pocket full o' posies

I’ll begin today’s post with a quick word of warning: Do NOT use Available Movers. Under no circumstances is this acceptable. I will offer a brief chronology of events:

June 15 – Place the order over the phone for the movers, and while they can’t guarantee a move-in date, they CAN guarantee that, after our stuff is put in storage that you can set a specific date for delivery. I set up the delivery date for 7/14, and the Lion family plans around this date, taking off work so that they can help us unpack.


July 3 – Movers show up two hours late. Sketchiness regarding the tip.


July 11 – I email to confirm the delivery date, receive a response saying “there are no guaranteed delivery dates.


July 12 – I send a strongly worded email stating that I was guaranteed I could set a specific date for delivery after my furniture has been stored. Later that day, I call the dispatcher and plead my case. He calls me a liar, tells me I didn’t read my contract well enough and “tough cookies” to put it nicely. I state that it’s a shady business that guarantees something over the phone, doesn’t put it in the contract as per our conversation, and then claims that the error is entirely on the consumer’s part. After an hour long fight over the phone, I’m told that the furniture will show up not on Saturday as originally stated, but Monday or Tuesday. This is, of course, distressing considering the Lions took off Monday to help us move and that if it takes longer, Erin and I have to leave Indiana on Wednesday for Tony and Rene’s wedding.


July 13 – a package arrives in the mail at the Lion’s house from my family with some “essentials” including Ziploc bags, paper plates, plastic utensils, garbage bags, etc. Now I know how Moses felt when mana fell from heaven. And everyone knows how much I like Moses.


July 14 – move in to our new apartment in Indiana. The Lions arrive later in the day to “rough it” with us. We have two air mattresses and an odd assortment of objects. We go food shopping and get some food essentials. SAMs club doesn’t accept Visa. But the best moment of the night is: 9pm, it’s starting to get dark in the apartment. I flip on the light switch, pause, look up, and notice: there are no overhead lights in the apartment. Walmart yields us 4 lamps for $50, but by the time we get home, Pete and Lynn are reading Chinese Food menus by the light of a laptop. Charlie, Erin and I huddle in the kitchen and put together the lamps. Charlie then takes the Styrofoam and cardboard boxes, lashes them together with tape, and fashions a fantastic card table for us.


July 15 – a phone call to the movers reveals that they won’t be showing until Thursday. The Lions and I head out to the historic “Battle of Tippecanoe” grounds and check out the place where the last hope for a Native American Confederacy died at the hands of president-to-be William Henry Harrison. From the beginning of the day, Charlie has stated he wants to visit “Hobby Lobby.” However, Hobby Lobby is the closest store to our apartment, so we decide we’ll save it for last. So every step of the way, we say “alright, Hobby Lobby next. Oh wait! Can we go to that discount furniture store?” And each time, Charlie gets pissed, wondering why we can’t go to Hobby Lobby. “How about Barnes and Noble? Hobby Lobby next!” By the end of the day, Charlie is just randomly shouting “HOBBY LOBBY!” at the top of his lungs. So its 5:30 and we finally make it to Hobby Lobby… to find it closed. Fortunately for us, as we would have felt awful if this wasn’t the case, but they were closed on Sundays.


July 16 – The Lion family takes off, leaving Erin and I with our plastic dishware, our blowup mattress, and our laptop. We spend most of the day running errands. We have a delightful meal at IHOP, Erin’s favorite pancake house, we also get cable/internet (though we don’t have a TV).


July 17 – As I said, Erin and I have been a little strapped for cash, and most of our DVDs are boxed. We can’t purchase anything new and we’ve been watching the same episodes of The Office, season 2 and NewsRadio season 1 for the past two weeks. I swear to Erin that if our furniture hasn’t arrived by the time we get back from Tony’s wedding, that I’m buying us Scrubs, season 1. We’ve been holding on to two Netflix movies for the past month, so each night, Erin and I watch one of them: Monday night it was “The Godfather.” Tuesday night it was “The Godfather Part II.” A phone call to the movers yields no response. I briefly considered rethinking my life choices and joining the mafia, but thought better of it.


Tune in tomorrow for: Anton and Rene’s wedding, our return to Indiana, and more moving disasters.

Celebrate good times... for a price!

