It's harder than it looks

I find myself staring at things and wondering why they did not go in the air shipment. Fairly obvious things which – had they been snakes – would have bitten me.

This is in between snatching things from the jaws of the removalists before they disappear into cartons. So far have lost a couple of things – but nothing of real consequence and that I cannot live without for a month or so. Who needs shoes.

This moving business is harder than it looks and I have apparently not learned very much from my previous moves – all of which have had a tinge of goat about them.

The cats were collected at 8:00 AM this morning and were not happy about the whole business. Billy was delivered back to Ducky Pharma and it was a sad parting – particularly as there were some new scratches that I had not noticed before.

There are six men doing the packing and they are all experts at their chosen profession. I remember the days when they used to move furniture. Not any more. Each piece of furniture is now wrapped in its own cardboard cocoon. Only boxes are moved.

I watched the man wrapping our lounge suite. He has an uncanny ability to craft pieces of cardboard to exactly meet the needs of whatever he is wrapping. It is like Origami. He cuts and slices and folds to wrap around edges, bumps and protrusions and ends up with a box of precisely the right dimensions. He does this without measuring anything. It is done with the eye and a precision box cutter. He can turn a sofa into a butterfly.

Poetry in motion.

I am now surrounded by approximately 200 cardboard cartons. I managed to rescue my breakfast porridge and the coffee maker and can thus survive to mid-morning. They also left me a bed and a TV.

The TV does not have much on at is SKY responded to the request to cancel services on 1 May be canceling everything immediately – i.e. on 24 April. Protestations elicited a response that a ‘re-establishment fee’ of €66 would be necessary to correct the mistake that they made. Who has the time, money or energy to deal with nitwits?

Tomorrow the van arrives at about midday and the whole kit and caboodle gets stuffed into a container. They assured me they will be finished tomorrow. Even after I showed them the basement – sure they were a bit shaky – but still guaranteed it.

Tomorrow I shall check into the Radisson Blu in Parkring. This is the first hotel we stayed in when we came to Vienna. It will be a bit of nostalgia – albeit without Cate who is already in the Land of the Free. 

And I must apologize to those bloggers whose blogs I have not visited for weeks. I promise I will get back soon.