Not sure I was cut out for this moving thing. It is coming up on a month to the date when everything in and around this house has to be stored, dumped, sold, given away or packed for a trip.
The last time I moved was a quarter century ago. So I am out of practice.
I started by getting a lot of plastic totes and boxes. Then I rented my first ever storage locker. I had an old safety lock-out padlock from my Pope & Talbot days, so I figured I was ready to begin moving stuff.
I ran a load over to the storage and put the padlock on the door. Back and forth with another load or two and I was beginning to feel good about the progress. But I got busy with regular stuff and it was a couple of days later before I had another load in the car to move over to the storage.
One thing with those safety lock-out padlocks from the mill is that there are no spare keys. You have one key and one lock—so that when the lock is on the electrical panel the only key that will open it is in your pocket.
When I got to the storage place I discovered a problem. The key that would open this particular lock was NOT in my pocket.
I searched the house, twice—to no avail. I looked in every pocket on anything I might have worn for the past few days. Then I looked in every pocket on anything I might have worn for the past week. No luck. No key.
I finally wound up driving around with the car loaded with boxes and totes for a day and half before I could overcome my embarrassment and went to Boundary Tool Rental to get a set of bolt cutters.
These were the smallest of the three sets of bolt cutters I would see that day; and since the heaviest thing I have pushed in a while is a pencil, needless to say I couldn’t break the lock with them.
Next I tried a bigger pair from the hardware store, but I still couldn’t cut through the lock.
Finally I called Carl Gough, owner of Mile ‘0’ Storage. He meets me at the locker 10 minutes later with a huge set of cutters—must have been three or four feet long. Opened that lock like a hot knife through butter. I guess I should have been looking around for the fellow most likely to often use bolt cutters, instead of simply trying to find a guy who owns a set.
Back to the hardware store, where I buy a brand new padlock, this one with two keys.
That night I go the wildlife game banquet and Doug Janzen is there. He asked if I had lost a key when I was in his store a couple of days before. * sigh *
But my padlock adventure wasn’t over yet. There was a raffle at the game banquet and I won a padlock. As a bonus, it had a locksmith’s business card taped to the box.
Many, many times during our 10 years together, Special K was called to come to my rescue when I had locked myself out of the car, the house or even the office. No doubt she’s been getting a good chuckle out of all of this.
In fact, I strongly suspect she had a hand in that extra little touch with the business card.