Moving Day

It's Friday night. The pets are in boarding. Our furniture is wrapped, boxed and on its way home. We've spent hours cleaning every crevice, fixture and surface in what used to be our house. We've met our landlord who, as happens rarely in my experience, looked almost exactly as I'd imagined he would based on a scant few conversations with him : mid-to-late forties, greying, with a round, bespectacled face. Now, we're in a hotel in San Bruno, resting and recuperating before our assault on Yosemite, the West Coast of California, and Honolulu.

Moving house is a curious thing to experience. All your possessions, which only hours ago littered every room, become featureless 'stuff' as they disappear into box after box. Pieces of furniture are individually mummified to take on barely recognisable forms. Everything is wheeled or hefted into the back of a truck, barely the size of a smallish room, and you feel a ridiculous, but palpable, sense of loss and finality. You realise that, for the next 2 to 3 months, you're entrusting eveything you own to a series of people you've never met. The rooms in your house - although you can barely call it that now - echo just as they did when you moved in. You've a sense, albeit vague, that you're going to go through this whole process again, though in reverse, in a few months time.

Yesterday's trip to the boarding facility with the pets went reasonably smoothly. You'll recall that the taxi company we chose was willing to transport "any pets, except snakes". Our cab driver informed us that he worked to an amended version of this policy, namely "any pets, except snakes, elephants and gorillas". Even this version, I think, leaves a great deal of room for mischief.

In the taxi, Mitzi sat quietly and contentedly in the middle of the back seat, between Debbie and I. Astra, caged and on my lap, serenaded us with a piercing rendition of what must be a traditional cat lamentation air, a song she saves especially for car trips.

After we stepped from the taxi, as if on cue, the two animals switched roles. Astra now played the well-behaved, contented pet and Mitzi proceeded to leave a deposit on the doorstep of the boarding facility and then peed on the rug at reception. Ah, the joys of pet ownership.

Tonight we dined at one of the US's numerous fast-food chains : Chili's. The cuisine is predominantly Mexican, the prices are reasonable by US standards, and the service is rapid and attentive. Debs and I now instinctively recognise the danger words on a US fast-food menu : large, grande, big and super-size. These adjectives are used exclusively to describe meals that should not be seriously considered by anyone who has ingested anything besides air in the preceeding week.

We have previously - naive as we then were - ordered dishes whose description contained these fateful words. On one such occasion, even after we had both eaten as much of a 'grande' starter as was physiologically possible, sufficient of the meal remained that it could have been whisked to Australia and served as a largish main. It's little wonder that obesity is such a major problem here.

Time to sleep - I've a non-large bacon burger to digest.

Originally posted by TC