Saturday: Moving & Drinking
Mar. 30th, 2003 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aSaturday was quite busy, because I helped a friend move, then went to another friend's bachelor party. Surprisingly I'm feeling relaxed and invigorated today, despite all the social energy expended yesterday. I guess it's kind of nice to hang out with the folks I game with in a different social context from time-to-time.
Moving was first off. That particular event was in honor of DS. He's been living on a (small) boat for a couple of years with his wife and menagerie of pets. Thus, he had two humongous crates representing most of his worldly goods residing at the warehouse rented by another friend.
Now he's got a new house down in southern California, and in addition said warehouse-renting-friend is clearing out his California warehouse, and thus the time came to move said crate southward.
The easy thing would have been to hire a flatbed trunk to grab the two crates and haul them toward LA, but because the crates weren't "packed for moving" (whatever that means; packed wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor is usually "packed for moving" in my book) we needed to haul everything out of the crates and then reassemble them in a truck--a Uhaul to be precise.
Unfortunately there'd been some miscommunication and the Uhaul which was supposed to available to DS at 9 or 10am instead wasn't available till 4 or 5pm. So, after we started arriving at noon to 1pm we hauled all the items from the back of the warehouse to the parking lot just outside the warehouse. And, by 3pm or so we were sitting around twiddling our thumbs.
Fortunately I'd foreseen just such a miscommunication and had a couple of board games in my backpack. There were also a few others on the premises. I ended up getting to play a new game I bought a couple of weeks ago with birthday money, The Settlers of the Stone Age. Another group of folks played Unexploded Cow and seemed to have great fun.
By the time we were done with the games it was 4.30 or so and calls to Uhaul revealed that the truck was being "fixed" or being "refueled" or something else, depending on the particular excuse that was being tendered at the time of each call. So, DS decided to go down to Uhaul to sit on them until he got his truck. He took one of the more imposing gamers with him (DP, who's bachelor party I'd be attending later in the day), to have someone to look mean when Uhaul claimed that the truck was "out on an excursion" or "in the bathroom" or whatever excuse they came up with when DS got there.
And so the rest of us decided to play basketball, using the hoop at the halfway house right across from the warehouse.
Now, I think I'm in pretty decent shape because I lift weights every week and was walking 20-25 miles a week until recently. But from playing 3-on-3 basketball I learned that I'm not quite up to that level of high-speed cardiovascular activity. The first 5 or 10 minutes were fine, and after that my heart was throbbing like a drum. From the beginning of the game until the end I progressing from deftly hopping about, avoiding guards and generally racing about, to a slow walk. Passing became my preferred activity as it became obvious how much less work that was.
My "3" team kicked butt in the first half of the game, and then lost terribly in the second half as I and one other team member totally faded.
By 6pm or so we were wondering if DS and DP had been arrested for being too imposing at a Uhaul store, but finally DP pulled in, with over a dozen Roach Coach tacos (tasty!) and the explanation that DS would be along shortly.
With the truck.
So, shortly after 6pm we got started with the real work of moving that had been planned for shortly after noon. DP had to leave very quickly for his bachelor's party and the rest of us packed the truck until 9pm or so.
This was of course fraught with more perils. The truck was only 17 feet long, and DS had closer to 20 feet of STUFF. And, the items in the truck had to be packed and tied down obsessively so that nothing would shift during the move. By the end DS was stringing rope back and forth over the back of the truck like he was laying a net intended to catch anything that might fall. The friend who's warehouse we were using, who does lots of packing every day, and I just shook our heads.
Everything did fit, but only due to lots of stacking and the fact that we had some cars that we could put stuff in. You see, four other gamers all went down to LA with DS to help with the unpacking on the other side. Kind of a share-the-adventure sort of thing, and I'd definitely agree with the noun "adventure", given that they pulled out of the parking lot sometime after 9pm, and thus probably didn't get to LA (or more precisely, the unincorporated area just beyond Apple Valley) until 5 or 6am this morning.
The one gamer who didn't head southward with the convoy and I then headed over to DP's bachelor party, which had begun a couple of hours before. It was a very casual affair. A bit less than dozen of DP's male friends (and one of their wives, who was a good friend of DP's) sitting around, chatting, eating (delicious Baja Fresh food), and drinking. I didn't know any of them, though I'd heard stories about a couple, but they were all nice, intelligent, funny folks and thus I had a good time.
