Settled (Mostly) in Chicago

We’re up in the new place after our three-leg, two-vehicle, 921-mile journey out to Illinois. Things are mostly unpacked, but more than anything I’m glad the moving part is over.

I managed just fine with the U-Haul truck. The testosterone highlight of the trip for me was when one of the movers asked me, “Who backed that [truck] in? You? Nice job,” when looking at the narrow alley behind our building. (That was without any guidance, thank you. I am pure steel.) About an hour later another of the tenants had to move her car out of the garage, requiring me to move the truck. I drove it down an alley nearby, thinking I could just drive straight through, but instead spent ten minutes turning the thing Austin-Powers style around a corner before I got out. Thus ended my truck-driving high.

While I now feel good about my own Teamster skills, I don’t get how U-Haul can rent bigger trucks than that one to the general public. A 26-foot moving van? A dude was driving one this weekend through Lakeview — he took a corner too widely, almost hit a bus, then had to back up in the middle of a six-way intersection. I thought cool over-one’s-head-on-the-road stuff like that is only supposed to happen in Third-World countries and New York City’s Chinatown-bus system.

Overall it was an unusually smooth move. The only things that broke were a cat-food container that fell out while I was unloading some extra boxes and a one-inch refrigerator magnet. I’m a little freaked out by how little went wrong. Apparently my payback has been the two games in Detroit. The less said about those, the better.