wow. that was hard.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004, at 03:58PM

By Eric Richardson

8:30am, I get up, get dressed, and Magilla and I head over to the U-Haul center that's conveniently just like a mile away. We're getting a 17' truck for $29.95. Plus $5 handling fee to reserve it. Plus $14 for their insurance. Plus $10 for an appliance dolly. Plus mileage.

So really not at all the $29.95 they advertise. But that's ok. I knew that going in. So we've got a truck, and we've got it until 4pm.

We get back here around 9:30. It's street cleaning day, so my side of the street is off-limits until 11. We park at a meter just a little bit away, but not at all bad. Normally my side of the street would have been pretty empty on street-cleaning day, with maybe 4 or 5 cars with tickets. Today, though, probably 20. That was kind of weird.

Magilla had a 10:30 interview downtown for an internship, so he heads off for that and D4 and I start taking things apart. That takes a while. 10:50 or so everything's disassembled, and we take a couple pieces of bed downstairs and move the truck in front of the building. Loading begins in earnest. It takes forever. Magilla gets back around 11:30 and starts helping. It still takes forever.

12:55, truck is finally loaded and we're on the road. Not to downtown, but to Covina, a good half hour away. We need to pick up two couches from Magilla's house and saw in half the 4x4's that were the legs for the bunk beds D4 and I made in the fall.

1:30 or so we pull into Magilla's driveway. His Dad has gotten us pizza, and we're starving, so we eat that. We then load up the couches, and Magilla goes to look for the electric saw. He doesn't find it. We end up sawing through those 4x4's the old-fashioned way.

2:40 we're on the road again, but again not to Downtown. This time we have to go to Whittier and drop off D4's bed, dresser, etc, at his brother's house.

At this point I'm getting nervous. The truck's due back at 4, remember, and there's no chance we'll make that. I call U-Haul, and they give me until 5.

3:00, get to Whittier and unload D4's stuff.

3:30, back on the road. The 605 to the 60.

4:00, pull into downtown. Problem is, you can't park downtown at 4. 4-6 on Spring is no parking, no stopping, no even thinking about it. Driving up Main at 4:01 we saw tow-trucks cruising to take cars sitting on the street a minute too long.

There are two parking lots next to Premiere Towers, one on each side. We ask the first one if we can park there to unload. He wants $6, and isn't real nice about it. Between us we have $4 in cash. The next lot lets us park for the normal after 4pm car rate, $4. We park, open up the back, and get busy. We're talking a 17' U-Haul full of mattresses, couches, bed parts, a dresser, and a refrigerator, and that truck's still due back in an hour.

4:40. At this point the pace is feverish. We're loading everything into the lobby, trying to empty the truck as fast as possible. The truck still needs gas before it's returned.

4:55, Magilla pulls out of the parking lot with the U-Haul, leaving me and D4 to take all the stuff upstairs and into the room. We're already dead tired.

5:40, D4 and I finally finish. We can hardly move. We both fall asleep on couches.

Magilla ends up back to the U-Haul place a bit after 5, but they don't care. Mileage ends up costing $56 (at $.8/mile), so the whole thing runs around $110.

But it's done. And that's what matters.

Less fun is all the littler stuff that still needs to go, and all the cleaning this apartment needs before we turn it back in.