Dormageddon

Yesterday, yet again, we helped the girlie move into her dorm for the coming year.  But this isn't just any year, this will be her SENIOR year.  I find this concept baffling since I'm pretty sure that she was a high school senior only 10 minutes or so ago.  I mean, I know I'm not getting any older, so how can she be?  It's a mystery.

After arriving in town Friday evening and grabbing some dinner we drove out to a friend's house to reclaim her car, which he had been watching over while she was home for the month of August.  What exactly he was watching it do I can't say, though I like to think he used it to herd his alpacas around their pen in lieu of a more compact and furry 4-footed herding companion.  After all, even a poor little Saturn should be allowed to dream big.

Saturday morning we went to collect the girlie's room key, went to the storage unit to load up our rental minivan (Stow and Go seats, you rock my world) and headed back to the dorm to unload.  Because the girlie's roommate is of the awesome, she stashed one of the giant orange utility carts littered around the campus in the suite for us after moving herself in earlier in the week.  This was quite the boon since those carts tend to be hard to get on move-in and move-out days.

I'm pretty sure that cart has a pig snout.

We loaded up the first cart and started to take it upstairs, only to discover a magically deserted second cart with which I promptly absconded.  Thus began what amounted to a move-in bucket brigade, with the hubs and the girlie taking one cart and unloading it upstairs while I loaded up the second cart at the car, then swapping them out and starting all over again.  At one point during the proceedings, a couple of German students who were standing outside having a smoke bemusedly watched me loading up carts.  Halfway through my second cart, they finally commented that my student had "packed the entire house."  While not expressly true in and of itself, her collection of SCA accoutrements over the last three years has nearly doubled the paraphernalia housed in her room.  When I was nearly done loading, one of the boys did ask if I needed any assistance, by which point I obviously didn't.  So much for chivalry.

Because we couldn't get everything from storage into the van in one go (yay, armor!), we once again hid the orange cart in the suite, released the second, and took a lunch break with the girlie and her roommate.  Then it was back to storage with a quick trip to Target on the side.

One trip to Lowe's, two to storage, three to Target and 4 orange carts of chattel later (never mind the 6 packs of bubble-wrapped books we took on the plane), we finally got the girlie moved in for her senior year.  The first Target trip was for standard cleaning/restocking sorts of supplies.  The second was for a curtain rod for her closet and a pack of underpants because she couldn't find any clean ones, having not had time to wash her Pennsic clothes before flying home.  The third trip was to return the curtain rod (which turned out to be the wrong size) and to exchange said underwear for the correct style.  I should have gotten a picture of the underpants and curtain rod for my collection of awkward shopping photos, but didn't.  I did get this one, though.

"Brain bleach on Aisle 6..."

The truly sad part was discovering today at the airport that I still had a Target gift card in my wallet, which somehow got missed on ALL THREE of the Target runs yesterday.  Clearly I need to staple it to my shirt or something because I'm pretty sure this is about the 10th trip I've made to a Target since receiving the card and I still haven't managed to use the blasted thing.  Ah, well...one of these days I'll finally achieve the elusive bullseye.

We spent the rest of the evening nomming pizza and catching the end of the recent Les Misérables movie.  Frankly, I still can't take Russell Crowe remotely seriously in the role of Javert; you'd think he'd be good at that sort of character but his clear preoccupation with getting the singing right (which he didn't, considering he sounded most of the time like he had a serious sinus infection or possibly a dirty sock wedged down his esophagus) rendered him virtually incapable of any acting barring the odd scene or two (when he notably was not singing).  On the plus side, when all the deceased characters came back at the end to sing the finale, I got to watch the hubs nearly spew soda up his nose when I casually commented "I see dead people."  So it was all good.

In spite of the approximately 900 trips around town, move-in went relatively smoothly though I find it difficult to believe that the next time we schlepp the girlie's possessions, it will likely be to take them off to her grad school residence.

Time really needs to stop flying past so quickly.