luggin' 'eavy things about
Depending, this blog may be supersized.
The truth of the matter is that, at this moment, my back does not hurt. This has much to do with three Advils (taken at my wife's assistance) and three beers (drank against my wife's protest), but regardless, the back is not hurting.
Let me attempt an explanation. The truth of the matter is this: the worst thing you can do after sitting in a U-haul for a week is to move in. Now, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying that a gracious period of time was spent NOT moving and then quite suddenly, I'm past Connecticutt and it is time to move everything inside of a 26x10x8 space up a staircase and into my apartment. What makes this perhaps worse is that said staircase, or more pr0perly staircases, leave me with a bitter choice of avenues for entrance into my apartment. One staircase, the back one, is about three feet wide, and though taller than the front, also includes two quick turns so that earlier today... oh but I'm getting ahead of myself. The front staircase is by far the more accessable. It has but one turn, it is a little wider than three feet, but it carries the obvious limitation of being only 5'8 at its shortest point. When we first moved in, we were unable to move a couch up the front stair, and found the back stair completely impossible due to the double turn. Either of these turns made employing the dolly nigh impossible the entire day long. Everything had to be lifted by hand, and in many cases, carried half way up the stair where tetris could be played while holding up the weight of various pieces of furniture. In the case of the couch, and a beautiful bookshelf, we lost this game of tetris.
Most of you who helped me move (Jake, Corbin, Kyle, and Lenny) will probably remember that my desk (yes, Kyle the desk we both hate) broke just before we put it in the U-Haul. Therefore, waiting to be taken care of were a desk, a bookshelf, and a couch. The moving expert who came out to help us in our plight (mainly because of the money we offered, but still with a never-say-die attitude) told me of a place that accepted used furniture while he lowered our couch off our roof where it had failed to fit through a window, and so off we went.
Jeff, the man who refinishes old wooden furniture, was only too happy to accept our couch and our bookshelf. Hell, he even took the broken desk, which, believe me if you'd seen the desk, you'd agree, was pure mercy. We traded them for a beautiful mahogony desk and a good deal on our next purchase with him.
As many of you know, Lynn and I are married, and with marriage comes the pitter patter of little patterns or namely china, and thus, we decided that our next purchase ought to be a china cabinet, which Jeff was willing to sell to us at an incredibly discounted rate. We bought the cabinet and waited for them to bring it around.
Now, mind you. I'm no stranger to heavy lifting. I've seen it done. But for the past few days, I have been the brute force behind the larger boxes, the larger pieces of furniture, the larger stuff, to put it bluntly, and every day I have felt the pressure of my spine just behind my right eye more and more, but today the charade of my physical strength finally ended.
We brought the cabinet up the front stair. It didn't fit.
The cabinet is large. It's made of real wood, not pressboard, so that takes off a bit of its weight but still...that's wood. It weights a lot. It stands 5 1/2' tall. Its a little over four feet long. It's big, that's all I'm saying.
We flipped the cabinet around and re-tried the front stair.
Massachusetts weather isn't like other weather. I suppose I could write a whole blog about humidity and how it is used erroneously in conjunction with temperature, but I won't here. Suffice to say that when humidity is high, no matter what the temperature, you sweat. And while I never realized this about myself in California, I now know that when I sweat, I sweat like a pig. After lifting that china cabinet twice I looked as though I'd just won a cannon ball contest. My hands could get no grip. My head ached from dehydration.
So we took the china cabinet down and brought it around to the back.
