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Sep 21, 2011

Moving Day

From Lil’ Canadian to Shoreviewer

I moved to Minnesota in June of 1995, and until this past Saturday lived in Little Canada—a small suburb of St. Paul—for the entire time. In fact, a hula hoop with a diameter of less than one mile could be used to enclose an area containing all three residences. If such a hula hoop exists.

My three Little Canada residences are numbered 1-3 on the map, and my new Shoreview home is marked with a four. It’s to the northwest, just over three miles as the crow files from my final Canadian outpost.[1]

Moving day help

We made the move on Saturday (September 17th), and couldn’t have been more fortunate. The weather was beautiful, the truck was big and orangy, and the unpaid help was fantastic. Two daughters and fourteen friends were unable to come up with excuses to not help and/or were lured in by the promise of burgers, brats, and beer. They were nothing short of awesome. That there were four or five engineers solving the pack-the-U-Haul challenge and six or seven guys driving pickup trucks didn’t hurt. We started packing the 27-foot truck at 10:00 AM, filled the last of the pickups by about noon, and had unloaded everything in Shoreview by a little after 1:00 PM.

It was a better-than-average-looking group, so daughter Nicole snapped a photo:

From left to right: Paul L, Rick, Joann, Tina & Bill, Cole, Paul S, Mark, Chris, me, Aaron, Wolfie, Eric, and Jesse. (Shoreview, MN: September 17, 2011)

You’ll want to click on the photo to get a better look at this crew, for sure. From left to right are Paul L, Rick, Joann, Tina & Bill, Cole, Paul S, Mark, Chris, me, Aaron, Wolfie, Eric, and Jesse. Daughter Tammy, her beau Nick and Elliott had left by the time the photo was taken (we think they were afraid of undercooked burgers). Because she was behind the camera lens, Nicole cannot be seen except as a gleam in Cole’s eye.

It was an athletic group (eight softball players—my MCO teammates—and four volleyballers) and so there was some fierce ladder golf competition in the backyard. Mark and Jesse squared off:

Jesse, doing the ’Saint Paul slide’ with a beer in his hand, and Mark, trying to ignore him. (Shoreview, MN: September 17, 2011)

Later, Tina and Mark staged an epic volleyballers versus softballers contest. Tina cleaned his clock:

Mark and Tina, playing from the rough. (Shoreview, MN: September 17, 2011)

It was a good day. Joann and I will miss our old place, but we think we’re going to like it here very much.

—

Notes

  1. And about the same distance for an unladen swallow—African or European—at any velocity. [^]
 

Sep 21, 2011

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