These are the boxes of our lives…

It’s PACK OUT DAY! Well, actually, it’s the end of Pack Out Day 1, and B, C and I are sitting in our living room (furniture has not yet been packed) relaxing among the boxes.

Today was surprisingly ok. Last night was not so ok. I was teary, sad and overall unhappy. We had a fabulous dinner with our friends T & A (yeah, yeah…) and their littles (their son W is about 3 months older than C and they love each other), we cooked steak, drank wine and enjoyed a lovely, lovely evening. Leaving their house was hard. Really hard. Harder than I expected given that I keep reminding myself that I’ll see them again in about 3 weeks when I’m back in town for depositions.

But then today dawned bright and early (particularly after the wine) and our movers arrived, and things since then have been pretty good.

They’re heeeeere…

The movers started with our UAB (unaccompanied air baggage). We had an allowance of 600 lbs. Anyone out there know what 600 lbs looks like? Nope? Well, me neither, because despite our worries our UAB ended up coming way under our limit at 366 lbs. Here is what 366 lbs looks like.

UAB for BCD.

There weren’t a lot of surprises today, but one of them was that the “tri-fold” box that is used for UAB turns out not to be triangular as I was expecting. I suppose if I had looked at the dimensions in our papers I might have realized a “tri-fold” box had 4 sides, but in my head I was imagining a tri-fold box that had three sides. It seemed like it would be pretty inefficient, but since we are talking about the government I wasn’t about to put it past anyone. So the mysterious “tri-fold” is a decent sized very sturdy box, three of which are now full of clothes and other things that will be delivered to our apartment next week.

A tri-fold box! With 4 sides!

Security sealed for your protection.

Rooms full of stuff became rooms full of boxes and here we are with our lives in boxes ready to ship them off and head to DC in a couple of days. B and I mostly stood around feeling useless and making ridiculously detailed lists of everything going into each box. I’m glad we knew to keep such a detailed list since the descriptions of the packers leaves a bit to be desired. Watching them pack the kitchen I watched them load vases, roasting pans, muffin pans, salad spinner and half a dozen other things into a box and then write “pots n’ pans” on the box. That would not have been very helpful in a few months when we are trying to figure out what boxes to call for when we go overseas.

We also knew (from reading other posts – thanks FS bloggers!) to have a “Safe Room” (or 3) where we could put things that we didn’t want them to pack. We shoved a LOT of stuff into those rooms and kept throwing things in as we went along. Once the movers leave we’ll have to pack all of that into our cars to take with us to DC.

We’re having a picnic in the living room tonight then going to stay with good friends. Then we’ll be back tomorrow to watch them load and drive away. Let’s hope Pack Out Day 2 goes as smoothly as Day 1 went!