We moved in a couple of weeks ago, but immediately went away so we wouldn’t be depressed by all the work that we will have to do to unpack. But now we’re back, and voila! the DSL is up and working, so … hooray! I’m online again!
(I’m still offline. My computers are mostly still in boxes, but Verizon won’t turn on our DSL until nearly Labor Day, so what’s the rush?)
Anyway, yes, the truck is now unloaded. It took us 1.5 days times three or four workers to load it, but three people unloaded it in just over 5 hours on Tuesday. (It was supposed to be Monday, but if we wanted a more reliable service we could have paid a couple of thousand dollars more and got one.) We packed during a heatwave; it was probably 90 or 95 degrees in New Jersey. Here in the desert it was probably no hotter … but “it’s the dry heat” so much more comfortable.
Speaking of comfortable: we liked to killed ourselves loading the truck, because we didn’t have those hernia-preventing belts that people who lift things us. It took about a week before our backs began to un-cramp. Lesson learned: we each got a back-saving belt (about $12 at Lowe’s) and only a day later our backs are fine.
So far all we’ve unpacked is our beds and a couple of dishes. Now that the truck is unloaded (and should be disappearing today sometime) we can take as long as we want to unpack our boxes. Years, even.
I did take seven boxes of books to the church. I only did enough unpacking to find my NA27 and JPS Tanakh. The rest I can unpack anytime.
Well, here we are. Ten days of traveling and ten nights in hotels, 2859 miles of driving, and now we’re officially Part of the Problem.
I stopped off at the new church yesterday but any further contacts there will be on the sly, since I don’t officially begin until September 10. We get our house on the 14th and we unpack the moving van (actually the trailer, which the tractor will drop off there) on the 14th and 15th. Then I have two whole weeks to figure out how to be a pastor, because it wasn’t a big part of what we studied in seminary.
We left New Jersey late Saturday, travelling through Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee (again), Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, before arriving here in New Mexico today. And do you know what? The prettiest one of the bunch is this one. It’s not even close. I don’t mean that Tennessee is ugly. There are pretty things the whole way. But one look at New Mexico and you can immediately consign all the others to “also ran” status.
…in Clinton, Oklahoma, where we visited the Oklahoma Route 66 museum here today. Route 66 has a special significance to all veterans of Dr. W’s Summer Greek, so I was careful to get some photos I can mail him someday when I get a proper computer setup, Real Soon Now.
My computer setup right now is anything but. I’m blogging from a hotel lobby. They have free wireless high-speed internet, like just about everyone else on the interstate, but I’ve got an old iBook G3. I never got Airport for it, because it cost too much. It wouldn’t cost anything to add it now, if it was an Intel box running windows, but Macs are basically un-upgradeable by design once they’ve left the factory.
I’ll sign off now; I was only checking my email. (Yecch! I had to use Internet Exploder. I wonder what kind of spyware is monitoring my keystrokes and where it’s being emailed.)
I’m blogging while traveling. Well, actually, I’m in a hotel right now, but I’ll be traveling again in an hour or two or three. This is the 3rd hotel we’ve been in and it’s the first whose “free hi-speed internet” worked, so I hope to be able to blog every third or fourth day going forward.
Today we’re in Cleveland, Tennessee (“the blogging state”). Today we’re bound for Huntsville, AL, to see the Marshall Space Flight Center. Then it’s westward ho, straight down I-40 another couple of months until we hit Memphis. From there it’s a clean shot west all the way to California. (“…here we come!”). Although we may deviate from this plan to visit Southern New Mexico and then take I-10 in to California instead of I-40.
Anyway, we’re 544.5 miles from the Lukoil gas station near the seminary’s married student housing.
I thought we’d never leave. We’d hoped to be done Friday at noon; in fact we didn’t finish packing the truck until about noon Saturday, and cleaning the house and packing our vehicles took until 7pm. Thank the Lord for good neighbors. (Honor roll: Phil T. from church, Bill M. from church and also from seminary, and Susan S-B & Mr. B., Sampson, and David and Caty A. from seminary.) I can’t say I’m looking forward to unloading the truck without them in the desert. (“But it’s a dry heat!”) Pretty clever of me to schedule a move during a nationwide heat-wave, huh?
Our stuff, which did not include any major appliances, took 20-odd feet of a truck 9×8 feet in cross section. The top foot of that isn’t as well-packed as I’d like, but I did my best. Call it 1260 cubic feet. I can’t wait to hear how much it weighed. Note: our new house is about 1500 square feet in area. So unloading the truck will be non-trivial even apart from the desert heat.
P.S. I preached on the 23rd and was called there! Someday after I get there I hope the church aquires a web site, then I’ll link there.
Goodness. I’ve packed 50 boxes. Most of them are book boxes (1.5 c.f.) but there are a half dozen or so each of banker’s and case-of-copier-paper boxes. The book boxes average about 52 lbs. each, so I’ve got just about one ton of book boxes. The banker’s boxes and paper cases are a little lighter. My back hurts.
