Apologies to readers for some delayed posts Saturday and Monday.  I will be working to get those finished today and tomorrow, and to get back on my regular posting schedule.  Even this short update post is a bit delayed.

I spent the entire weekend helping my girlfriend move to her new apartment, and while it was one of the easier moves I’ve done in terms of furniture heft, it was also a situation of Murphy’s Law:  what could go wrong, did (well, not entirely—I suppose the U-Haul could have exploded en route).  We made an initial run Friday morning to drop off a small load and to get the keys to her new place.  It turns out there were several bits of documentation that the various utility providers had either not sent or did which my girlfriend did not realize she needed until the night before, but fortunately that all got sorted fairly quickly and headed back to South Carolina for the big load.

Unfortunately, when we arrived at the U-Haul pickup location, the place was totally dark—and this was at 3:30 PM.  There was also a massive storm system rolling in, with lightning popping in the area as we waited despondently on the off-chance the proprietor of the fly-by-night used car lot where my girlfriend had made the reservation would show up.

When it became apparent this mystery proprietor was not going to materialize miraculously, I began calling every U-Haul location in the general vicinity.  On the fourth attempt, I got through to a location.  They did not have a twenty-foot truck, but were able to place a reservation for me at a location that was a mere half-mile away from the shuttered used car lot.  As the storm began to shower its sky babies upon us, we booked it to a U-Haul Super Center and got the twenty-foot truck, which I drove gingerly through the downpour to my girlfriend’s apartment.

(An aside:  I love U-Haul trucks, with their lower storage cabins and their easy-to-drive cabins.  What I do not love is the willy-nilly fashion in which U-Haul hands out franchises to every Tom, Dick, and Skeletor out there.  Virtually every move I’ve ever made has involved going to a seedy, dilapidated, remote location, and asking the surly gas station/hardware store/dirt-floor shack attendant to give me the keys to the truck.  There’s always something unseemly about it—it’s like buying drugs, or purchasing an escort [I don’t know what those things are like, to be clear, but I’ve watched enough 70s movies to get the idea].  One time I picked up a U-Haul at a shack with a literal dirt floor and one bare light bulb burning overhead.  I’m surprised I made it out of there alive, much less with a truck!)

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