Rant #3,216: The Gift

Yesterday was an interesting day for myself and my family in our quest to relocate as quickly as possible.

We paid our security deposit and first month’s rent, and we went inside the apartment again.

It is still being worked on, but my wife and I were able to get a better read on what we need to make these new living quarters perfect for us.

Again, we have about half the room we once had, so all those garbage bags you saw in the photo accompanying this Rant yesterday will certainly be doubled or even tripled in due time.

(And yes, the garbage men picked up every last drop of them, with plenty more to come.)

We got, and paid for, apartment insurance, which is a requirement of our lease. I found out that most of the major insurance companies offer this to customers, but in various degrees or levels, so I had to go outside our unusual insurance company to find something that fit our needs.

We still have to schedule a moving company to help us cart over the bigger pieces, and we are going to need boxes, boxes and more boxes to store away the stuff that they can transport to the new residence and that we can also get over there ourselves.

My wife’s brother can get plenty of boxes for us, as he works in a supermarket, so we should have plenty of boxes by the time we need them, a time which is coming up really soon.

I still have to call Verizon to transfer over our TV and Internet, and we are seriously thinking about dumping our landline phone. We rarely use it anymore, and I think we can save a little money by getting rid of it.

And also yesterday, I finally put my remaining comic book collection into storage boxes that we already had, and lacking anywhere to put them, I had to put the three larges boxes of comics in the garage.

My childhood is in those three boxes.

I started collecting comic books when I was about three years old, taught myself to read with them—hence, my 12th grade reading level in first grade—and I collected them seriously until I was about 18, when I gave up that pursuit and moved over to serious record collecting.

Over the years, I have sold about one-third of what I had—the pricier comics in my collection—and now I have the remaining 1,000 or so issues, mainly DC and some Marvel.

You might have seen that I put up the comics for sale on Facebook and elsewhere, $500 for the entire lot—you get the bad and the good, but it is well worth it at about 50 cents an issue, because many of the comics are worth much more than that individually, but I want to move them—every one of them—as a set, and close out my connection to the collection for good.

I hope someone is interested, because it remains a really nice collection, and I guess I can be a little wiggly on the price if necessary.

And then we have my records, all 10,000 of them, and what are we going to go with them?

One solution is a curio cabinet that we are taking from my mother’s house, which should hold a lot of them. It is a really nice piece, and it just needs to be sanded down and repainted, and I have asked out local handyman to do that, and he said he could in about two weeks, so that cabinet should be one solution.

But it won’t fit everything—and I am looking at ways to get every one of those 10,000 records into the house in the limited space we have.

And yes, we are looking into renting a storage area in a local facility, because beyond the records and the comics, we have so much stuff that we cannot throw out but that we can’t get rid of, like photo albums that go back years and years and years.

So yes, things are still a bit of a mess.

But in all the chaos—I haven’t even told you the whole story about what is going on here—there is a lot of sanity and a definite direction and an end goal.

To get to that end goal, we still have a lot of things that we still have to do to get things just right for the move and the new residence.

By Christmas, we should have everything the way we want it, or at least very close to the way we want it.

And let me tell you, that is the best holiday present my family and I could possibly give ourselves.