Including a couple of moves before I was out of high school, I think I’ve moved 7 or 8 times now. The move this week was about as painless as it could get. The house that SWMBO bought is 4 blocks north of where the bus is parked. We still haven’t slept in it but we ate all our meals in it starting on Monday.
We met Dizi Dingbatski, the Ukrainian realtor at the house at 9:00 Monday. She very kindly brought a bottle of cheap champagne along which we finally got around to opening tonight. I was busy figuring out where we were going to put our meagre possessions while Marilyn very kindly pretended to listen to Dizi but it finally got to be too much for me when she started doing a “home tour”. I pointed out that we had a long day ahead of us and mercifully she took the hint and buggered off.
The holdup on sleeping in the new house was that we decided to move the mattress from the bus into the house which meant I needed to build a base for it before the move. We’ve got two really comfortable beds – I think the one on Gray Hawk is slightly better but they’re both pretty damn good beds. Most beds in the world don’t fit me so I insist on a good bed when I’m at home. The one on the bus is close to 8 feet long so building a base for it was no trivial matter but I got the base put together Monday afternoon & got one coat of paint on it. That first coat took a long time to dry but Tuesday night I was able to sand it and put a second coat on. That second coat dried much faster and I was able to get a third coat on this morning. By supper time it was dry enough to finish the assembly and a few minutes ago we moved the mattress onto the frame. It shouldn’t be noteworthy that the mattress fit but I have inherited my father’s abilities with regard to wood butchery – I am more of a carpenter than a craftsman and not that good of a carpenter either so when things work out it is cause for celebration.
Yesterday I got the bus drained and pumped antifreeze into all the lines so it is ready to freeze up whenever we get done sleeping there, which now looks to be tonight. We have been slowly moving “stuff” from the house at 110 to the new house at 515. Its really alarming how much “stuff” we have accumulated. When we left Nipawin all our “stuff” fit either in the bus or in the cubevan. Unfortunately I think we have grown our stock of “stuff” significantly since then and I fear that growth will now turn into an explosion. On the other hand the move has allowed us to consolidate food and booze in a single location and that has turned up booze that we didn’t know we had. Finding single malt that you didn’t know you had is like finding $50 bills in the pockets of a seldom worn jacket.
SWMBO says she needs a serger for her new sewing room. I have agreed, on the condition that I can have a metal lathe. I’m not sure what I’ll do with a lathe but I’ve always wanted one. I’ve been watching Youtube videos to try to learn some of what I don’t know about lathes. It turns out that there is a very long list of things I don’t know about lathes. SWMBO is not sure what she’ll do with the serger either but she is more reluctant to admit that than I am to admit that I don’t know what I’ll do with a lathe.
We didn’t stop to take any pictures in the midst of the move. Mind you the whole affair didn’t really take long enough to be worthy of photography either. The one above is from this afternoon after we got the mattress unloaded. As you can see, most of our snow has melted. Maybe we’ll have a green Hallowe’en after all.
We’ve been very busy this week, all the more so because this little village is a beehive of activity. The sign on the highway says that 220 people live here but they keep pretty active. There was a fall supper here last Sunday and the Ukrainian Catholics next door to us are having another one this Sunday. This week I discovered that some group puts on a Wednesday lunch every week in the community centre. There’s coffee twice a day at the Co-op. It was hard to fit in our move around all that community activity.
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