Lugging Fridge

In which our Hero relates a moving tale of an old man and a baby. And a fridge.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t intend to be as nice as I ended up being. When I asked if my cousin Ice needed help with their move, I was really expecting her to say “No Thanks.” I mean, they’d hired movers, and between her parents, her husband and her brother, she really had all the warm bodies she should need. And even if I did join them, that would just leave me doing trim and assembling furniture.

Except she said yes. With a great deal of relief. Okay. Well, I guess I’m helping move. That’s okay, I can spare part of a weekend to help out my cousin… it’s a weekday? Crap. Weekdays are billable. Now it’s not just work, it’s expensive work. (sigh) Sometimes I forget I’m a contractor and I don’t get automatically get paid when I’m not at work.

And yesterday the day came. Ice wanted me at the new house because her idea was for me to put up blinds. Fantastic, that’s the kind of stuff I enjoy and it’s heavy-lifting free. So I brought a van-load of stuff from her parent’s place to the new house, and started unloading. Ice arrived with her SUV crammed, and I unpacked both. Oven was with a babysitter but 9 month old Fridge spent the day hanging out with us.

He’s got a walker. I can’t say I’ve seen one since Ice and I graduated from them, and I know that some years ago they were banned in Canada because kids were going down the stairs in them. Heck, I’ve watched a kid ride one down the stairs, and I was too young to realize it was a risk. (It’s idiotic because, of course, the problem isn’t the walker, the problem is the lack of supervision. The baby would still go down the stairs if it was crawling without someone watching) But weirdly they seem to be back in the US and now my boy Fridge was bobbing his way around the house. (With a heavy box wedged into the bannister rails to keep him stuck on this floor if he got away from all of us.)

It’s kind of funny. Ice was explaining that before they got the walker, all Fridge had experienced was a jolly jumper. Which meant that instead of stepping, he moved by hopping. And for now, he has only a tenuous grasp on the idea of reverse. And thus Fridge was roaming the kitchen, exploring and examining, and gurgling and cooing and occasionally shrieking in joy or just for the heck of it.

And there I was on the kitchen floor, with a drill and tools and bright yellow wall anchors, which made me very interesting to a young man of inquisitive mind and uncertain balance. Or so I assume from the number of times he’d thump into my leg and babble at me as I tried to match parts together.

He was all the high points of my day. Either just the time spent playing with him, or talking to him or soothing and distracting him so mom could do something productive like dealing with the technicians. And I am going to guess that the smiles and chatter means that he didn’t have too bad a time with his uncle Serin. On the other hand, by the middle of the day I could already feel the fatigue in my arms and my back as I hefted him into the air.

The movers arrived and I headed to the old house to help pack more. And that was honestly horrific. The entire first floor was covered in essentially debris, with no boxes to put them in. It’s not fatal, but doing 20 trips in your car is a waste of your time, doubly so when there’s not one but two trucks moving between locations.

Ice’s husband seemed relieved when I showed up. I think he was just exhausted because he was looking to me for help figuring out what to do next. So we walked the house, figured out what else was ready to go, and then the bunch of us got to work. Clothes into garbage bags, everything possible into what boxes were available.

I was in the bathroom unloading the oh-my-god-crammed cabinets. The hard part there is that there are a lot of liquid components and some are human cleaners which are pretty mild and some are room cleaners which really aren’t so trying not to mix them too much and also trying to not put too many in a box so the box isn’t too heavy.

I know they have two little kids so it’s pretty busy for them. I know that the little kibble-kinds of stuff accumulate like crazy and take up mounds of space, so I was expecting to have to deal with hard-to-box cruft. But people can live with one bathroom, they should have shut down the other two and emptied them ahead of time. They should have boxed or bagged the clothing. They should have set up staging spaces so that we can put stuff down and say, “everything there is for the truck, everything here is for the car.”

I’m scolding, but I’ll give them some credit though. They had post-its on all the doors in the new house with labels, and the boxes generally had locations to match. And the main floor stuff moved well.

The various installers were nice, and helpful, but to a man they were all hours late. Not a good thing. Then again, not something I’d really time with moving day, it’s just one more distraction.

Packing and moving are skills I’m oddly good at given how little I do it myself. Or maybe not, recalling my previous life as a travelling consultant, but packing a suitcase is not the same as packing a truck. But I’ve got a good spacial sense, and a good awareness of how hard things are to load and unload. So when I was putting things in the car, they kept saying, “You’re close to full, right?” and I was expecting a lot more stuff so I was stacking it all for easy loading and stability and as a result… my van wasn’t even a quarter full.

Confuses me. Especially when they decided it was full even though I told them I had room. I’m not just saying it, and I’m driving between houses anyway. Why not load up?!

And maybe I’ve learned to be paranoid, but the other thing was that they bought a fridge and discovered they couldn’t get into the bay behind their island. The doors with direct access were too small, the gaps around the island were too small, and the island had plumbing and power, so it wasn’t moving.

Thank goodness they took the suggestion to ask the professional movers wearing weight-belts to help turn the fridge sideways and lift it over the top. (shudder)

Even without lifting the fridge, I was worn out. By the time I was in the bathrooms even getting up and down was getting difficult because I was just so tired. And the good news is that I’ve got a good sense of when to stop before I hurt myself, but I’m definitely out of shape because the next morning I needed a good 10 minutes to pick my pen up off the floor when I dropped it.

And now I’m still able to say with certainty that I’ve successfully avoided hurting myself in the sense of an injury. But as my muscles wore out and the skinny little 19 year old kept working bent over at the waist, for the first time I actually felt old. And the sad part is that it’s not old, it’s that round is *not* a shape.

So I guess it’s time to reintroduce my sorry ass to my sorry treadmill.