Monday, April 3rd, the day I had the containers loaded onto trucks, was the worst single day of this whole move so far.

All three shipping containers were too heavily loaded. The legal load limit for what the big-rig trucks could carry was approximately 48,000 lbs. The first container to be loaded, the forty-footer, which I had estimated to weigh between 30 and 35 thousand pounds, actually weighed in at over 50,000. So, in the rain, while the $170/hr crane guy and the two truckers waited, I unloaded 2500 lbs. It only got worse from there…..

The second container, a twenty-footer, which I estimated at 25,000 lbs, actually weighed 36,000. I removed 9,000 pounds from this one. And the last one, which needed to come in at no more than 20,000 or so, weighed in at 32,000. When John, the crane guy, told me this, I almost broke. I had to remove 12,000 lbs, while they all waited and it rained on me and my stuff.

All told, I removed over 23,000 lbs from three containers. That’s 11.5 tons of stuff that didn’t make it to New Mexico and is still sitting in LA. The crane rental cost twice what I’d estimated it would because it took twice as long as I’d thought. And crane rental isn’t cheap.

I just barely made it onto the train which would take me on an overnight trip to Albuquerque, and when I did finally settle in to my seat, I realized I’d lost my cell phone. To put it euphemistically, I sort of lost it.