Plans

Things rarely go according to plan.

I have re-learned this lesson in spades over the past twenty-four hours.

Yesterday morning, our movers arrived to pack us up and move us to our new home.  I sat in my apartment for hours, watching them pack my life into boxes, and instead of being sad, as the stack of boxes grew, I felt an overwhelming panic start to rise. How would we ever find anything in this mess of packing materials without emptying every single box? How would we shower tonight, or find sheets to put on our bed? How would we change our underwear, or find clothes to wear to the lunch we were invited to this afternoon?

Instantly, I started dodging the movers to fill a suitcase with everything I thought we would need for the next twelve hours without having to unpack all of the boxes.

It turned out to be the best decision I have ever made in my life.

I met my husband downstairs, and we drove away from our apartment for the last time, expecting that the movers would be right behind us.

When we arrived at our house, we called the movers to check in, and they said that they had just finished loading up the truck, and were about to pull away.  Excellent.

Some of our workmen were still at the house, finishing up some last minute stuff, so we paced around, and chatted with them until the movers arrived. There was nothing much that we could do anyway, until they got there.

We still don't have a kitchen - we wanted to make sure the second floor was livable before we moved in - but the rest of the construction was pretty much done, so we checked out all the rooms, and decided where we would put everything when it came out of the moving truck, and admired, a little nervously, our new home.

And then, as we checked out the empty room that would soon be out kitchen, there was a quiet bang outside, and suddenly were in darkness. Power outage. We had not been in our house for more than ten minutes. Our house, that miraculously survived Hurricane Sandy without ever losing power. Our house, that was now growing darker by the second with the setting sun.

I thought that there was no way that the movers would be able to take our stuff upstairs, and we would end up with absolutely everything in the living room.  I thought how much I would hate that. I thought how heavy the bed would be when we had to carry it up the steps ourselves. After seven years of apartments, this was a pretty daunting thought.

Luckily, the power went on a few minutes later. Our neighbors told us it was just a fluke. Super.

We called our movers again, wondering where they were, since they should have already arrived. And then the trouble began.

They told us that they had accidentally left the lights on while they were moving us, and the truck battery was dead. They sent one of their guys across the park to home depot to get jumper cables, which they strangely enough did not have in their truck. He would be back soon, and they would be on their way.

Being the optimistic sort, I believed them. Joke's on me I guess.

Hours later the movers still had not shown up. My husband got in touch with them, and they said that they tried a bunch of ways to jump the truck, but nothing had worked. The battery was well and truly dead. Because the hurricane had pushed so many moves to Friday, there was no truck readily available to make the switch. They had a truck finishing up another move in a couple of hours, but that would mean they wouldn't get to our house until around three in the morning. No thank you. We said we would wait until morning.

I guess we could have slept on our new couch that was delivered on Thursday, but for our first night in our new house, we really wanted to sleep in our bedroom. 

So, in a nearly empty house, with the sheets and pajamas I packed, blankets borrowed from friends around the corner, and all the pillows from the new couch, we set up camp on the floor for the night.

And you know what? We slept really, really well.