Our quest for wedding locations continued in Deep Creek, MD. Erin and I were at that point in Day 6 of our interstate sojourn. While the car is packed, it is not really packed with “useful” things at the moment. We’ve got a bag of clothes, a laundry basket of shoes, a desktop computer, two laptops, Erin’s paintings, three potted plants, wedding information and magazines, file crates, an inflatable mattress, and a desk organizer/paper rack. In other words, anything that didn’t fit in a box, plus a snack bag and a cooler. Also, the expense of the move had kept Erin and I on a tight budget, so we’d been living off of stolen gatorade’s from my parent’s house and whatever stale chips we still had left from our last trip to BJ’s wholesale club a month prior.

The wedding search has been entertaining, but trying. The locations we found were all nice, but nothing was “perfect.” Maryland ultimately proved to be too expensive and too far away to be practical. While some of them were marvelously beautiful, others were just simply not what we were looking for.

ZOOM IN: The Wisps. Erin’s parents, Erin, and myself stroll in at 10:45 for our 11:00 appointment. Keep in mind that we have another appointment at 1:00, so we only have an hour before we need to pick up Charlie and get back on the road. One old lady at the front desk making nice with a pair of customers. I’m fine with that, except that she completely ignored us for 20 minutes before someone else finally showed up and called the office to find Wendy or whoever. 15 minutes later, no one shows. So I start pacing. 11:30 rolls around and I decide I’m just going to walk back into the office and find someone. I interrupt a wedding coordinator whose on the phone, who personally goes on a quest for this person. 50 minutes after our appointment was supposed to start, a woman comes out, guffaws at me as the groom, then proceeds to show us the equivalent of an airplane hanger. “How many people do you have?” she asks. “We’re not sure, anywhere from 60 to 100.” “Okay, well we can set up some partitions. The cost of the room is about $2000.” “Do we only pay 1/8 of that if that’s how much of the room we’re going to use?”

Anyway, this whole process has been mildly disconcerting and I’m not sure if it’s just me. The $25k to $35k for a single day gives me a queasy feeling. I’m not one to go all conspiracy theory, but is there a reason that it costs so much? I mean, if I took all these people out to dinner and put it on my credit card, it wouldn’t cost nearly that much. But there are so many hidden fees and nothing is the same from one venue to another so it’s impossible to know what you’re getting into. For example: venue A costs $2000 to walk in the door, but they include tables and chairs, but no linens. Venue B costs $500 to walk in, but doesn’t include service fees which is 25% of your total bill. However, they provide linens (but only for 8-man round tables) but charges a tax. Venue C requires your second born (the more likely of your children to be “planned”) and a minimum of $6k spent. But that’s only on Sundays. On Saturdays they need three locks of hair from a vestal virgin and a $9k minimum.

So someone please explain to me when weddings became so commercialized. This has been eating at me for a while because it seems ridiculous that a young couple who can’t have much money to begin with could be saddled with such immense debt for a single ceremony/party. As I understood it, finances are one of the top reasons people get divorced. So why put so much financial pressure on a pair of newlyweds. Or rather, why do vendors seem to think its okay to gouge those which need to be gouged least. $25k could pay for couples therapy for at LEAST five years.

And if the general rule of thumb is to purchase a gift that equals the amount the couple spent on you for you to be there, do people realize that their gift should cost around $250? It’s just ridiculous all the way around.

However, through this whole wedding debacle, I think I’ve brainstormed a solution to the “gay marriage” debate. Much like the argument for legalization of marijuana, the solution is so simple: tax marriages. This way, if people have a moral problem with it (shame on you… judge not) they can at least make money off it. And not only gay couples, because that’s stupid. All couples get taxed! Honestly, they’re charging you for it one way or another. And people get over moral scruples REAL quick when there’s money involved (see: prohibition, the drug trade, oil, dog fighting). So let’s make this happen! MORE TAXES!!! FREEDOM FOR ALL! Let there be peace in our time!

Tune in tomorrow for: The moving debacle, “Throwdown” with Aaron “Bobby Flay” D, and how to see in the dark.

Jersey

After bidding farewell to Casa DeRosa, Erin and I headed south to the fabled land of sour milk and rancid honey: New Jersey. As you might expect, we hit traffic. I know you all expect me to rant about New Jersey right now, but I won’t because it’s too easy. I will say only this: New Jersey traffic has got to be the worst variety of traffic I’ve ever encountered. In most states, you get traffic from bad drivers, rubbernecking, volume, etc. In Jersey, you get traffic for exits. In no other state could getting OFF the highway cause so much backup. It’s the only place where people swerve across 8 lines of oncoming traffic to find the nearest exit off this urine-soaked hell hole of a highway. It’s like the hallway to the bathroom at a Chinese Buffet. Elbows flyin’, horrible smells, oil spills….

