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| 1st leg of the trip. Waiting to fly out of Seattle to Detroit MI. |
My brother passed away suddenly back in March and we've been dealing with his things. He has (had) 4 storage lockers scattered about the country and Canada. One in Vancouver WA, which we dealt with after he passed away when we went to clear out his apartment. One in San Jose, not sure when we will get to that. The one in Canada my mom will have the contents shipped to me and put into storage here so I can spend a month or two sorting out without stress and then the one in Maine. Which is where my mom and I flew the end of June to deal with.
Oy!
What could have taken a day if we had 4 people took 2 days as there was me. My mom is almost 80 years old and no way was I going to let her do a lot of the heavy stuff. It was almost all heavy.
Would not have been so bad, but none of the charities did pick up, so hubby arranged a pickup truck for me from U-Haul Moving & Storage of Arrow Hart (15 stars for service and all, they were wonderful) in Brunswick ME.
We were able to take two loads of stuff to Goodwill the 1st day. The 2nd batch was mostly books, records and several other boxes of heavy stuff. I could barely move the flat truck. Couldn't push it, took me awhile to pull it off the 3rd floor, down the elevator and out to the loading dock (the storage place is in an old factory that was converted into shops and such. Rally cool building). I think it may have weighed somewhere over 500 pounds or so.
BTW, have I mentioned I usually use 2 canes to get around and had scored a rollator to take with me?
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| Rollator rigged to carry my canes and trekking poles. This thing was a lifesaver on this trip. Couldn't have survived without it. |
Had originally planned on using the U-haul the one day, but the Universe reached out and 2X4'd me in the head that I would be needing it the 2nd day.
I'd locked the keys to the rental car in the storage unit.
SIGH!!!!!!
So hubby had previously notified them I might be using it a 2nd day so getting the extension was a breeze. As we'd discovered we didn't have the car keys, mom had to get back into the truck (she's shorter than me and I was having slight difficulty). So one of the nice young men there found a step ladder she was able to use to get in.
It was a good thing we had the truck the 2nd day, we filled it completely with the rest of the stuff to donate.
What was left was a lot of magazines, old newspapers, computer floppies, empty CD cases, lots of audio tapes, lots of odds and sods that just weren't worth sorting thru, and years and years of old business papers and such. Into the dumpster it all went.
Both mom and I were sad, tossing what's left of someone's life into a dumpster. But what could be put to good use went to someone who can get it to people who need it. We found a few things of his we kept. His old high school and junior high yearbooks, a few things he'd made when in grade school out of clay. A lot of his boy scout pins and such. A couple photo albums and some photos.
I will blog about the rest of the trip later. We were able to take a couple days to get out and about to see a bit of Maine (and eat lobster hehehehehe).
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