Packing and Leaving

Ho Hum.  Packing is tedious.  Yesterday we went to pick up the cargo trailer, at the location to which they told us to go.  Nope!  The previous renter did not return it.  It would have been nice to have gotten a phone call to that effect, and the location of an alternate trailer, but no.  There was exactly one trailer available in the Spokane metro area, 15 miles in the opposite direction that we had already driven.  I called to confirm it was actually there, and the nice lady said it was, but that it had been returned marked stolen and she wasn't sure she could rent it to us.  Upon further investigation, she discovered it had been marked not stolen and so we could come and get it.  That ate up the entire morning.  Drive downtown, and then drive out into the hinterlands.

A key learning here is don't leave on a month end.  There's too much pressure on rental equipment.

Packing the bikes was about as bad as I thought it would be.  The bike rack had to be restrained in the trailer, and the bikes needed to be restrained from violent side to side motion.  Things were easier when we had a rack that fit tightly in the bed of the pickup truck.  It ended up looking like this.

The sarcophagus in all of its glory.  Most of this stuff will not be coming back.  Maybe all of it will not come back.  That also went in the trailer.  We had to unload the box in the house, take the box out, and then wedge it all back in to the box.

This is the size of the box, 100 feet of deer netting came in it from Amazon.  We've wrapped the arbovitae to keep the deer from eating them.  Last year was an extraordinarily cold and snowy year, the deer generally don't eat them.  However, I want those trees to survive and look better than they do, so they're wrapped.  Jim is standing by the box to provide perspective on how big it is.

We have another fungus in the side yard.  This is growing on the stump of what used to be a pear tree.  It's pretty cool looking.

Apropos of nothing, when we lived in Tucson, we put bagged trash out in the street, and the truck would come by with a man hanging off the back, who would jump down and pick up the bags.  It was kind of great, you could put just about anything there, and a lot of it, and they'd take it away.  Their major ask was that there were no sharp things that would cut their hands, like palm fronds.  Those, we boxed.  Anyway, trash is different here.  These trucks are so interesting to me, the hydraulics involved are fearsome.  Because there are bins that the trucks are designed to pick up, when they're full you have to stop putting stuff out.

Halloween was last night.  We got the most people between 7:00 and 7:30.  As always, we had too much candy.  

We're leaving for Tucson in the morning.  Tonight the atmospheric river will be arriving from the south west.  It will bring warmer temperatures and much water.  It will be interesting to see how long it takes to drive out of it.