Anyway, we reach the Pennsylvania Turnpike and, I kid you not, the overcast sky clears, and there are five cars on the road. When we finally arrive, we are greeted with the smiling faces of Jon, Audrey, Lauren, Sean, Greg, and his new girlfriend Jen. We got some drinks, had some burgers. A great time was had by all. When we got back to Jon and Audrey’s, Sean somehow conned us into some type of karaoke video game. I think we were drugged.

The next morning, Greg, Jen, Erin and I dragged our sorry asses out of bed at 8am for the annual Long Beach Island trip. So we arrive, put our stuff done and head over to the water to test the temperature. To our right are a bunch of pre-teen wake-boarders. I put my feet in the water and about 10 seconds later, a boarder wipes out. His board comes shooting up the shore and I think to myself “it’s just a piece of foam, how bad can it hurt.” So I stand there and it hits me in the feet, giving me two gashes and a few bruises. The punk didn’t even apologize. Anyway, Matt and Addison arrived and we had a good time. Unfortunately, the four of us had to leave early to meet with others for dinner back in PA.

So we meet up with “the crew” (Jon-Aud, Laur-Sean, Bri-Joan, Bates-Laurie, Greg-Jen) and stake out an entire dining room in this random german restaurant. We’re being asses, of course, and then Bates and Laurie offer a “toast” of sorts where they announce… “THEY’RE PREGNANT”!! So we’re all jovial and so forth, then the jokes start flying about the child being an “accident” or a “surprise” or whatever euphemism you want to use. So continuing the trend where somehow my comments are more “insidious” than others, seem to cross the line, for which Bates finds the need to give me a dead arm. Not that I didn’t deserve it, I’m simply pointing out the overall trend where I get blamed for something everyone else is doing. More examples of this to come.

We headed back to Greg’s place, where Sean and Jon proceeded to fire nerf missiles at everyone. At one point, Sean hit Lauren and I was fairly certain his head was about to explode with the hate rays emanating from L-Mac. However, but by the grace of God, he was spared. And of course, hilarity ensued.

Tune in tomorrow for: “CSI Maryland: Wedding Reception Sites,” the return to Kentucky, and the first part of the mover mini-series.

Manifest Destiny

Alright, so it's been a month and a half. You might be asking yourselves "where did Aaron and Erin go? I thought he was blogging?" And that would be a fair question. To quote Johnny Cash, "I've been everywhere, man..." I'm going to have to tell this story in installments over the next few days, so bear with me. The shorthand: Erin and I have moved to Lafayette, IN so I can pursue my PhD at Purdue U. It's exciting, but it's also probably been one of the, let's just say "oddest" months of my life. So let's get started.

Packing and the initial move:
So no one in Boston seems too keen on giving away used boxes. After begging about 7 different stores for their garbage, I finally conned a Barnes & Noble into coughing some up, pulling the "I used to work for BN" card. I must say that the packing process was phenomenal. While Erin is not known for her spatial recognition skills, she did AMAZINGLY well in packing her crap. I was, how shall I put it, stunned.

The weekend prior to the move, we headed out to Martha's Vineyard for Howie and Keffie's wedding. We hop in the car at 5am to make the 9am ferry. We get about 10 minutes out and stop for gas. Unfortunately, our water bottle of gatorade broke and spilled over Erin's white sweater. We made it with about 3 minutes to spare. The wedding itself was, how do you say, GORGEOUS. So was Keffie. Howie was moderately attractive, but only because he was dressed to the nines. The ceremony was under the shadow of a lighthouse looking out over the ocean. Literally 10 feet from Howie and Keffie, there was a 20 story dropoff to the sea.

When we got back Monday night, Erin and I finished packing our last odds and ends. Tuesday, the movers arrived 2 hours late. They carted out our boxes and cornered Erin at one point to get a feel for how much we paid for the apartment. Afterwards, they cornered me and asked for their tip in cash...

Ultimately, we wound up in NY for the first leg of our cross-country trek where we were greeted by the famed hospitality of the DeRosa family.

That is where I leave you for today. Tune in tomorrow for: The annual LBI trip, New Jersey traffic, Greg and the gang, Lauren disowning Sean for shooting her with a nerf gun, and surprise news from Bates and Laurie that somehow earned me a dead arm.