boxes and boxes

You need to be prepared when it comes to moving from one place to another. You need to be doubly prepared when moving to another country. I prepared for this move by visiting my local supermarket almost daily. Whenever I trudged up from the subway, the market was the first place I went before heading for home. The market has boxes and boxes are needed for moving. Professional boxes can be purchased for an obscene amount of money, but supermarket boxes are free. So I have been collecting chicken wing boxes, egg boxes, Lipton Tea boxes, Idaho Beef boxes, Purdue chicken boxes, and Eggland's Best boxes, to name a few.

Thas and I went to our local Bangladeshi 99 cent store and bought packing tape. It was a dollar a roll and Thas wanted to argue with the owner about the false advertising aspects of the store's name, but I convinced her that the owner's kharma would be retribution enough, so we went home with three rolls of the tape to tape up our boxes and fortify them for the long journey into the wild.

It took us a good ten minutes trying to unwind the first strand of the sticky stuff because it was microscopically thin and difficult to peel away. When Thas finally got it started, it tore in the middle and we had to retry several times, but it eventually unrolled and we began taping the bottom of the boxes to reinforce them.

The first items to get packed were our books. We knew we'd never re-read them--I mean, how many times can you read "The Psychology of Pain" before experiencing the effects yourself? So we did our best to rid ourselves of those books that were not necessary for us to take along to the land of ice and hockey. It was hard, but we did it. We labeled the myriad boxes "Bks" and sealed them up. Those books that we discarded went to the basement, stacked across from the elevator where they would be seen by people coming down to do their laundry, and amazingly, we saw they were gone the next day. Who knew we had so many avid readers, budding psychologists and  wannabe social workers in our building?

We packed most of our dishes, pots and pans next, and then did the same to most of our winter clothes--I suggested we keep a jacket on hand for those frosty summer nights in Ottawa, eh.

Then it hit me. I realized that some of the chicken boxes and meat boxes had little stains in the corners, and it occured to me that this was not a good thing. This was chicken blood and who knows what else. Our clothes and books and pots and pans might take on the trace odors of dead animals--and we'd be taking this to the border of the USA and Canada, and they would stop us and have us slowly get ooot of the vehicle and hand over the keys, whereupon they would inspect every last box for the presence of death and we'd be delayed for hours in some godforsaken border crossing station and they would ask us questions and Thas would admit to being a Muslim, and they would do things to us like have us remove our shoes and question me about my hockey knowledge and allegiences. And all because we got our boxes from the supermarket because we're too cheap to pay for professional boxes.

When is Boxing Day anyway?