Moving from California to Ohio Part 5: Arrival in Ohio

I arrived at my new home in Columbus, OH on Jan. 1, 2007, after riding from St. Louis with my new housemate Chris. We stopped at a Wendy's somewhere in Indiana. Since Wendy's is not very common in California, it was the first time I had eaten there in a long while.

Once at my new home, I met my other new housemate Se-Kyung and Chris' Dalmatian Jenny. The four of us share the top floor of a house. My room, as it was before I moved in, is shown below, with Jenny for scale.
The couch is now in the living room, but the chairs are still in my room. The portal on the left remained open for a few months. How it was finally turned into a proper closet will be told in an upcoming entry.

Our landlord Robert manages this house as part of Community Revitalization Associates, LLC. It is one of many efforts he is making to bring spiritual and economic revitalization to the neighborhood of Weinland Park. He lives across the street from us.

Since Ohio State does not pay for graduate student moving expenses, the cheapest way to get my possessions from California back to Ohio was shipping them via UPS and the USPS. I shipped my bicycle, books, clothes that would not fit in my suitcases, and sound system; that says something about my priorities. I either sold, gave away, or threw away all of the furniture, dishes, etc. that I had accumulated in California.

Robert agreed to accept the shipment at his house so he could store them safely until I returned. However, I apparently failed to communicate the magnitude of this shipment.

Since I packed and shipped the boxes in several stages, I never saw them all in one place until I arrived to claim them. I wish I would have taken pictures. They formed a wall about 5 feet (1.5 m) high by 10 feet (3 m) wide. Robert lent me an appliance dolly to haul them across the street to my room. Since the USPS has a discounted media mail rate for books, several of the boxes we filled with nothing but books, which made them rather heavy; a few of them were just slightly below the 70 lb. (31.8 kg) limit.

When I unpacked, I found almost everything was intact, except for a few VHS tapes. I was able to repair them by transplanting the tape from the broken plastic cases into new ones I purchased in Columbus.