specifically paid to have our power turned on by 9:00 a.m. that morning! But there was no power?? Nothing??
Lou called me an hour or so later — just as it was getting too dark to see inside our unit — and he said that the power company told him there was a problem with our unit. Our new building had notoriously “bad wiring,” and so the remote turn on they scheduled didn’t work.
So the best they could do was to schedule a technician to come out the next day.
I was already struggling to keep my composure with Frick and Frack — who were moving at a snail’s pace. Marlin ended up saving the day by lending me a long extension cord so I could at least plug in a lamp. It was so kind of him to help, but honestly, the lamp put out a pathetic amount of light — and really, it was the AC that we needed more than anything.
But Frick, Frack and I persevered. I didn’t even care where they put things at that point — I just instructed them to find an open spot anywhere in any room, and I’d sort it all out later. The movers did carry our enormous leather sleigh bed up to the master bedroom, as well as the chocolate brown leather love seat and recliner I wanted to put in the loft.
But the next morning, in the bright light of the day, I was horrified to see a huge brown scuff mark that started at the landing of the white marble staircase and stretched mid-way up the wall as the stairs ascended. It looked like a horrible brown rainbow arching over the condo like an ominous promise of dark times still to come. It was an awful mark, and even my superpowers couldn’t get it off of the freshly painted white wall. (That was going to be a job for Painter Man.)
But we did it…
Everything was a disaster, but all of our stuff was in one place. Lou was feeling a little better the next day, so we decided he should go to work for a few hours while I unpacked. He wanted to see our new home for himself before I dropped him off at the office.
Even without the horrible scuff mark on the wall, the scene at our unit made our place seem like an unmanageable wreck. I remember feeling completely exhausted looking at all the work I had ahead of me. I didn’t even know where to begin. All it took was one look at my face for Lou to suggest that one more night in a hotel might be wise…