The deceptive thing about the back stair is that it seems to have a seven or eight foot of height clearance. But as you begin to bring things higher and higher on the step the inclination is to bring them up, and soon you're clearance has run out. But still worse is the idea of getting a two foot wide piece of furniture stuck in a three foot space. The man at its head is no longer any help. The man at the bottom can only pull. Somewhere an intermediate hand is needed to guide the furniture from one supporting step down to the next, but this intermediate hand must do so in a space of...oh about a foot...and then they must lift. lIft with your legs? There's not enough room to bend your legs, and the man at the bottom, holding most of the weight, well...his strength isn't going to hold out forever you know. You have to get down there. You have to get your sweaty little mittens under this giant and clumsy hunk of oak, and you have to set the legs evenly down onto the next step so that all the weight isn't on a single leg. That leg might break and then you'd own the furniture whether you could get it up into your apartment or not. So you brave the move, sink yourself into the pocket space between oak and wall. Meanwhile, your partner cannot see you. He only know that the farther he moves the furniture over to the right, the better chance he'll have of navigating the double turn that only the mind of a puritan monster could devise. So he pushes the furniture to the right, as hard as he can, to jolt the mass into moving. But as it moves it shrinks the space between the furniture and the wall--that space which you occupy--down to a few inches. You suck in your breath for the space and attempt to lift at least half the mass with the first joint of you fingers, which, you may remember, are slick with sweat--the same sweat that is now dripping down into your eyes, stinging them.
To tell you the truth, when we got the furniture unstuck from that jam, that was it. When you're lifting heavy things, the last thing you want to do is lift them when you're tired. You get stupid. You overestimate how much force you could put behind you and how much load you can bear. Once we were unstuck, there was no way we were going to get the china cabinet up the back step...
...but I was too stupid from momentary exhaustion to realize that. So we moved that hunk of wood back in and got it stuck again. This time, however, the front end of the operation was being managed by Jeff's assistant who had come to help me move. And he was smart too. Rather than lifting the cabinet up just a little for each stair, he lifted it as high as it would go and then pushed it out, onto me, so that I was not lifting one end of the cabinet--oh no!--I had the left side of the cabinet braced against my chest pointing straight down toward the ground. I was lifting the entire cabinet by its end.
Anyway, I hefted the thing, feeling this bit of a pang in my back and got it to the ground, and when I set it down, I realized that my legs felt just a little more rubbery than they're supposed too. But anyway, three beers, three advil and I'm doing better.
The truth of the matter is that, at this moment, my back does not hurt. This has much to do with three Advils (taken at my wife's assistance) and three beers (drank against my wife's protest), but regardless, the back is not hurting.
Let me attempt an explanation. The truth of the matter is this: the worst thing you can do after sitting in a U-haul for a week is to move in. Now, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying that a gracious period of time was spent NOT moving and then quite suddenly, I'm past Connecticutt and it is time to move everything inside of a 26x10x8 space up a staircase and into my apartment. What makes this perhaps worse is that said staircase, or more pr0perly staircases, leave me with a bitter choice of avenues for entrance into my apartment. One staircase, the back one, is about three feet wide, and though taller than the front, also includes two quick turns so that earlier today... oh but I'm getting ahead of myself. The front staircase is by far the more accessable. It has but one turn, it is a little wider than three feet, but it carries the obvious limitation of being only 5'8 at its shortest point. When we first moved in, we were unable to move a couch up the front stair, and found the back stair completely impossible due to the double turn. Either of these turns made employing the dolly nigh impossible the entire day long. Everything had to be lifted by hand, and in many cases, carried half way up the stair where tetris could be played while holding up the weight of various pieces of furniture. In the case of the couch, and a beautiful bookshelf, we lost this game of tetris.
Most of you who helped me move (Jake, Corbin, Kyle, and Lenny) will probably remember that my desk (yes, Kyle the desk we both hate) broke just before we put it in the U-Haul. Therefore, waiting to be taken care of were a desk, a bookshelf, and a couch. The moving expert who came out to help us in our plight (mainly because of the money we offered, but still with a never-say-die attitude) told me of a place that accepted used furniture while he lowered our couch off our roof where it had failed to fit through a window, and so off we went.
Jeff, the man who refinishes old wooden furniture, was only too happy to accept our couch and our bookshelf. Hell, he even took the broken desk, which, believe me if you'd seen the desk, you'd agree, was pure mercy. We traded them for a beautiful mahogony desk and a good deal on our next purchase with him.
