The Upcoming Move

For the upcoming move to our new house near Stanford campus, I started looking for a moving company.

ACE Relocation handled my moves from Boston to San Diego as well as from San Diego to Bay Area. The first time it was great – we got up in the morning and packed up a suitcase for ourselves for a week, but did absolutely no packing. The movers showed up and packaged up the entire apartment in a matter of a couple of hours. Things showed up in San Diego in nice condition. The only downside was that I had to unpack so many boxes due to their excessive padding.

The second time, however, was not that great. We lost some items but they refused to pay for them even though we paid for extra insurance. The movers were not as efficient as the ones in Boston.

As this upcoming move is a local move, I thought that I would check out some cheap Chinese moving companies. Sure enough, they are a lot cheaper than others. But will they show up? - I asked on the phone a Chinese moving company referred to me by a friend, “what if you don’t show up on Saturday August 28? Should we sign some paperwork first?” he said, “Why would we not want to show up? We are running a business here. In fact, we don't have time to sign any paperwork." Then another friend told me that one of her former roommates did encounter that problem – the chinese moving company did not show up on the scheduled day. So I guess I will have to pay the extra money for an American moving company still.

Then of course the question is “what do we want to get rid of before moving?” Since Michael is the picky one with respect to furniture, I gave him a list of furniture stores recommended by other friends. Our current couch is the same one that we had when we were both graduate students in Boston area. I remember that it cost us only $60 to buy that used couch, sometime around 1997. Now for the 13 years since, we did look for couches but never could find anything that satisfies Michael. The fabric is tearing up so badly that I am sure that anyone who visits wonders why we are so cheap. My mom is a thrifty person, but even she mentioned several times that she did not see why we would still keep that old couch.

While the new house has all the appliances ready, it does not come with any window treatment. I went to Home Depot one day, hoping to decide on a kind of blinds. It had been a long time since I last went into a Home Depot store, as I am perhaps the extreme opposite of the “do-it-yourself” mentality. I know nothing about home improvement or gardening. It was overwhelming – I was shocked to see what one could buy in Home Depot. Literally one could build a house with stuff from Home Depot!

Needless to say, I was confused by the many varieties of blinds and shutters, and decided after a few minutes of browsing that perhaps this job should be left to Michael as well, in case he thinks that my taste is blinds is as bad as my taste in furniture.

I have to say that I really admire people who either have the courage to go through any home improvement projects or those who would even go through building up extensions of a house or a new house. After owning a house in San Diego for many years, I have remained as hopeless as ever about such things.

The weather in South San Francisco for the past few weeks has been atrocious – it’s so cold, windy and cloudy all the time that our heater still has to be turned on, in the middle of summer! For most people who work outside of this area, perhaps it’s okay to return to a house in this area after a whole day of seeing sunshine. However, since I have been working at home, it really has been dreadful. I can’t wait until we move to Palo Alto!