Writing While Moving

Writing While Moving

     “NOT ANOTHER ONE ALREADY,” says Douglas James very loud as he returns to his guard post. He looks out his front window as he walks over to his chair and sits down. After a few seconds, he rolls back in his chair to push a button to let them out.

     Douglas is tapping away on his laptop when he hears something on his cell phone that makes him put down his laptop and look at his cell phone. As he does this, he glances out his front window. “Three more. I’m going to be outside quite a while this time.”

     “I’m not surprised it’s this busy considering it’s a Wednesday,” says Douglas as he sees some more reasons why he has to stop writing. “But I didn’t expect it to be this busy.” He gets up and heads for his door. “I think they are doing it on purpose.”

     “Only two hours left until the end of my last shift here,” says Douglas. “And I have a bad feeling it’s going to be a very busy one. Douglas looks up at the camera on the ceiling above him. “A whole lot busier than it normally is for a Wednesday.”

##

     After Patrick James backs up to the opening garage, he and Douglas get out and goes into their old place. Just after they enter it, they stop. “The movers will be here in an hour and a half,” says Patrick. “We don’t have too much time before they get here.”

     Patrick talks to the movers as Douglas put one last box into his SUV. He gets into the passenger seat and keeps the door slightly ajar until Patrick gets in the driver’s side. “That didn’t take long,” says Douglas. Only about an hour to move out of our old place.”

     “We’re about halfway to our new house,” says Douglas while looking out his side-view mirror. “I still think that they are behind us. We would have caught up to them by now if they were ahead of us. Don’t see them behind us. They must be really far back there.”

     “There they are,” says Douglas as he points out the front window of his SUV. “I guess I was wrong about them being in front of us. With only a few miles to our new house, they have been ahead of us this whole time.”

##

     Too tired after moving to the new house to get any writing done yesterday, thinks Douglas as he fights to keep his eyes open while Patrick drives them back to their old place. And I have a feeling that I’m not going to get anything written today either.

     Patrick is almost constantly talking. Mostly at the other drivers on their way back to their old place. But he’s also talking a lot about his new house. And how many more trips that it’s going to take before they out of this old place once and for all.

     “We need to get as much as we can on this trip,” says Patrick after he opens the back of his SUV and starts to walk back into their old place. Once he enters through their garage, he goes to their kitchen to start moving what is still left there.

     “I’m getting tired already,” says Patrick from a folding chair in his old garage next to Douglas. Patrick continues to stare at what they have put in their SUV too. “I wanted to get as much as we can out of here. But I have changed my mind.”

##

     Douglas opens his laptop and waits for the latest Short Story he has been working on to come up on his monitor. It barely appears when Patrick enters. “I know we have a lot to do today. I just wanted to check to see where I was on this Short Story.”

     “Does Dish know how much longer it’s going to be before they are finished here,” asks Douglas after Patrick comes in from talking to them about it. “The sooner they are finished the sooner I can contact Cox about dropping down to just internet access.”

     After Douglas taps the Submit button on his cell phone, he returns his phone to the home screen. Then he taps the button on the side to turn it off. “Our cable service should have been eliminated when we got Dish earlier. But now it’s official. We only have internet with Cox.”

     “I wanted to go back to our old place to get another load too,” says Douglas as he flops down in his recliner in his bedroom exhausted. “But we just had too much that needed to get done today at our new house to do it.”

##

     “The weather isn’t a big problem so far,” says Douglas after he and Patrick get into his SUV. Patrick sets the alarm to their new house before he backs out of their driveway. “It’s only lightly raining right now. But it is supposed to get a lot worse later today.”

     Patrick taps slightly on his brakes when he starts to hydroplane. “I don’t want to go back to our old place in this weather either. But we have no choice. After all, we only have a week left to get our stuff out of there by the end of the month.”

     Slowly, Patrick backs their SUV into the driveway of their old place. After he stops, Patrick and Douglas get out of it. While Douglas opens the back of his SUV, Patrick heads inside. “I don’t want to be here any longer than we need to be today.”