The apartment where we live (for a few more weeks) is located on a corner. We see a lot of people go by on their way to the pool or to the childcare center. Some of them are kids on bikes. And with the exception of one (1) family, it seems as if none of the kids wear helmets. There’s nothing more common than to see a family unit walk by in the morning or afternoon on their way to or from day-care, with the kids on some kind of bike, the parents walking alongside, and the kid not wearing a helmet.
This strikes me as falling into the same category as making a pit for the neighbor’s ox to fall into, or watching an enemy’s donkey wander away.
So I wish that these people would make their kids wear helmets, or not ride bikes. And so does the state of New Jersey. As the saying goes, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.
I’m not sure whether it should be a law. As a citizen of the republic, I tend libertarian (lowercase ‘l’) in my politics, so I would probably favor elimination of the law. I’d prefer the legislature to make more general laws — “no endangering your minor children” — and then executive-branch agencies and the courts could figure out in specific cases whether not wearing a bike helmet was child endangerment, juvenile delinquincy, or what. That way the legislature wouldn’t have to write and keep continually up-to-date a raft of laws defining all the different ways kids could be endangered. (The bike helmet law would have to follow the trends as people’s interest moved between mopeds, Segways, razor scooters, skateboards, roller blades, unicycles, and so forth.)
But the point is that it is a law, here, and these people are scofflaws.
They are not protesting it as an unjust law. They aren’t sending overtures to General Assembly feebly trying to pressure state legislatures into overturning a bad law. No. They’re simply ignoring the law, because it’s inconvenient to them.
Now put aside for a moment that bike helmets make sense. Put aside the responsibilities that a parent has not only as a citizen but also as a Christian, for the nurture of their children. Put aside even the Christian ethical matter of obedience to the civil magistracy. (We’re not talking about bad laws here. A parent letting their kid crack their head open isn’t Dietrich Bonhoeffer.)
What galls me is that from my interactions with neighbors, from a quick survey of the number of cars that (still!) have “Kerry-Edwards” or “God is not a Republican” bumper stickers, and from the prevalence of hyphenated last names, it’s clear that the seminary’s married student housing trends more blue than red. So it’s likely they will continue to vote for more dumb laws and the politicians who propose them. Even the evidence from their own lives, they will not or cannot learn that some good ideas don’t make good laws.
In the original version of the movie (the movie) The Empire Strikes Back, toward the end, Darth Vader offers a bargain of sorts to Luke. Luke declines, then falls off a platform, apparently to his doom. Soon after that, there’s a shot of Darth Vader striding along surrounded by some of the Imperial garrison he’s stationed on Bespin. He says,
Bring my shuttle.
The scene is only about 15 or 20 seconds long, but it’s a nice little moment. It leverages the inscrutable mask and the voice-over talents of James Earl Jones to leave you wondering just how Luke’s decision has affected Vader.
In the DVD box set that came out in the fall of 2004, there are many improvements and a number of bad decisions. Of the later, the most controversial is having Greedo shoot first, but the worst is probably the alteration of the musical number in Jabba’s throne-room from Return of the Jedi. It was bad before, but now it’s simply awful.
But. Bad as that is, it’s understandable. The old music was limited by the puppets’ acting ability but also by the evolution of musical tastes. You can see why Lucas (or someone whose opinions he values) decided to replace the puppets with CG and the music with something “modern.” Fine. They were terribly, terribly wrong. But it’s just a tragic misjudgment: you can at least understand their motivations.
What is unfathomable, however, is the replacement of the original dialog for this tiny scene where Darth Vader summons a ride back to his star destroyer. Now, instead of saying:
Bring my shuttle.
Vader says:
Alert my star destroyer to prepare for my arrival.
What could have possessed them to make this change?
Accordingly, I hereby nominate this change for the single dumbest alteration of what is nevertheless one of the best movies ever made, and by far the best of the Star Wars series.
I’ve been packing. Our lease (actually, the 1-month extension) runs out at the end of the month, so we’re moving. I expect to know where we’re moving no later than the 24th or 25th, so we can give the moving company a “to:” address.
Anyway, I’ve been packing books. I hope to mail some of them to their final destination. (Oddly enough, the USPS media mail rate is cheaper than certain national relocation specialists. Which is why a stamp costs $0.39, I suppose.)
With the first couple of boxes I did a little study. I figured out that a 1.5 cubic-foot box of my old computer books averages 39 books and 55 lbs, while same size box of seminary books has 51 books but only weighs 45 lbs. These samples aren’t perfectly representative. The computer book sample represents almost half of the computer books I still have. (I used to have a whole bunch more, but my wife spent the last three years unloading them them on half.com.) The sample of seminary books, on the other hand, was only about 5-10% of that category, and even then, it skewed light, since it included a bunch of C.S. Lewis paperbacks.
But from these (flawed but not hopelessly so) data can be determined the following facts:
(These numbers again in SI, for the world readership: computer books average 0.64 kg mass, 1.089 litres in volume, and 0.59 g/cm^3 density. Seminary books average 0.40 kg mass, only about 0.83 litres volume, and about 0.48 g/cm^3 density.)