Challenge,  Fun Stuff

Craziness is Over…

July 21, 2020 /

Except for Recovery…

And catching up on emails and workshop assignments and such.

The guys arrived this morning, right on schedule, with the huge UHaul truck. Kris and I had parked all three of our cars out on the street last night to hold the parking spots in front of the new office. So as the truck pulled up, we shuttled our cars into the parking garage and let the truck take the spots so it was only twenty feet from the door to the office.

I had bought a lot of Staples banker boxes, so every box in the truck was the exact same size making packing a ton easier. 33 different shelving units were in there as well, most with boxes packed inside the shelves. The entire area over the cab was packed solid with some of the art.

I had a very, very careful plan on where every thing would go, and frighteningly enough, it all worked. And our SUV was packed solid with marbles, a hundred thousand or so, all carefully packed in foam so they would not bang together in any way.

So by 3:30 in the afternoon, Kris and I were sitting at the table in the new office wondering what train had hit us, and the guys were in our van (now their van) headed back to the Oregon coast.

Again, thank you Chris and Steve York for all the amazing help and food. And for the incredible sales of remaining stuff.

Thank you, Cameron for all the help with heavy lifting. And Allyson and the crew for being there when I needed something.

The entire move was insane, but now, by the first of August, we will have closed the door on a ten year section of our lives. Some wonderful meeting and workshops and other things were held in that warehouse space. And for years it was an amazing store.

And it was WMG Publishing’s first office. WMG now has two offices, one in Lincoln City and this new one in Vegas. And so we start into a new phase of this crazy business. It’s going to be fun.

Thanks for putting up with me this last week on these crazy travels. As I said many times along the way, I am way too old for this sort of thing.

So tomorrow back to normal.

 

 

10 Comments

  • Mary Jo Rabe

    July 21, 2020 at 11:20 pm

    I’m so glad you survived this huge moving project. Take good care of yourself and recover from the exertion. This may take a little longer than you would prefer.

  • James Mendur

    July 22, 2020 at 7:41 am

    a hundred thousand marbles

    Do you still go to estate sales and other places looking for marbles or is a hundred thousand enough?

    Actually, since you no longer have a store, do you still go picking just for yourself (if that is even a thing in Vegas) or have you settled in with your collection and just go through it from time to time to remind yourself what you have?

    • dwsmith

      July 22, 2020 at 11:33 pm

      Had to stop on the way down for a break, so went into an antique store that was open in a small town. Owner was wearing a mask, so I ended up buying one marble, a real beautiful one. Ketchup and mustard oxblood, large, mint condition. So clearly still buying marbles. (grin)

  • Kate Pavelle

    July 22, 2020 at 8:19 pm

    That’s fantastic and I’m glad you get to relax a bit before you decide that, you know, you could be doing *interesting things* of all kinds.
    Speaking of interesting things (and this is second-hand book research for me, so bear with me…)
    With a hundred thousand glass marbles packed into the SUV, how did the car handle? How much do they all weigh? Glass is like rock (I used to work at a glass factory, adjusting colors and melt properties, a fascinating job.) So glass is dear to my heart, but a big-ass SUV packed with glass sounds a lot like a break job coming up faster than expected 😉

    • dwsmith

      July 22, 2020 at 11:31 pm

      Not heavy at all, actually. I was surprised. Biggest issue is that I have a ton of plastic containers for marbles, with one marble in each little slot with just enough room to slosh around. Marble against plastic is no issue. I had to make sure no marbles were touching each other which is why the packing took so long. But thousands of marbles against plastic, sloshing at every corner, was an interesting sound. Like ice slushing around in a cooler. Very weird thing to get used to.

      • Mark Kuhn

        July 23, 2020 at 4:55 am

        Dean, your description of the marbles against plastic sound just triggered a character/setting/problem idea for me.
        To the laptop!!