Moving Days

We did it. We moved me out of my apartment in Oklahoma City and back to our home in San Marcos. Of course, thanks to my Galloway genes (that’s my mom’s side of the family) nothing is ever simple and straightforward about such things. I used to wonder about my uncle who seemed to make the simplest projects complicated. Then I realized in his disaster relief work with the Red Cross and later FEMA, he was used to solving really massive organizational problems. He worked on questions like, how many tons of plywood will be needed after a level four hurricane passes through a large city, or whether the organization should move relief supplies in ahead of the storm (risking the destruction of the supplies) or after the storm (risking the ability to bring supplies into the disaster area). That skill, when applied to a move from one abode to another, is both wasted and confusing. My mom’s version runs along the lines of attempting to be efficient and ending up complicated. For example, “can we get the movers to move these items to point A, drop these at point B along the way, and what if we added to the load at point C?”. In other words, how many things can we accomplish in one trip?

This move was something along the lines of a “Mom move” rather than an “Uncle move”. The movers took our items and headed south. We cleaned the apartment, checked out, and started south two hours later. Oddly, when we stopped at the truck stop in Ardmore about 90 minutes south, we ran into our movers. We were all surprised. We learned later that all of the coolant had suddenly drained out of their truck in the middle of some intersection or another and the truck stopped dead. The moving company sent out a second truck and a crew and they transferred all of our belongings from one to the other and didn’t break a thing. It may be the only time we’ve had movers who didn’t break anything. The way it becomes a Mom move is that about half of what we brought with us went to help furnish the apartment of our older grandson who will be leaving the Marines in about a month. But since we couldn’t quite get everything synced up, we emptied the truck, sent the movers on their way and about three hours later, after we took apart our old bed and moved in the new one from OKC, one of our daughters showed up with a truck, a trailer, and a helper and moved out the items going to a new home. (Mom did suggest we have the movers drop some things at our house and then take the rest to the new home thirty minutes away, but I couldn’t get us that organized to load in that way. Just as well since it all would have been for naught once they moved from one truck to the other.) It was still one of our easier moves.

Unlike the move from Austin to Dallas when Peter was driving the U-Haul truck that was nearly out of gas. He was following me and beyond the name of the apartments and, maybe the address, he had no idea where we were going. I know how to go from I-35 to Central Expressway, but some things had changed and I doubted myself and didn’t take the usual way and then made a quick dart to the right in my little car. The U-Haul was not so maneuverable, and Peter drove on. Cell phones had been invented at this point, but we didn’t have one and GPS was something only the government and maybe a few university researchers knew of yet. We each carried on without the other. He found a gas station, got a map, and eventually found me. This is still a story he holds over my head whenever we travel in tandem, and I fully deserve every bit of grief I get.

Our move years later from Austin to San Marcos was equally memorable. There was a new guy on the moving crew and the team was not gelling. It took them hours to load us. At one point I was walking through the upstairs and remember thinking, “Wow, somebody has pungent body odor.” That night in San Marcos, I looked into the front bedroom window from the outside and saw the problem wasn’t body odor but the new guy vaping, now in our brand new house. I was right back in my residence hall days as I stood in front of the much taller young man and asked him not to vape in the house. One never knows when those old skills will come into play.

This week, I’m back in OKC for one more week in the office and then my Nursing adventure will be mostly over though as I mentioned earlier, I’ll still be involved with some transition support for a few months. Like every move or change effort I’ve been part of, there have been challenges and great successes. We’ve had unexpected turns and created new pathways. As in any organization, different people have different ideas about how to get from point A to point Z, and just how many points we should hit along the way, but what’s been great is the commitment of the people in this College to the students, to their profession, and to the future of the College. Like every place I’ve worked, I’m sad to leave and at the same time looking forward to new adventures. Like every move I’ve made, it was difficult to accomplish the actual move, but once it’s done it’s great to be settled and ready for what comes next.

I’ll admit, I’m also ready for a bit of down time at the end of the year. This is the final newsletter of this calendar year. I’ll be taking off the last two weeks in December to read, watch some football, and like every student home from college, sleep as much as I want. I hope you have some time for rest and rejuvenation as the year turns from 2023 to 2024. Enjoy your holidays and best wishes for a wonderful New Year! See you in January!

Take care,

Gage