The earth did not move. Yet.

Okay, after my rant the other day, I ended up giving the four guys who effected my move $20 each. They were competent, and of an ethnic group that puts them at risk for illegal visits by ICE, so I just forked over more than I’ve ever tipped movers before.

I’m not happy that the end price was about 12% higher than the quote, and I’m still looking for my down jacket that one of them packed in some carton not with any of my other clothes, but I guess I should be glad that his crew chief asked me what I wanted done with my handbag before it, too, ended up in a carton.

I’m in my new place, where I was greeted by chickadees and juncos—have to get a bird feeder tout suite, because I am not throwing stuff out to be gobbled up by squirrels—and I have a new water heater, connectivity and TV. I reckon I’ll eventually figure out the rest.

But I do have to go look for that jacket.

Staying within the lines

Here’s a view I probably won’t be seeing for a while:

Sunrise over the Capitol, riding into the District They Call Columbia on the Yellow Line.

I’ll be a Silver Line girl soon.

A moving tale

Since I’m moving house this week, I went out yesterday to the nearest bank to get smallish bills for tips. The nearest bank in this instance was Bank of America, an institution I’ve despised since the 70s, and they didn’t disappoint even now.

Because having legal currency of the United States isn’t enough for them to exchange for other denominations of legal currency; you have to have an account with them for them to move their arse.

So, no tenners for the movers.

But on my walk back to the office I considered that, since this moving company is charging me 25% of my total costs of moving from the West Coast to the East last year to haul my kit from one NoVa county to the next, I should perhaps expect them to be paying their staff so well that tips are not welcome.

As an aside, I got a quote from this same company for the cross-country move, which came in at about $5K more than the next highest one. And the estimator this time, in surveying my effects to come up with his 25%-of-a-3000-mile-relo quote, glanced at my pictures on the wall, got the vapors and said, “You’ll want to move those yourself.”

Evidently charging more than two large for a 20-mile move doesn’t include packing and transporting anything that might break.

The writing on the wall

I was attempting to clear out my hard drive—a task which I find exceedingly difficult because it’s kind of like your junk room: you just heave stuff in there willy-nilly until you’ve got a right mess, with the added layer of complexity that usually you only heave one thing into your junk room, but there is pretty much an infinite number of times you can save a file to your hard drive, if it’s living in different folders—and came across this photo I shot a few years ago.

The tagger decorated the wall outside my condo complex, and I wondered what statement s/he was trying to make.

About foolishness?

About fuel consumption?

About some conflation of the two?

And was the number 1 appended to distinguish it in a limited series of tags? Like lithographs by Andy Warhol?

Sadly, the condo association washed it out shortly after it appeared, so I’ll never know.

I’ll also probably never know how many copies of this I’ve saved to my hard drive.

Gratitude Monday: Fade to black

As follow-on to my Gratitude Monday post last week, I am truly, madly, deeply grateful today that the dag-blamed pitch is in the can.

Well, since we are in the Digital Age, technically I’m glad that the video is on my hard drive, a jump drive and in the cloud.

I’m a girl who likes redundant systems.

I can’t believe how long it took to get this 90-second piece put together: more than two hours shooting take after take (including another session this past Friday because, after viewing what we shot the previous Sunday, I was so appalled that I suited up and drove out to west nowhere Fairfax County to do it all over again), and then almost two hours with the editor to lay in the background and a cool fade to black at the end.

So today I’m grateful for two things: I’ve got friends who went to bat for me, setting up, shooting and editing. And I’m looking at the damned thing in my rear view mirror.