Writing the academic paper and a shout out!

First off, I want to give a shout out to HJHOP friend Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors for his 450,000th post. OK, 10,000th, but it's still enough to make you thankful for sunlight replacement therapy!

Currently, I am working on my next article, since I start teaching again in a few weeks and will need to set aside time for that. After the class ends, I have bare days before I have to move down to Atlanta and to prepare for the next semester, so this is the only chance that I will have to get it finished this summer.

I decided on a mover. Me. Damn it. This is the deal. I wanted a full-service mover, since the university I am going to be working at will pay $1000, my Spring semester contract stretched through to this month, and my summer class is paying me an assload. Of all things in the world, I hate moving into a new apartment most. That and polio. Anyway, the way that the moving racket works is that you go online, enter in a bunch of information about exactly what they are going to be moving and then they send you an email telling you that you will be getting a call/email/will have to call for a quote, and during that call you will have to go through all of it again. The estimates of how much stuff I had by weight ranged from 3,000-5,500 pounds even though I was working from the same inventory. The quotes that I got were $1,100 (which was a lie...I had to get a new quote when I talked to them and they gave me the hard sell) to nearly $3,000. On top of that, I could not be sure of when I would be moving in--there would be a range of dates, as the truck carrying all my stuff would also be carrying the stuff of other households as the truck worked its way south. So the schedule was too uncertain for that price. I checked U-Haul and they were cheap and could even schedule movers to help me load and unload at the pick-up and drop-off points. So far, when the school coughs up my moving reimbursement, I will have spent less than $500 for a full service move. Can't beat that, and I don't have to move a f-in thing! I will also be towing my car, it seems. So, we are going to load one day, drive down the next day, stay in a hotel that night, and move in on the third day.

Crazy.

Anyway, it is long past Bing's bed time. Read me a story. Can I have some warm milk?

HJ