DP got roaring drunk, to the point of falling out of chair and later falling asleep. He kept refilling the whiskey in my glass too, and thus I got tipsier than I've gotten in a year or two (which isn't saying much, because I haven't had a drink in a year or two). I've got a great picture on my digital camera of DP making funny hand motions and looking very happy.
Afterward, I helped one of DP's friends get Dave home. There was a long struggle with house keys at DP's front door, because DP couldn't get the door open, and neither the other friend nor I could figure out the locks. Fortunately DP's upstairs boarder showed up while we were struggling and opened the door for us. (It turned out that one of the locks was in backward and turned away from the frame rather than toward it. I might have figured that out, despite my tipsy state, but I was busy making sure that DP wasn't going to go tumbling over, while the other friend messed with the lock.)
Mission accomplished, I then got a ride home too, stumbled in the door, and watched an episode of Six Feet Under with Kimberly before heading off to bed a bit after 2am.
My sleep was a bit unsettled, mostly due to very vivid dreams that shaded into weird wakefullness a couple of times. That's generally been how I've seen alcohol affect the sleeping process the couple of times I've been sufficiently toasty, and I just can't imagine folks who get drunk regularly, because I can't believe they'd ever get good sleep.
As for today, I'm planning to wander off and engage in one of my regular Sunday rituals, which is cleaning out my brain by heading out in Berkeley by myself, and eating some fast food while reading. Later today I need to do some work for Skotos because last week was too busy for me to get some crucial stuff finished (wherein I'm doing an integration with someone who's leaving on vacation in a week). But, that can wait until this late afternoon or evening, and in any case should be fun ... I love doing web work where I can see immediate results.
Moving was first off. That particular event was in honor of DS. He's been living on a (small) boat for a couple of years with his wife and menagerie of pets. Thus, he had two humongous crates representing most of his worldly goods residing at the warehouse rented by another friend.
Now he's got a new house down in southern California, and in addition said warehouse-renting-friend is clearing out his California warehouse, and thus the time came to move said crate southward.
The easy thing would have been to hire a flatbed trunk to grab the two crates and haul them toward LA, but because the crates weren't "packed for moving" (whatever that means; packed wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor is usually "packed for moving" in my book) we needed to haul everything out of the crates and then reassemble them in a truck--a Uhaul to be precise.
Unfortunately there'd been some miscommunication and the Uhaul which was supposed to available to DS at 9 or 10am instead wasn't available till 4 or 5pm. So, after we started arriving at noon to 1pm we hauled all the items from the back of the warehouse to the parking lot just outside the warehouse. And, by 3pm or so we were sitting around twiddling our thumbs.
Fortunately I'd foreseen just such a miscommunication and had a couple of board games in my backpack. There were also a few others on the premises. I ended up getting to play a new game I bought a couple of weeks ago with birthday money, The Settlers of the Stone Age. Another group of folks played Unexploded Cow and seemed to have great fun.
By the time we were done with the games it was 4.30 or so and calls to Uhaul revealed that the truck was being "fixed" or being "refueled" or something else, depending on the particular excuse that was being tendered at the time of each call. So, DS decided to go down to Uhaul to sit on them until he got his truck. He took one of the more imposing gamers with him (DP, who's bachelor party I'd be attending later in the day), to have someone to look mean when Uhaul claimed that the truck was "out on an excursion" or "in the bathroom" or whatever excuse they came up with when DS got there.
And so the rest of us decided to play basketball, using the hoop at the halfway house right across from the warehouse.
Now, I think I'm in pretty decent shape because I lift weights every week and was walking 20-25 miles a week until recently. But from playing 3-on-3 basketball I learned that I'm not quite up to that level of high-speed cardiovascular activity. The first 5 or 10 minutes were fine, and after that my heart was throbbing like a drum. From the beginning of the game until the end I progressing from deftly hopping about, avoiding guards and generally racing about, to a slow walk. Passing became my preferred activity as it became obvious how much less work that was.
My "3" team kicked butt in the first half of the game, and then lost terribly in the second half as I and one other team member totally faded.
By 6pm or so we were wondering if DS and DP had been arrested for being too imposing at a Uhaul store, but finally DP pulled in, with over a dozen Roach Coach tacos (tasty!) and the explanation that DS would be along shortly.
With the truck.
So, shortly after 6pm we got started with the real work of moving that had been planned for shortly after noon. DP had to leave very quickly for his bachelor's party and the rest of us packed the truck until 9pm or so.
