Yesterdays adventures...

While our tween/teen camp and regular walk ins happened as usual in store (Thanks Sepehr for your help!), I was on my own adventure outside the store.

Many of you may not realize that we make many of the pottery pieces we have in store ourselves. We have thousands of pottery molds split between the store and my home which I cast whenever it's slow. It takes working at home to a whole different level.

Well, as I plan on moving to a new home (personally, the store isn't moving again anytime soon if I can help it!), the molds I kept there needed a new home. Yesterday myself and my husband Dave, with help some limited help from loved ones, we moved it all. Its dirty back breaking work due to the weight and volume of molds. Each mold weighs between 5lbs to 70lbs on its own. I like to joke its a great work out (you really do gain some great muscles doing this), and my family and friends would all be over weight if it wasn't for me. You need lots of jokes when you have roped your loved ones into moving these multiple times. You also find out who your true friends are, because no one would volunteer for this if they didn't love you.

The day started out with some drama at the truck rental. Apparently they had a rather poor day the day before that was spilling into the next. 3 trucks were out of commission leaving me and 2 others without our reservations at 8am. Alternates were found for all of us after a 1.5 hour delay, but my 16' truck reservation turned into a 26' truck. Not an easy thing to drive in the city. I was successful, and even managed to back it up into the alley behind our home that had about a 1' clearance on either side of the truck without too much trouble. I have much more respect now for drivers that do that in the city on a regular basis with massive trucks.

We started loading around 10am, and as you can see from the picture below there were a lot. To give it more scale, thats a 26' truck practically full (I was standing on the lift gate and technically outside the truck for that photo), and the molds are stacked about 2-3 high. We had already removed most of the shelving and the casting machine before that photo (which is essentially a big heavy bowl with a few motors for mixing and pumping liquid clay through its hose and into the molds). It took us about 3.5 hours to get the truck loaded (we were bringing them up a flight of stairs from our basement and then up the ramp to the truck, which doesn't make it any easier), add an hour travel to its new home and another 3.5 hours to unload (down the truck ramp and up a few more steps).

To add to the adventure, Dave was unlucky enough to get stung by a bee in the truck during the drive to the new location. What makes it news worthy is that it was already dead before it stung him. It appears it must have hit the partially open window and then into the cab of the truck where it fell violently into his wrist. It will be an ongoing joke, because he really did defy all odds with that one.

Well after all of that, we got the truck unloaded and back to rental place by 7pm, went home and crashed.

Today, we are all a little tired and sore, but happy its done. Now we just need to sort them so we can find them as needed for casting. Think it may need to wait a bit before I can ask for volunteers to help with that one...especially since I plan on asking them to help move our home in the near future too.

Karin

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