We moved Mike and Nancy on Saturday. Phase I (moving Mike) went smoothly.
We were just moving him from his apartment on the 7th floor to the one
almost directly below. The only hitch was that the auxilliary elevator had broken
that very morning, which made the trip four times as long as it should have been.
(“We apologize for any inconvenience,” the sign on the elevator said.) But with
help from me, Don, and Pat, it wasn’t so bad. Even Mike’s
secretary Audrey helped. (And they say it’s hard to find good help these days.)

Phase II did not go as smoothly. We backed the U-Haul truck into Nancy’s
driveway. Then we realized that we had to pull forward a few feet. So Pat
turned the key… nothing. The battery was dead. Not wanting to try
jumping the truck with my Sentra, we called U-Haul. They had nothing
available at all, naturally.

So until tomorrow night, Nancy is sleeping on her couch and fishing through
boxes for clean underwear. I guess it could have been worse. We could have
loaded up the truck and then discovered the problem.

Nevertheless, let us not be too quick to curse U-Haul and swear eternal fealty
to Ryder. Ever heard Sam’s story about the time he tried to
pick up a Ryder truck on the weekend? Closed on Sunday, the sign said —
right next to the sign with the company motto, We’re There When You Need Us!
“As it turned out,” says Sam, “they weren’t there when I needed them.
They could have at least taken that second sign down.”

Ah well, on to Good News and Bad News.

Good news, from AndrewSullivan.com:

So after a good long time at the helm, the old cleric finally decided to surrender
his last remaining fortress – the place where it had all begun not so very long ago.
What should we do with him? Capture? House arrest? Public humiliation? I think we
should let Pat Robertson get on with the rest of his life in peace, don’t you?

Bad news: looks like my good housing deal has fallen through, sort of.
I can live there for two or three months, but then I’d need to move again.
Hmmm… the price is right… but as we’ve seen, moving stinks. But on the
bright side, my longing to haggle over the rent (see sidebar) might become
a reality. Be careful what you wish for…

Great news: I’ve sold a short short story, “Watercooler”, to the Bay
Laurel Ebooks anthology,
“Why I Hate Aliens“.
Now we’re not talking a lot of money here… my story is only 1000 words, which means
that according to my calculations I’m entitled to roughly $0.04 per copy sold.
But the important thing is that I wrote something and
someone else liked it enough to publish.
So hooray for me! Besides, all the other books I’ve written in the last few years
have had titles like, “Lucent Computer Telephony Products Utilities User Guide” —
smashing blockbusters for which I have gone lamentably uncredited. High time
we turned that around.

Anyway, I’m feeling pretty good. And fired up, too. Time to turn in, and get
cracking on another story tomorrow night, right after work! No wimpy freewrites,
no journal, no tinkering with the broken HTML tutorial — no,
the real stuff. A bonafide story.

Except… I can’t. I’ll be helping Nancy move. Arrrggh.
We hates U-Haul. We hates them forever.