A Week of Hard Work

The big move is getting close. Meredith, Mike and I drove a big truck full of boxes and furniture to the cabin last week. Jake drove up from Tallahassee a couple of days before we arrived. It was good to have the entire family together.

It was week of hard work unpacking and trying to get organized.

I don’t know where we are going to put everything. I fear we were too optimistic or, perhaps, materialistic in deciding what to bring and what to discard when we packed for the move. We probably will have to dump more stuff after we move in. Those choices will be more difficult because we have already culled the easy stuff. Maybe the singing turtle will have to go after all.

For the time being boxes and possessions that don’t fit into the house are going into the garage. The garage is a 24 by 48 foot building. We call it the garage but over half of it was intended to be open space for my eventual workshop.

At this point there is anything but open space in the garage. Aside from all the overflow boxes from the cabin, the garage holds a dune buggy, the engine for a 1968 Dodge Charger, a transmission for Jake’s old truck, my large stack of bass amplifiers, acetylene tanks and a MIG welder, a large sandblasting cabinet that Jake built, cut lumber that we are drying, a sickle bar mower, a lawn mower, a giant mounted Mule Deer head, a table saw, Mike’s extensive beer bottle collection, my weights and dumbbells, and an endless array of tool boxes, hand and power tools, and garden tools.

Jake and I struggled mightily to bring some order to the chaos. We built shelves to store the tool boxes, chain saws, and other assorted hardware.

The number of hand tools that we have accumulated over the years is ridiculous. I discovered I own eight claw hammers. I think I counted a bazillion screw drivers, box wrenches, crescent wrenches, and socket wrenches. How in the world did I end up with seven axes and three machetes?

Jake mounted 18 feet of peg board across the north end of the garage, and I started to mount hand tools on the board. If you have never mounted assorted hand tools on a peg board, I will tell you that it is not a job for anyone who is even slightly anal retentive. Metal mounting pegs are used to affix tools to a peg board. The pegs come in assorted shapes and sizes. Some pegs are a straight piece of metal that projects from the peg board. I discovered that the straight pegs come in several different lengths. Other pegs are hooks. They too come in various sizes. Complicating the matter further, not all hooks are rounded; some are flat-bottomed, and some are v-shaped. Deciding what shape and size of peg to use for each tool and where to place the tools on the board is a painfully deliberative process if your mother over-emphasized toilet training as a child. I still can’t decide whether pliers should go with crescent wrenches or screwdrivers. Hammers and mallets clearly belong in the same genus, but I’m not sure whether saws are related to tin snips.

Then there are the combination pegs. These are designed to hold several similar items, like screw drivers. Naturally, you want to place screw drivers from the same set together. The problem arises when you discover the number of screw drivers in a set is more or less than the number of holders in the peg. Even worse is when one of the screw drivers in a set is missing. Let me put it this way: I would not assign the task of mounting tools on a peg board to someone with a full blown case of OCD. I can tell that once I move to the cabin, I will spend many an hour arranging and rearranging that peg board.

After supper, in the cool of the evening, we relaxed on the front porch drinking, talking, gazing at the mountains, and watching for the fireflies. Meredith kept her eyes out for deer crossing our field. She gets more excited when she sees one than Darwin did when he discovered saltwater iguanas in the Galapagos. I did not have the heart to tell her that deer are so common in the area that they are reckoned as garden pests.

Slowly but surely we are making progress in getting moved. One more truck load, and our house in Clearwater will be empty. If everything goes well, we will take up permanent residence in Fannin County is three weeks. How scary is that?