Jim's Place

Time is Moving Quickly

Well, I survived my trip to El Paso. Actually, it wasn't too bad. Spent all day last Thursday loading the truck and then left for El Paso at 6:00 am Friday morning. I had planned 3 days for the drive, but when travelling alone, it doesn't make much sense to stop early. Anyway, I drove almost 850 miles that day (not bad for the big truck and the fact that a couple hundred weren't interstate) and stopped for the night just outside Dallas. That only left me 650 miles to go.

The bad thing about going so far was that I really expected to be driving through Dallas - Fort Worth around lunchtime on Saturday and my son was going to drive up from Waco to meet me for lunch. So, I called him on Friday night and told him I'd be going through Dallas before 6:00 am so lunch probably wasn't going to happen.

I made one big mistake on the trip on Saturday. Through the first 4 tanks of gas on this trip, the truck had averaged 10 miles a gallon so I had a pretty good idea of when I needed to fill up. When I hit the 1/4 tank mark, I would start looking for a station. Well, on Saturday, there were more rolling hills and the gas mileage wasn't as good. To make a long story short, I still started looking for a station at the 1/4 mark, but happened to be in a long stretch of interstate where there weren't any gas stations. I finally saw a station and got off the interstate but they only had diesel (and the truck used gas). I knew my situation was getting serious now so I asked the attendant where the next gas station was. He said 28 miles. I knew that was going to be pushing it, but wasn't too concerned until almost as soon as I got back on the instate, the low gas warning light came on. I immediately began praying that I would make it to the gas station. (NOTE: When I had stopped for lunch and called Lucy, my cell phone battery died so I didn't even have a phone available if I ran out of gas.) I continued to pray as I watched the gas guage and truly believe I could actually see it going down. Anyway, I did make it to the station and filled up with 33 1/3 gallons of gas. I assumed that the truck must have had a 35 gallon tank. When I turned the truck in in El Paso, the guy told me the tank held 33 gallons of gas! People who think that the power of prayer is overrated are wrong. He couldn't believe that I had put in more than 33 gallons so I showed him the receipt.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful (I didn't even come close to running out of gas again). In El Paso, I rented a temp storage unit and unloaded everthing and returned the truck. My realtor picked me up and we went out and looked at our new house. It's progressing good and should be completed on time. However, both of us were surprised at the color of the cabinets since they were MUCH darker than the color we had picked out. The builder sent the superintendent out to check it out and said that they were the right color but that sometimes the stain comes out darker than the sample. The problem is that there is such a difference, the countertops don't look good at all with them. We tried to get them to agree to change the countertops, but since they insist (I'm still not sure) that they used the stain we chose, they will not change them. We'll just have to deal with that when we get there (either sand/re-varnish the cabinets or change countertops).

Flew home on Tuesday--the long way. To get the cheapest available fare, I had to fly from El Paso to Atlanta to Tampa and then to Tallahassee.

Complete change of subject--Worship was great last night and we got to see our good friends, the Shepherds, who came up from Tampa yesterday to see us before we head out west. So, tonight we're going out to dinner with them to Roadhouse Grill (which is one of my favorite places to eat).

posted by Jim @ 7:09 AM 0 comments

Everything's on Track

I know it's been a couple of weeks since my last blog but getting ready to move really involves a lot. You'd think someone who moved 18 times in his military career wouldn't think anything of it. But, it's a whole lot different when the government arranges and pays for everything (other than selling our houses). Even though we got the contract on the house in a day, it still has seemed like a revolving door with all the inspections--house inspection, appraisal, septic system inspection, WDO (wood destroying organism) inspection, etc. All those have now been done and we just have to get some wood rot fixed.

We finallly decided on how we're going to move our stuff to El Paso. We decided to simply rent a truck and I'll drive everything out there. When I started looking at rental trucks I discovered a strange fact--the larger capacity trucks don't allow as much cargo weight as a smaller one. So, we realized that the largest one available was big enough for all our stuff, but we had too much weight. Of course, the next one down would handle the weight of our stuff but not the volume. We still didn't want to spend the extra thousands of dollars of hiring a moving company, so I (stupidly) volunteered to make an extra trip out to El Paso with some of our stuff. So, I'm renting a small truck this week and then filling it with a bunch of our stuff we will not need in the next month and driving it out to El Paso and renting a temporary storage place to put it in. I'll then fly back to Tallahassee. Then, I know we'll be able to fit the rest of our stuff in the larger truck when we actually move next month.

As for the move itself, everything seems to be on schedule (I'll get to see the progress on our new house next Monday when I'm in El Paso). I've reserved the big truck for November 15th and we should have it loaded and leave town on the 17th.

We (I) also decided I didn't really want to tow a vehicle all the way to Texas. It already requires too much concentration driving the big truck, much less while towing a car. So, Lucy will drive the car and we now need to sell our van. I put flyers in the window of the van over a week ago but haven't had any calls--maybe because the van has sat in our driveway almost all that time. I guess that's not going to work :). So, next week after I get back from El Paso, I will need to park it on one of the busy traffic intersections so people can see it. That's about it and I know this is boring, but that's been my life for the past month or so.

We can still use everyone's prayers for this move including--safety for my drive out to El Paso (leaving this Friday), the selling of our van, and generally that things continue to progress smoothly.

posted by Jim @ 7:23 AM 0 comments