     Douglas glances over at Patrick and smiles. Patrick is leaning forward with his hand gripped tightly against the steering wheel of their SUV. He looks over at Douglas with squinting eyes for only a second. Then he returns to driving in the rain which is extremely heavy right now.

####

     It’s not raining too hard today. But it is still raining steadily as Patrick and Douglas head back to their old place to get another load. The weather isn’t their main problem, though. It’s all the other drivers on the road right now. And there is a lot of them.

     Patrick quickly swerves their SUV into the center lane when the traffic in front of them slows down. “Why are there so many drivers in my way today? And why do they keep slowing down to a crawl? I know the weather is bad today too. But it’s not that bad.”

     Douglas glances into an almost completely full back end of his SUV just before he closes the fifth door to it. Then he gets in the passenger seat next to Patrick. “We got a lot out of here today,” says Douglas as they leave their old house again.

     As Patrick and Douglas are heading for their new house, the rain starts to get bad again. Not as bad as it has been the last two days. But it’s still bad. “This rain is supposed to be gone by the time we get back to our new house,” says Douglas.

##

     Looking in each room of the old place, Douglas sighs deeply and for a long time. “I know you want everything out of here by this weekend,” says Douglas. “But I don’t think we can do that. We still have a lot of moving we still need to do.”

     “I know that you want at least a couple of days to clean up this place,” says Douglas as he places another large box into the back of his mostly full SUV. “But I’m not even sure that we can get everything out of here by the end of the month.”

     It has been over a week since I have been able to do any writing except for my blog entries. And I have only been doing them, so I don’t have another missed blogging day, thinks Douglas as they head back to their new house.

     “There is only one thing I can think of to get this move over with by this weekend,” says Patrick. “And neither one of us wants to do it. But we may have no other choice. Especially, if you are right about us finishing it by the end of this month.”

##

     Patrick and Douglas are on the road again. But they aren’t heading back to their old place. They have just arrived at U-Haul to pick up a truck. So that they can get everything at once. “I know you don’t like this either,” says Patrick. “But what else can we do?”

     Douglas is in his SUV following Patrick in a rented U-Haul truck. “With both my SUV and the U-Haul truck, we should be able to get most of what we have left at our old place. But I don’t think that we will get all of it.”

     After getting everything, we wanted to get on the truck and in my SUV into the garage we started loading them up. Douglas begins with his SUV. Once he gets that finished with very little room to see out the back, he helps to load up the U-Haul truck too.

     Once again, Douglas is following Patrick. And after getting stopped at almost every light on Colburn Rd, he finally catches up to him. After he does that, he has a few problems keeping up with him. But he doesn’t have too many more following him back to their new house.

##

     Douglas leans back in his recliner in his bedroom thinking about what is going to happen today. After yesterday with the U-Haul, we were going to take today off. But we still have at least one more day, probably two, before we have everything out of our old place.

     Patrick and Douglas are on their way back to their old place. Hopefully, for the last day of moving. They know they still have quite a bit to get out. And they think they can do it in one trip. But once they get there, they aren’t so sure about this.

     After moving things around so that Patrick can see out the rearview mirror, Douglas closes his fifth door. He gets into the passenger seat next. “It’s not everything,” says Douglas. “But what little is left here, we should be able to get it all out by Tuesday.”

     “Now all we need to do is clean up our old place,” says Patrick as he flops down in his recliner in his new living room. “And that should only take a day to do. After the last few days, I think we both need to take a day off.”

##

     With only two days left before the end of the month, we really need to go back to our old place. But once again, the weather is against us. It is another heavy rainstorm. We have no choice but to go back there. But we aren’t there for very long.

     It has only taken us a couple of hours to finish taking almost the last load to our new house. About the only things left are the cleaning supplies we need to clean up the place, and the few things that won’t fit into this load.

     It’s the last day for us to be out of our old place. We figured it will take us most of the day to clean it up. But we are sure we can do it by the end of the day. It doesn’t take us that long to do it after all.

     We have turned in our keys and the garage remote for our old place. And we are now on our way to our new house. We’ll be back there about one-thirty our time. That should give me plenty of time to finish writing my WDC Short Story for this month.

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