Duvall to Redmond with a truck
News, Bad Drivers ·Sunday August 23, 2009 @ 11:09 EDT (link)
WA-203 at Big Rock Road, at 2020. WA 496 YPK, small black car (Geo?) Sahara Pizza deliveryperson stops for a while, sees no cops, drives through the red light. It doesn't go green for another 30 seconds. They're RTB, not trying to get someone's pizza out (not that that would excuse it). Pretty silly.
Saturday was the day of the big move, that is, I wanted to get all the items I couldn't move by myself from our house in Duvall over to the Redmond apartment. We were up fairly late disassembling our bed, taking drawers out, and ensuring there was a clear path to move everything out. I'd also offered our old wardrobe on the Microsoft free stuff alias, and someone picked it up Friday evening around 2000; I helped carry it out.
We left 0830 Saturday morning: Honey dropped me to the Redmond Penske pick-up (at Willows and 87th), and then went to pick up Tim at his place in Bellevue (at 0915) and Ali at the Redmond library (at 0930). I got the truck back by about 0930—it wasn't too hard to drive; I may have even had a 26' truck on the Memphis to Boston move. Honey arrived at about 1000 as expected, and Amani and Thomas showed up about 1030.
Loading went pretty much as planned (I'd worked out the larger items in a scale diagram in Word). The hand truck was very helpful for items such as the washer, dryer, and treadmill. Tim rode in the truck with me to Redmond, Honey took Ali, and Amani and Thomas drove themselves. Unloading went faster than loading: no steps (ground floor apartment), plus a few of Tim's friends lived at the same complex and came by to help. All told we finished by 1400, a total of four hours, which is what I had estimated. It's a huge amount of work and I appreciate those that helped very much. And next time, I expect I'll hire people, even if I do have to pay for their truck to sit around (since I'll be loading a long-distance Penske truck and most movers charge for their truck).
We hung out for a while—Amani and Thomas left since they were fasting and I'm sure they were very tired: they couldn't even have water. Then we went over to Tim's place, parked the truck in a side street, and Katt returned from jogging. We watched a few episodes of the BBC show Coupling and then headed to All Purpose Pizza for dinner (it opens at 1600). We got a large sourdough pizza with caramelized onions, basil, garlic, and bruschetta, and a smaller regular pepperoni pizza.
I had a small headache at Tim and Katt's; after we got home, it was worse and I was also feeling nauseous. I lay down for a bit but eventually had to throw up, and then slept several hours and felt much better. I'm not sure if I got some sort of food poisoning (I hadn't last time); I don't seem to have the stomach virus; perhaps I just ate too much (5 slices of pizza). That put the kibosh on plans for making one or two more runs with the truck.
I got up at 0715, swept out the truck, folded and stacked the furniture pads, wrapped the straps around the hand truck, and filled the tank with diesel on Avondale. Being mindful of the warnings posted at the Penske office about getting stuck in narrow turning areas and $300 towing fees, I made sure I had plenty of space to turn around, using the Arco down the street and parking the truck where I picked it up. It's the mileage charges that get you ($0.99/mile, we went 82 miles); the truck itself was $79.99, 12 furniture pads $10, hand truck $10, came about $210 overall. Perhaps hiring a truck and movers wouldn't have been much worse. I plan to get a 16' truck Friday to move everything else, and will probably take the day off work.
Books finished: Who Killed the Constitution?.
