This was moving weekend for me, so I didn't exactly "go out", but I promise there will be beer in this post. We got the key to the new apartment Friday evening and spent the next day and a half breaking our backs moving furniture, packing, loading, cleaning, and stopping to randomly use things up we'd never gotten around to using in the past 1-3 years (for instance, I rubbed on a sunless tanning sample I'd gotten for free over the internet several months ago). On Friday night, our friend Katie brought her truck and took a load of our stuff to the new apartment. Right afterward, these two Mormons packed a load into their SUV and brought it to our new apartment.
Now, the two Mormons are a married couple, though one of them is clearly a lesbian (as in, dyke hair cut, has a soundproofed room in her house full of percussion equipment, is on a lot of medication for depression - due to being married to a man and a member of a religion that teaches homosexuality is wrong? who knows - etc.). So on Saturday night, after Kristen and I worked on the arduous task of moving for about 12 hours, we needed another run with a truck to finish the process. We ran out of all other options besides taking the Mormons up on the very gracious offer they'd made the night before to borrow their friend's truck and help us again.
We were loading up as much as possible so that Kristen and I would, at most, only have to do one more run on Sunday with just her car. I was carrying out one of those three-high stacks of Wal-Mart Bins (well, that's what I call them. You know those bins college students tend to buy.) I had just spent a couple of hours taking everything out of these bins, thoroughly cleaning them, sorting what had been in there, throwing away or recycling what we didn't need, and organizing them. As we packed up the apartment, all the important things that didn't really have any other place to go (like a piggy bank full of coins, a plastic bag full of coins, book covers, a few books, several wires, etc.). I didn't really pay attention to what I was putting where since I knew I'd be unpacking all of these things pretty much right away. I ran out of duct tape right before taking this out to the car (with the other bin stacks - full of socks and underwear - we'd duct taped them shut, just in case). So I was carrying the stack out to Kristen's car, where they'd be safe, but, as with everything else I'd tried to put in Kristen's car, the Mormon man insisted I should put the stack in the truck bed. I explained the nature of the bins and their contents, but he was sure it would be fine. I said, "Okay, well let me at least go get a few towels to put around them." I did that, and then he stacked some cheap patio furniture on top of them as well.
On the way, in Kristen's car, Kristen almost T-boned a cop who forgot to change our light to red. Neither of us heard or saw him until it was almost too late. That was scary. Then I started talking about how the Mormons could tell a story in testimony meeting, which I realized would be the very next day (first Sunday of the month), that they had helped these two lesbians in need (one of whom is an ex-Mormon) move that weekend. They'd probably go on to say that, while neither of us is likely to call the missionaries to set a baptism date this weekend, they perhaps planted a seed that might one day grow.
When we got to the new apartment and started unloading everything, we realized that the top bin and some of the contents of the middle bin, were clean gone. The Mormons promised they wouldn't stop until they found our stuff, or what was left of it anyway. I said I'd prefer to go with them. Kristen was too depressed to go, and pulled me aside to let me know that there were a few sensitive items in there that made this tragedy particularly shitty.
The Mormons and I drove the truck back to their friend's house to drop off the truck and get their own vehicles. At this point I realized their testimony meeting might go a little differently, and I couldn't decide whether I wanted to ask them to say a prayer with me. I quit praying years ago, for mental health reasons as well as non-belief. I thought A-it's always possible God is real, is testing me, and wants me to pray, B-believing that prayer will help can help in a number of ways (especially if it turns out that existence is all in my "mind"), and C-they'd have a way better story in testimony meeting if I asked them to pray. So, on sort of a whim, I went ahead and asked, and we said a prayer at their house.
Mr. Mormon and I drove his car up and down the 30 mile drive, retracing his and his gay wife's steps, while the lesbian did the same in her motorcycle (oh yeah, she also drives a motorcycle). Kristen texted me to let me know they must have lost the lawn furniture as well as it wasn't at the apartment with the other stuff we'd unloaded and that she was just going to start drinking beer (see, beer, a Bud Lite I think). Well the Mormons had apparently decided it would be best to take the tollway instead of sticking to the slower roads. This turned out to be the problem as, after two hours of Mr. Mormon and I driving together with our eyes peeled and singing songs from Camelot and My Fair Lady together, the lesbian finally spotted some of my stuff right at the entrance they'd taken onto the tollway. Apparently accelerating to 70 mph causes sufficient lift to pluck patio furniture and a bin with probably 40 lbs of contents (remember all those coins) up and out of a truck bed despite being tied down.
We spent the next hour or two walking along part of the George Bush Tollway, picking up bits and pieces of books, movies, wires, a pill bottle, etc. A few things were salvaged, one of which, thankfully, was a library book. All told, I think this probably has cost Kristen and me around 150 bucks. It turns out that we lost all of our phone chargers ($50), the iPod shuffle connector ($30 at Wal-MArt, waiting for the $1.50 one from Ebay to arrive...), the wire that connects the printer to the CPU ($16.82 after tax), all that change, the sensiitve materials ($45), two remotes we really needed to replace anyway, all kinds of crap that doesn't matter too much, a dvd, a piggy bank with a good deal of sentimental value as well as change, and a lot of change on top of that, and hopefully nothing else we still haven't realized is missing. I've found a broken wire from Logitech and some broken piece of plastic with a Logitech logo, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the hell it might be. "God" bless those Mormons. They were so kind and generous to help us with that. Sadly though, we would have saved money had we hired movers to do the whole damn thing for us in one trip. Then again, we wouldn't have had this interesting life experience.
Speaking of which, when we got back to the apartment finally, delirious from the late night, never-wracking adventure, we compared the various things each of us had salvaged. Lesbian said, "Well, I think I had the best find." At this point, I figured she'd found the bag of change with the sensitive materials of which, strangely, no one seemed to have seen a trace. She continued, "I saw a brown bag in the middle of the road, and it looked heavy, so I just knew I had found that bag of change you guys mentioned (we didn't tell her about the other contents). I figured I had the find of the night. It was two lanes down, so I waited for traffic to clear, ran out and picked it up, and it was a bag of poop. Just crap. Diarrhea maybe. It...got on my glove."
I laughed my ass off, so the night wasn't a total loss.
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