This was of course fraught with more perils. The truck was only 17 feet long, and DS had closer to 20 feet of STUFF. And, the items in the truck had to be packed and tied down obsessively so that nothing would shift during the move. By the end DS was stringing rope back and forth over the back of the truck like he was laying a net intended to catch anything that might fall. The friend who's warehouse we were using, who does lots of packing every day, and I just shook our heads.
Everything did fit, but only due to lots of stacking and the fact that we had some cars that we could put stuff in. You see, four other gamers all went down to LA with DS to help with the unpacking on the other side. Kind of a share-the-adventure sort of thing, and I'd definitely agree with the noun "adventure", given that they pulled out of the parking lot sometime after 9pm, and thus probably didn't get to LA (or more precisely, the unincorporated area just beyond Apple Valley) until 5 or 6am this morning.
The one gamer who didn't head southward with the convoy and I then headed over to DP's bachelor party, which had begun a couple of hours before. It was a very casual affair. A bit less than dozen of DP's male friends (and one of their wives, who was a good friend of DP's) sitting around, chatting, eating (delicious Baja Fresh food), and drinking. I didn't know any of them, though I'd heard stories about a couple, but they were all nice, intelligent, funny folks and thus I had a good time.
DP got roaring drunk, to the point of falling out of chair and later falling asleep. He kept refilling the whiskey in my glass too, and thus I got tipsier than I've gotten in a year or two (which isn't saying much, because I haven't had a drink in a year or two). I've got a great picture on my digital camera of DP making funny hand motions and looking very happy.
Afterward, I helped one of DP's friends get Dave home. There was a long struggle with house keys at DP's front door, because DP couldn't get the door open, and neither the other friend nor I could figure out the locks. Fortunately DP's upstairs boarder showed up while we were struggling and opened the door for us. (It turned out that one of the locks was in backward and turned away from the frame rather than toward it. I might have figured that out, despite my tipsy state, but I was busy making sure that DP wasn't going to go tumbling over, while the other friend messed with the lock.)
Mission accomplished, I then got a ride home too, stumbled in the door, and watched an episode of Six Feet Under with Kimberly before heading off to bed a bit after 2am.
My sleep was a bit unsettled, mostly due to very vivid dreams that shaded into weird wakefullness a couple of times. That's generally been how I've seen alcohol affect the sleeping process the couple of times I've been sufficiently toasty, and I just can't imagine folks who get drunk regularly, because I can't believe they'd ever get good sleep.
As for today, I'm planning to wander off and engage in one of my regular Sunday rituals, which is cleaning out my brain by heading out in Berkeley by myself, and eating some fast food while reading. Later today I need to do some work for Skotos because last week was too busy for me to get some crucial stuff finished (wherein I'm doing an integration with someone who's leaving on vacation in a week). But, that can wait until this late afternoon or evening, and in any case should be fun ... I love doing web work where I can see immediate results.
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Re: Drinking & Bachelor parties
Date: 2003-03-30 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-30 02:58 pm (UTC)Absolutely. It tends to be far more fun and less serious for one thing! Or is that just my gaming group? ;+)
U-Haul woes
Date: 2003-03-30 03:25 pm (UTC)To give you an idea of U-Haul's corporate policy, as a "customer service representative" you are required to take any reservation for any truck on any day. That means if someone calls on Friday wanting a truck for a Saturday at the end of the month (always the busiest day) and you already have 20 reservations and not a single truck on the lot, you have to take the reservation. And when I say have, I mean it. They have people at the main offices who pretend to be customers and call. If you tell them you don't have any trucks available, and the liklihood of there being any trucks available is significantly smaller than the chances that George W. Bush is actually the son of God reincarnated and goes to bed every night on a cloud borne by angels, you get fired.
They have some small print on each contract that says that if no truck is available, they can substitute another truck of the same size at another time or location. That means, if you want a 20 foot truck on Saturday, you may show up at the U-Haul place and find out that you will actually receive 2 10-foot trucks at a location 100 miles away 24 hours later. You don't have a second driver? You have to be out by the end of the day? You are paying movers $100 an hour and there's no truck for them to use? Tough luck.
And that's just so the very tip of the iceberg. So, erm, knowing U-Haul, you got off lightly ;)
Glad you had a great Saturday, though! :)
no subject
Date: 2003-03-31 05:28 pm (UTC)