It sounded better in my head...

Halfway through packing my kitchen stuff yesterday I ran out of the free boxes I got from someone off of craigslist. While I don't mind purchasing Office Depot-brand foldable file boxes for my books (I have not yet found a better, more hassle-free way to package and transport all the books in my collection), I didn't really care to purchase larger boxes, which in the past I have always managed to acquire from friends who have recently moved. So I decided to try my luck and check out the backside of the Plymouth shopping mall.

There were a number of big blue cardboard-only dumpsters behind the Kroger and other shops, and while the pickings were slim (I think the collection day must have been pretty recent) I nevertheless found the boxes I was looking for. It did take some work. As you can see in the picture, I had to pull my car right up to the dumpster to give myself something to stand on since most of the boxes were near the bottom, and I decided dumpster-diving is better executed with another person, and I probably would have found someone to come with me had it not been so spontaneous. But overall it was a grand and successful adventure and I was looking forward to telling the story.

Because I was kind of caught up in the moment, I didn't really anticipate how dumpster-diving stories might be received. When my roommate Stephanie came home from work and I started to tell her the story, her response before I could even go into any detail was, "Oh, I'm sorry!"

"No, don't be sorry," I said. "It was kind of fun." And I prepared to give the full narrative, but she interrupted again.

"I have some boxes," she told me. "I wish I'd known. You wouldn't have had to do that."

"No, no," I said again. "It was kind of an adventure." But I gave up on the full narrative at that point because I had the distinct impression that she was reading my assertions that it was "fun" and an "adventure" as Making the Best of an Unpleasant Situation, when in reality I had never expected it to be an Unpleasant Situation in the first place. I knew she had boxes. I had considered texting her and asking if I could use a couple, but going hunting for free boxes on my own sounded more fun, and got me out of the house, and allowed Stephanie to keep her boxes for her own upcoming move.*

But her reaction made me realize that dumpster diving doesn't sound as fun and exciting and blog-worthy as I thought it did while I was doing it. In fact, it sounds kind of icky. It wasn't. I'm squeamish around trash smells and even the faintest whiff of unpleasantness probably would have put a stop to my adventuring. But since the dumpsters were cardboard-only, some rusty puddles of water at the bottom were as icky as it got, and I never touched those. I even managed to get some lovely scented Yankee Candle Company boxes from behind the Hallmark store.

But even after Stephanie's reaction, my heart was kind of set on blogging about this one, so I'm doing it anyway. I realize it's not even that interesting a narrative, now that I've actually put it in writing for a captive audience. Okay, you're not really captive, but at least you're not able to stop the flow with your own admittedly more pragmatic box-getting ideas. But it's the stuff like this that is helping me to make moving (never a very fun experience, whether it's across town, or across the country) feel like less of a chore and more of a narrative, with twists and turns and setbacks and even a deus ex machina or two. Or three, actually. But that's fodder for another blog post.


* I don't blame Stephanie for her reaction, by the way. If our roles had been reversed, I probably would have thought she was Making the Best of an Unpleasant Situation too.