In either case, I have my description nearly memorized. (I’m an INFP… or maybe INFJ… or possibly INTP… with moments of ISFJ… At least, I know for sure I’m not an ESTJ! I think. Decisiveness may or may not be part of my personality type.)

One thing that my personality type “dictates” is that when I’m overwhelmed, I become obsessed with minutiae.

Not to disappoint Myers & Briggs, this week I’m sharing with you the intricacies of the PODS moving and storage system, which I found completely fascinating. It would have been fascinating even on a good week.

The events of this week, though, made such a triviality particularly engrossing:




– Early Thursday morning, a VIP from my husband’s workplace showed up (I had missed the fact that he was coming). He came to pick up my husband for a work-related trip (my husband was late coming home from an overnight shift), but also to meet the kids (who were sleeping in yesterday’s clothes on the living room floor because their beds weren’t assembled yet), and to tour our brand-new labyrinth of moving boxes. The good-humored VIP patted horses’ noses until my husband arrived.




– Then I got a speeding ticket while looking for a gas station after the “empty” light came on in the van. Driving faster while on “empty” is kind of like pouring faster into an almost-full jar. If you pour faster, you might fit everything into the jar before you run out of space. Similarly, if you drive faster, you might get to the gas station before the gas runs out. (Don’t try this.)




– Shortly after the speeding ticket, the baby puked on my shirt, and I went through most of my shopping trip with a wet sleeve. On the way home, a potty-trained child (who had already visited the bathroom once during our trip) peed all over a car seat that requires an instruction manual and a focused chunk of time to disassemble and wash.




– Then my keepsake necklace, which I wear every day, got caught on a dog crate, which I lean over every day, and it broke, which gave me a foreboding feeling.




– My sister-in-law, who is one of the loveliest people I’ve ever known, showed up with my parents late at night (I had forgotten they were stopping by before picking up my brother at the airport). She hugged my puke-stained shirt, toured our brand-new labyrinth of moving boxes, and made me feel like a beautiful human being in spite of it all.




So, instead of needing to lie on the floor counting window blinds for a while, I merely took pictures of our alien storage/space POD.

Nearly two months ago, a truck showed up at our prior house, bearing an empty 8’x8’x16′ box. It dropped it off in on the side of the mountain that doubled as our yard for three years, and we slowly filled it with stuff that wasn’t necessary for day-to-day life.

Then the truck showed up again, and we said goodbye to our stuff for a couple weeks while it was “mailed” to our new house. (This, by the way, was the most expensive part of the ordeal. It cost about $2215 for a 560 mile trip. The actual storage cost about $260 per month, not including an initial reservation fee.)

Several days after we moved, we let out a sigh of relief when the POD truck reappeared at our new house.

The way they loaded and unloaded the POD from the truck was amazing. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of the POD fully loaded on the truck. In the picture below, he had already set the little wheels on the ground to begin unloading, so imagine those wheels off the ground and tucked tightly against the POD box.

Slowly, all four wheels got set on the ground until the weight of the POD was on this structure of bars. Then he raised the POD slightly from the bed of the truck…

and drove the truck out from under the POD!

I love how the POD looks, dangling in mid-air like this. (Please don’t drop my Singer sewing machine on the concrete! I really do plan to use it one day.)

Then very slowly, he lowered the POD…

lowered some more… (fascinating! I can feel my stress levels dropping even now)…

and set it on the ground (aaaah).

After he unhooked the chains, he steered the POD bar-structure thing up over the POD and back to the bed of the truck…

and started tucking the little wheels back up near the sides of the bed!

Then he drove away as fast as he could from the lady with the camera.

Actually, he was a nice guy, and I could tell he thought the POD was cool, too, in an alien-spaceship-landing way.

What wasn’t so cool was all the shifting of our stuff that occurred in-transit, as the POD went from truck to truck to the final POD station. Oh well. We had packed it ourselves, and nothing was ruined in the end. And even if it had been… living without that stuff for two months makes me wonder how badly we needed it anyway.

Order a POD today! It’s good for de-cluttering and de-stressing alike.