Stunslinger.com Blog

Mrs. Stunslinger and I went to visit her family this weekend, and we had a really great time.  We got home tonight at 8:30 or so.  Since that time I’ve killed three very large spiders in our living room.  Each of these guys, including legs, was about two inches across.  Did I mention I really hate spiders?

Yuck.  Now I’m hyper-vigilant, sitting in my living room with  a shoe.  I’d better not see any more spiders.  Of course I also need to relax a bit so I can go to bed and whatnot.  Argh.

Good night.

I thought of a few more, and decided I should add to my list of pet peeves:

• People who wear wireless ear pieces when they’re not talking on the phone.  At my last job, there was a woman who didn’t seem to realize that she could remove this wireless device from her head.  I don’t know why, but it’s horribly annoying to try and talk to someone with a blinking microphone attached to their ear.  Here’s a memo: It’s removable for a reason…remove it!
• Bicyclists who change between acting like cars and acting like people.  If you’re riding a bicycle on the road, I am more than happy to accommodate you.  I agree with the “see bicyclists” bumper stickers.  However, when I see a bike rider in my lane, and then he/she jumps into the crosswalk, I don’t know what to do.  I can’t say how many times I’ve nearly hit a bicyclist (well, I’ve never come closer than 5 feet, but in my mind it’s close) because they’ve randomly switched from riding under traffic rules to walking rules.  It’s not fair, and I’m peeved.
• People who park in lanes in a parking lot.  I saw this frequently in Salt Lake, and it always pissed me off.  These individuals actually think they’re so awesome they can block everyone’s way “because I’m only going in for a minute.”  Parking spaces don’t seem to contain them.  Often I’ve gone into the store, bought my items, and come out while they’re still “temporarily” parked in the lane.

Obviously my posting frequency has dropped off quite a bit recently, and I’m going to blame that on the move.  Things are smoothing out some now, so I should be back up and posting more frequently.

Anyway, in order to move our belongings we rented a 26-foot Penske moving truck and a car trailer.  This thing was massive, and we didn’t actually need that much truck, but it was a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than the shorter ones.

On the way home from the rental place, I almost killed somebody.  I should specify, had it happened it would not have been my fault.  I had to make a left turn onto a three lane road, so I lined up in the rightmost of the two left turn lanes…so that I could turn into the middle lane and then move safely into the slow right lane.  I made my turn, and afterward put on the blinker to move over.  Just as I began to merge into the right lane, a motorcyclist behind me decided it would be a good time to speed up and pass me on the right.  Thankfully I was obsessively checking my mirrors, and saw him come around.  So I corrected and he shot forward, but he could’ve been in a world of hurt.

I got the truck safely back to our apartment, and we got to the loading.  Or, more accurately, let the movers get to the loading.  They did a great job, and laughed at us several times for having way too big of a truck.  Wednesday morning we cleaned up our apartment, loaded the car onto the trailer and headed off.  About 300 feet down the road my wife called from the other car and said our trailer had a flat tire.  Sure enough, we hadn’t even made it off our street before I had to call Penske’s SOS number.  Luckily a neighbor down the street was very friendly and talked to us for an hour while we waited for the service guy to change the wheel.

After that, we got off down the road and had a mostly uneventful drive out of Utah.  When we stopped at the Flying J in Snowville, UT, I discovered that one of the tire straps had slipped off.  Turns out I had misunderstood how to attach the straps, so I had to fix that at the truck stop.

We made it to Boise that night, and then had a pleasant drive into Oregon on Thursday.  We had no more mishaps until we tried to return the truck and trailer.  In order to unload the truck we had to park the trailer, so to return it we had to hook it back up.  I lined the truck back up with the hitch, and my wife yelled up that she couldn’t lower the trailer hitch onto the truck.  The crank that raises and lowers the height of the trailer hitch wasn’t working.  Sweet.

I called Penske’s SOS yet again, and thankfully they offered to just tow the trailer away for me.  This made me happy, because I hate driving the gigantic truck with a trailer too.  So we packed up the truck and drove through terrible traffic to return the truck.  We arrived at the place, and the guy told us he couldn’t accept it back because he had to log in the truck and trailer at the same time.  What?!  Well, after not being too happy about it, he called Penske corporate (he wasn’t actually a Penske employee, he worked for Public Storage) and got it approved.  Phew.  After threatening to charge me $35 to fold the dozen blankets despite having no sign saying they needed to be folded, we got out of there.

And thus concludes the story of a boy and his giant moving truck.