Adjustments and Transformation

The recent moving further away from my office, but just next door to USF where my younger D will be enrolling this fall, has necessitated some changes to my routine. Gone are the days of leaving the home JIT (as in just in time).

For the past four days since I started the longer commute, I’ve been taking the Interstate 275, leaving our new home just before 6.30am. And the journey so far averages about 25 minutes for a travel that is best described as free flowing but at a controlled speed.

Here is a morning shot from our complex across to the USF campus. You can barely make out the name USF at the entrance pedestal.

The return trip, on the other hand, is a different story. I’ve tried three different routes, leaving the office around 5pm, and they all took at least 45 min. People are all just anxious to get home, clogging all the lanes at the same time. The I-275 way is shorter, but is a grid lock at several places where feeder roads join it, debouching near endless streams of cars into the over-stretched I-275.

The city road has too many traffic lights, ensnarling the traffic into a frequently idling mode. It seems a better solution could be to change the time of travel and not fight with the first wave of traffic, during both the morning and the evening rush hours. At the moment, I’ve no choice because my D has to get to school before 7.25 am. But she will soon be done with high school in another one and a half months, and counting whence I will experiment with the new time slot.

After more than three years of enjoying a single digit minute commute, I’m really not about to spend more time on the road than I absolutely need to. The aggravation of traffic woes, the increased chance of accident exposure, not to mention the apparent waste of valuable time and burning fuel. Except when this glorious vista comes into view, kind of driving (though galloping would be preferable) into the sunset.

Since school is off today for Easter, I arrived at the office about 10 min before 7am. So I was able to leave proportionally early, a practice known as flexi-time, which I did at 4.40pm.

And to my surprise, the I-275 route was relatively free-flowing. In fact, it seemed to be slightly better off than the morning’s commute. Then again it could be because the school is off and also because of the long Easter weekend. So it’s premature to generalize today’s ease of travel as being the rule.

I also located the nearest public library, which is my favorite book haunt. Actually, it’s even closer to our home than before. Then there is the huge USF library, which provides free access to the public, even though the loan facility is not likewise extended.

So tomorrow will be a busy day of exploring the neighborhood, which we first did by foot around the perimeter of our complex yeterday. It was around 7pm and the neighborhood road was quite deserted, save for another woman walking her dog across the street. So serene.

As for unpacking, just witness what the lady of the house has done, transforming an empty house into a comfy abode where many hours will be spent in leisurely pursuits.

Moving and Strength Training

After toying with the idea of getting friends to help out in our moving mission, we decided on a combination of self help and hired help.

The self help part started early this week when we made daily trip to our new home in our loaded minivan. My wife did the packing into boxes marked by different letters/numbers to signify different destinations in the house, e.g., K for kitchen, 2L for second floor left bedroom, and so on. And I do the heavy lifting, loading the boxes onto and unloading them from the minivan. I am very careful so as not to hurt my back: knee bent, and using the thigh and hand rather than the back muscles. And one box at a time, maybe two if they contain light materials such as clothing. So yesterday was the fourth strip, and each trip is like the image below so you get an idea of the efforts involved.


My wife commented that despite my not exercising as much as she does, I am still able to undergo some “hard labor”, thanks to my “grounding” during my earlier years.

My late father was a rubber dealer, buying and selling rubber sheets and scraps, the former from small holders and the latter, to rubber smoking factories (a literal translation) where they smoke-dry the machined rubber sheets made from rubber latex (a sap/secretion from rubber trees) into high quality rubber products. Since it was basically a family business, all the male siblings had one time or the other helped out in the rubber store.

Basically we would cycle every weekday (after school and lunch) about half a mile to the store. There the small holders would deliver their machined rubber sheets or scraps (these are remnants of rubber latex that have dried up overnight and are pulled from the cut grooves on the rubber trunk, sometimes containing some of the tree barks, and hence, are of lower quality and would fetch a lower price) in bicycles, motorcycles, cars, and small trucks/pickups.

Our job is to carry the rubber products by hand to a weighing machine. Each load could run from tens of katis (one kati is more than a pound but less than two, I’ll have to look that up) to over 100 katis, shared by two persons. And we started doing this while in elementary schools (aged 11) but on a graduated scale starting from smaller loads in proportion to our (growing) physique. And this weight training for me lasted until my Junior High when I had to skip town for further schooling but would still be around to go through the same drill during holidays. So I have had really good physical training that would last me a life time of strength and health as I’m enjoying now.

But the physical toil did take its toll on my blogging, which has become a case of mind willing but body failing. So the past few nights I’ve been going to bed earlier than usual and I’m getting worried that I would fall victim to the very thing that I have ranted about, the virtual cobwebs, here. And not at a time when the same blog article has inspired our D from Oregon to start dusting off her blog site. There’s where the hired help comes in.

And I let my finger do all the walking, thumbing through the Yellow Pages, under the Movers section. After a few phone calls, I had our reservation. It so happened that we wanted to move on Friday (March 30), an auspicious day for conducting such a business as moving according to the Chinese calendar, and moving services are hard to come by on weekends. So University Moving it is.

The mover’s truck with two men came right on time at 9.00 this morning. And even as I was blogging, stuff was gradually disappearing from my view. And it looks like this would be my last blog from this house that has been our home for the past three years.

So long Post Hyde Park. And USF/MOSI here we come.