As many of you know, Lynn and I are married, and with marriage comes the pitter patter of little patterns or namely china, and thus, we decided that our next purchase ought to be a china cabinet, which Jeff was willing to sell to us at an incredibly discounted rate. We bought the cabinet and waited for them to bring it around.
Now, mind you. I'm no stranger to heavy lifting. I've seen it done. But for the past few days, I have been the brute force behind the larger boxes, the larger pieces of furniture, the larger stuff, to put it bluntly, and every day I have felt the pressure of my spine just behind my right eye more and more, but today the charade of my physical strength finally ended.
We brought the cabinet up the front stair. It didn't fit.
The cabinet is large. It's made of real wood, not pressboard, so that takes off a bit of its weight but still...that's wood. It weights a lot. It stands 5 1/2' tall. Its a little over four feet long. It's big, that's all I'm saying.
We flipped the cabinet around and re-tried the front stair.
Massachusetts weather isn't like other weather. I suppose I could write a whole blog about humidity and how it is used erroneously in conjunction with temperature, but I won't here. Suffice to say that when humidity is high, no matter what the temperature, you sweat. And while I never realized this about myself in California, I now know that when I sweat, I sweat like a pig. After lifting that china cabinet twice I looked as though I'd just won a cannon ball contest. My hands could get no grip. My head ached from dehydration.
So we took the china cabinet down and brought it around to the back.
The deceptive thing about the back stair is that it seems to have a seven or eight foot of height clearance. But as you begin to bring things higher and higher on the step the inclination is to bring them up, and soon you're clearance has run out. But still worse is the idea of getting a two foot wide piece of furniture stuck in a three foot space. The man at its head is no longer any help. The man at the bottom can only pull. Somewhere an intermediate hand is needed to guide the furniture from one supporting step down to the next, but this intermediate hand must do so in a space of...oh about a foot...and then they must lift. lIft with your legs? There's not enough room to bend your legs, and the man at the bottom, holding most of the weight, well...his strength isn't going to hold out forever you know. You have to get down there. You have to get your sweaty little mittens under this giant and clumsy hunk of oak, and you have to set the legs evenly down onto the next step so that all the weight isn't on a single leg. That leg might break and then you'd own the furniture whether you could get it up into your apartment or not. So you brave the move, sink yourself into the pocket space between oak and wall. Meanwhile, your partner cannot see you. He only know that the farther he moves the furniture over to the right, the better chance he'll have of navigating the double turn that only the mind of a puritan monster could devise. So he pushes the furniture to the right, as hard as he can, to jolt the mass into moving. But as it moves it shrinks the space between the furniture and the wall--that space which you occupy--down to a few inches. You suck in your breath for the space and attempt to lift at least half the mass with the first joint of you fingers, which, you may remember, are slick with sweat--the same sweat that is now dripping down into your eyes, stinging them.
To tell you the truth, when we got the furniture unstuck from that jam, that was it. When you're lifting heavy things, the last thing you want to do is lift them when you're tired. You get stupid. You overestimate how much force you could put behind you and how much load you can bear. Once we were unstuck, there was no way we were going to get the china cabinet up the back step...
...but I was too stupid from momentary exhaustion to realize that. So we moved that hunk of wood back in and got it stuck again. This time, however, the front end of the operation was being managed by Jeff's assistant who had come to help me move. And he was smart too. Rather than lifting the cabinet up just a little for each stair, he lifted it as high as it would go and then pushed it out, onto me, so that I was not lifting one end of the cabinet--oh no!--I had the left side of the cabinet braced against my chest pointing straight down toward the ground. I was lifting the entire cabinet by its end.
Anyway, I hefted the thing, feeling this bit of a pang in my back and got it to the ground, and when I set it down, I realized that my legs felt just a little more rubbery than they're supposed too. But anyway, three beers, three advil and I'm doing better.
posted by Monstro D. Whale at
7:00 PM
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