Moving Preparations

One of the things I am looking forward to in our next home is the garage. Our current place has one scary spot in the back, with the potential for a nasty run in with the stairs to the basement if you pull in too far. Any additional cars have to find places on the street in two hour parking spots. And if it rains on grocery day, bringing stuff in is cold and wet. Also, it makes finding a spot for a moving van rather hard. In fact, part of the moving process has been reserving parking for the moving van. It took one hour of sitting on hold, a search of a website and fifty bucks, but I got the reservation permit. Today, I went to print off the posters that warn the neighbors not to park on the street. To do that, I had to track down the nearest Police department, where I was assured that there'd be a kiosk to print the posters. Sure enough, the kiosk was there, and I got all set to print, and the copiers jammed. :::sigh::: I had an immediate flashback to teaching at West and the constant copier jams we dealt with there. I was pretty sure I could fix the problem, but breaking the copier in a police station seemed like a bad idea, so I hesitated. I asked the very nice police officers what to do, and they said it wasn't their set up. Great! Feeling I had the green light, I started following the instructions on the machine and, sure enough, it was the same sort of issue we had back at school. It often resulted from overfilling the paper tray. I felt pretty good about fixing the machine, until the next page jammed too. Frustrated, I called the department of traffic, who owns the kiosk. This time I wasn't on hold for an hour, but the only thing they suggested was going to another kiosk. At this point, Ela was laying on the floor crying for no apparent reason and Lily was whining in her car seat. Going elsewhere was not an option. So I opted for a two pronged approach. First, I wrote down all the information that the printer was supposed to put on the posters with the intention of may be just writing it in myself. Then, I took a bunch of blank posters from the paper tray and set the machine up to try again. It worked! Just like our copiers back at West Forsyth! Who knew that unjamming a copier was such a useful skill. Even better, the copier automatically reprinted the posters that had jammed. I was glad to take the finished products and go. So now we've got the parking for the moving van. Now we just have to get the house ready. Six days to go!