What a day!
Posted by bert hubert Sun, 03 Sep 2006 20:19:00 GMT
Ahh.. Late afternoon Friday we got the keys to the house, which is 2.5 times as big as the old house. I should mention that the old house now feels like a shack. We moved over enough stuff on Friday so we could take out Chinese food with my brother, my uncle and my father (and Mirjam of course), which was grand.
Late night Friday we also picked up the van, a trusty Ford Transit. It took some trouble getting someone willing to rent us one, given the fact that I’ve only had a driving license for 50 weeks now, and most rental companies want you to have one for a year before you can get a van. However, a local company in Delft (‘since 1930’) thought I looked reliable enough to trust me with one.
A van is real fun. I miss it already.
On Saturday, Mirjam and I got up at 6AM and had our first van full of boxes delivered and unpacked at our new house before 8AM. Mirjam’s brother and mother arrived to help us settle, and find a place for everything, and my brother and uncle dropped in as well to fix various things. We moved over most of the big stuff on Saturday. Took out Indian food from the very good Lasanie Restaurant here. I’m somewhat of a connaisseur of Indian food, and this restaurant is very good. The ‘spent 14 hours hauling boxes’-effect might also play a part though. The Indian restaurant is actually from Pakistan btw, but let’s not get distracted!
I also had a lot of fun with our American-style two door refrigerator, which can make and crush ice. This is very rare in Europe and we would probably not have bought one on our own, but it came with the house.
On Sunday lots of odd stuff happened. We tried to drive the van into my father’s parking garage, which turns out not to be high enough for vans, except that you can drive in. Luckily I was in an astute mood, and when driving in further to get to to the right place, I heard an odd noise, so I stopped the car. The odd noise was the flexible antenna scraping some tubing. Oops. Driving back in reverse was real fun too. My father later told me many a van has made the mistake, and showed me the markings on the roof a few feet further. I’m pretty happy I didn’t trust that noise!
Then we messed up and let a supermarket trolly drive a few meters down a hill and impact a car. Oops. Contacted the owner who came to check, but couldn’t find a scratch anywhere, so wasn’t bothered. Phew.
Back to the new house for lunch with Mirjam’s sister, our brother in law, and Mirjam’s mother, who have done a stellar job cleaning and ironing all our clothes. Then to the old home to empty the attic, and disassemble and move more stuff.
How it happened exactly is not clear, but the very server that is serving these pages dropped from the attic to the floor below. A matter or 3 meters (9 feet). And get this, it survived unscathed. The case is a bit bent, and I think one of the (redundant) ethernet connectors has gone to meet its maker, but everything works, including both halves of the RAID mirror containing the root filesystem. The ethernet cable and casing probably absorbed most of the impact.
Then magic happened. We needed to move our cat, but found that the pet store did not participate in the first-Sunday-of-the-month opening, but we didn’t want to leave it behind in an empty house. So we decided to pack her into a big moving box, and secure it with lots of rope. Miep is a friendly cat, so she went into the box easily enough. We go ready the van, come back into the house, and Miep stands next to the box. Which is unaltered, all the ropes are still around it, nothing is damaged, yet the cat just sits there like nothing happened.
So then we decided to REALLY secure the box using packing foil, leaving the hand holds open of course for the air. Well, we don’t know how it happened, but she escaped from that as well, while we were driving. From that point onwards we drove very carefully as we did not want anything to move in the back and harm the cat. She’s still recovering here, moving is a very stressful experience for a cat anyhow..
Back in the house my father dropped off some gardening equipment, and we had yet another great take-out dinner (pizza & pasta).
Then I returned the van, where a friendly looking person without any company clothing on the street asked me for the keys of the van. So I asked him if he actually worked there - turns out nobody had ever done that before, and the guy had been there for quite some time alreadybut his outfit wasn’t ready yet. They were impressed though, as they have had cars stolen by people attaching fake key ‘drop off’ boxes for cars delivered late, but they hadn’t thought of this angle yet. But I bet that if you print an overall with the company logo, you could have a ball.
All in all, things went well, but I really hope we won’t have to move anytime soon, it is hard work!
