Furniture is Heavy

Well, the soreness continued the whole time, and I didn't jog very quickly (I estimate about a 10-minute mile, but I did manage to jog my whole 'long' route from the fitness center without stopping to rest! Woo-hoo! It's good to know that I can at least make it around that loop al one blow. Now I can see if I can improve my time!

Today I got a different sort of exercise.

If you read Ceej's journal, you know that she and David (her partner in marital bliss) recently bought a house. Well, CJ has been in her apartment for seven years, and David's been there with her for two years, and as you might guess, they have a lot of stuff. (Worse, their apartment is very conducive to packing stuff in little nooks and crannies, so it's actually got more stuff in it than it at first appears.) So, figuring that moving karma is always a good thing to have, I offered to help them move stuff this weekend.

I arrived around 12:30, helped them move some boxes over (they'd already moved many, many boxes of books over on their own). We had lunch at Hobees (they were nice enough to buy me both lunch and dinner in exchange for my muscle), and then David and I picked up the U-Haul truck for the furniture.

Here's what we moved:

1. 9 "blonde" wood bookcases, about 7 feet tall by 3 feet wide.
2. 2 "brunette" pressboard bookcases, slightly shorter and deeper.
3. 2 futon frames, 1 futon mattress, and 1 futon pad. (David pretty much moved the mattress on his own; it was very unwieldy, and adding more people didn't seem to help.)
4. 1 bureau.
5. 1 medium and 1 small CD rack.
6. 1 metal stereo rack.
7. 1 television (27-inch? Looked like it).
8. 1 stepladder.
9. 1 desk.
10. 1 medium fan.
11. Assorted pillows and blankets.
12. Somewhere between 20 and 30 boxes.

(Note to self: Remember always to design custom bookcases with moving them in mind.)

I did get a good idea for how to anchor bookcases to walls (which is a concern here in earthquake-prone California): Get screws and brackets and screw them to the wall. Easy to undo (especially with a power drill, as David demonstrated), and cheap to install. I will have to consider this.

CJ's friend BC (who also works at Apple, and whom I encounter periodically) came over mid-afternoon and helped us lug stuff, although he was wearing sandals which as he put it caused him to sometimes do "the inappropriate footwear dance".

We had dinner at a Palo Altan burger place called Taxi's, which was just what I needed, and we finished the moving around 9:30.

CJ and David's new house is quite nice, by Silicon Valley standards. I'd estimate that it is around 1500 square feet. They have both a lemon tree and an orange tree in their yard, as well as a front porch with a swing, and a large garage. And a bit of a yard out back, along with a spacious deck. They have easy access to the highway. Heck, go see some photos of it for yourself.

On the other hand - and also in keeping with the Bay Area - their yard is quite small, and the house is a one-story dwelling with no basement (no houses out here have basements, which I find strange; presumably it's for earthquake reasons). They're not in walking distance of anything, as far as I can tell. And, of course, the price tag on the house (or what I've deduced was the price tag) is pretty much ludicrous. You could buy five nice houses in Madison for that kind of money.

As I left, I congratulated them on their home, and said, "This is more money than I'll ever see." They scoffed at this, and David said that CJ started her job which basically paid for the house when she was older than I am. (I'm actually not sure this is true.) It's still pretty much insane, though.