An actual Friday five.

In honor of recent activities, I bring you five tips for your next long-distance move, in no particular order:

• Stress early and often. This will ensure that you have thought of everything, and things will go quite smoothly.
• That trick from Carson the Queer Eyed Guy about rolling your clothes instead of folding them to prevent wrinkles? Works pretty darned well.
• If you pack your own boxes, buy twice as much packing tape and bubble wrap as you think you will need. Trust me on this one - it will save you several last minute trips to the drugstore, and you can always use it later if you end up not needing it for the move.
  
• Find a rich coworker who has moved recently and ask them for their empty boxes. This way you will have very good quality boxes and the coworker will bring them to work for you, instead of you having to go pick them up like with Craigs List or Freecycle.
• Forget that rule about packing rooms together rather than mixing up rooms in boxes. Mixing it up makes unpacking so much more fun!*
  

Bonus for those of you with feline friends... Prepare for the worst - chances are you will be more stressed about their travels than they are. And in addition to all the usual tips of putting them in one room and slowly introducing them to the rest of the place, have a can of tuna handy for when you get to the new place. Her Majesty took the 10-hour car ride pretty well, but refused to drink for at least 12 hours after we got here, and didn't eat for at least 20 hours. I was pretty concerned but after breaking out the tuna out of desperation, I took a Daily Show/Colbert Report/BSG/pass-out-from-exhaustion break last night (where she was curled up on my lap purring-then-sleeping-then-purring the whole time) and she started to consume again.

She's still pretty skittish but seems to recognize all the stuff from the apartment, even if it's not in the same place, and there's this new smell that might have some of the old dweller's cat mixed in with it, and there's this strange hard floor she has to walk on now. And she's definitely pissed off at me (but what else is new...). There's ongoing progress. Just now she ventured farther than I have ever seen her:

And maybe the 20 hours of not eating wasn't such a bad thing. She can actually sit on the window sill, whereas three days ago I'm really not sure it would've been possible:


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* May only apply for people who live in small one-bedroom apartments. I can imagine a six-bedroom home family being rather irritated with mixing it up.