
I was desperate. Instead of putting it all back into the storage closet, I set up for a second (smaller) storage locker down in Kankakee, got all the Xmas boxes stuffed into a ZipCar SUV, and talked a friend into going along on the "road trip". Unfortunately, traffic that afternoon was bad, and we didn't get down there until their office closed, which shouldn't have been a problem, as I had an access code for our other locker down there. However, due to issues with folks messing with our credit cards, we were on a new card, and our other locker was needing an update, and so the code wasn't working.
So, there we were, in freezy late February, in a car that had to be back in its slot by Xpm, locked out of where we needed to unload everything. Cue suicidal panic and thoughts of how the universe was always going to find some way to make my plans fail.
Fortunately, my co-conspirator on this trip had a storage locker in her building which was not being used, so we turned around, drove back to the City (well, on up to Evanston), unloaded the car (which I got back in just in time), and she loaded up all our Xmas stuff into her locker ... where it sat for four months.
In the meanwhile, I'd gotten a storage space up here, into which I managed to move most of my library, my record collection, and photography before the dreaded moving/clearing date. My perception of having to "save" stuff was right on target as everything else we had for holidays (and history) got thrown out with nothing I could do about it.
Anyway, my friend was wanting to get other stuff into her locker, so we spent the evening loading up a van with the Xmas stuff and driving over to the one I got on the NW side. The picture here is the current condition ... still needs a bit of an organization (aside from the books), but at least they still exist ... unlike 90% of my old belongings.
