Well, we are half way through emptying out the apartment and the folks I hired to help have not shown up - neither do they answer messages left on their machine. The company was sourced through UHaul - they maintain a list of local moving help - the company that was supposed to help us was Cheetah Landscaping - they were to have two guys here at noon today for two hours and our credit card was charged. Yeah, I know it says that they are a landscaping company but they provide moving muscle as well. The customer services guy at UHaul was very helpful and apologetic but he could not get through to them either - he also contacted every other local mover that he had ontheir list as well - no one was availble on such a short term basis. All he could do was cancel the order and reverse the credit card charge. Doesn't help el Capitan and I get the job done but... We are taking a break and posting messages on as many sites as possible about our negative experience with Cheetah - Better Business Bureau, Facebook, this blog, and I will be figuring out how to use my Twitter account - gotta love the social media environment we live in.

Wowzer! Barb got on the blog before me. She really is pissed.

What a day!

It all started during the wee small hours this morning when we set off to get the truck and bring it back to the laneway. This time there was a miracle and there was no one parked there visiting an old friend so we got to slide right in. Good thing too as during the night there were a whole bunch of loud noises in and about the apartment. Some sounded like the water hammer that occurs when the furnace starts off pumping hot water through the baseboard water heaters, but every once in a while there was a really loud sharp crash that would shake the apartment. If I was superstitious I would suspect that it was one or more of the spirits of the dead prisoners that were buried in Deadman's Island which is right off our balcony, making their presence felt. Other than that it's a mystery. I can't think of anything else that it might be. The building super thinks that it's ice but I don't see how that could happen.

The first part of today was supposed to be much easier than yesterday as the fellows that we have hired were supposed to do all of the heavy lifting to load the trailer. The trouble is they never showed up! Apparently they work for a company called CHEETAH LANDSCAPING that is actually located just down the road from us here at Regatta Point. Their main work this time of year is snow removal and I could understand that they might have been busy working on existing clients but were their delicate little fingers broken that they couldn't make a phone call and let us know that they weren't going to honour their contract?! Yes I put their company name in caps so everyone could see who they were. We strongly recommend that unless you have some strange need to be disappointed you should avoid dealing with these folks. We have filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau (boy that crowd doesn't make it easy either) and let U-Haul know that they shouldn't recommend them for moving assist with their clients.

So the work fell on us again to both load and unload. I got it finished loaded at about 1500 and then we drove off to the storage unit and squeezed everything back into our two units. It should have fit in easily right? Especially since it all came out of there and we didn't add to the pile. Snicker, snicker, snicker... What a joke! Quelle ammusant! After several false starts we eventually squeezed everything back into its place and locked things away. It's a funny feeling looking at all of our dirt bound worldly possessions and remembering how important they all seemed in the previous life and realizing how much they have begun to pale in comparison to our life aboard Nelleke. There are still some things that are important, in particular those with some familial significance, but by and large all those things that we spent our careers "collecting" are now just collecting dust in a locked storage unit.

Anyway, I might get to use the computer one more time tomorrow to blog before we shut down our wifi link. It is now 19h15 and to put it bluntly, thank the lord thunderin' that crap is over. Now I need a tub, a drink, and bed.