Meanwhile, I am back at the apartment in New York, and having slept only two hours last night (went bowling with friends, got back well after midnight, had to pack and then get up for a 6:15 AM flight), I am about to take a nice, long map. Zzzzzz…

Here is a photo, taken yesterday, of kitchen stuff being gathered for packing at the Zaks’ house. The movers are coming today to haul the stuff away to Arizona. I left my camera with Becky so she can take pictures of the house being stripped down.

I am on the ground in NYC. Back for two and a half days. Should get my laptop back later today. Job interview Thursday.

Dr. Zak awoke this morning and went out into the garage to discover Toby strutting around, bursting with pride at her latest feat — she had captured and killed a mouse.

Toby’s latest blog post suggests she is still beside herself with glee. It also features a somewhat more close-up view of the mouse… if you can stomach that. :)

For the most part, yesterday’s daylong moving party — hauling Shannon’s stuff from her ex-boyfriend Willy’s place to her parents’ house — was pretty uneventful. But it got exciting right at the end of the night.

Becky hauled three full loads of stuff in her parents’ large van. The third vanload included a bunch of bedding on the roof rack: a comforter on the bottom, a heavy metal headboard on top of that, and a large box-spring mattress on top of that. It was all tied down by Shannon’s friend Bob with some orange rope — literally the only rope we could scare up at Willy’s house — that Bob thought would be enough to hold it.

So Becky and I drove off with the mattress in tow above us. Not three minutes after pulling out of the driveway, though, we heard some funny noises coming from the direction of our roof, and I looked out my window to see the mattress severely listing toward the right-hand side. I told Becky to pull over. Vikki and Kristy, who had been a ways behind us, soon caught up and pulled over when they saw us. Working together, we re-centered the mattress.

Vikki and Kristy suggested that Becky slow down a bit. They said they’d follow right behind us, and promised to honk their horn if anything went wrong.

Maybe 60 seconds had passed when Becky and I noticed Vikki’s headlights flashing behind us. (Apparently she was honking, too, but we couldn’t hear it over the country music we had playing on the radio.) I looked out the window again, and this time saw the mattress not listing to one side, but sticking almost straight up in the air, looking like it was about ready to take off.

We pulled over again, as did Vikki and Kristy. They were both laughing hysterically. (Apparently, the full view of this mattress at an almost 90-degree angle from the roof was quite an amusing sight.) For my part, I had visions of the mattress coming loose and flying backwards onto Vikki’s car, blocking her view while at the same time freeing the rope on our roof and thus releasing the heavy metal headboard to come crashing off the van and onto the ground, possibly breaking our windshield, or perhaps hers, on its way down. But I kept that nightmare scenario to myself and let everyone enjoy the hilarity of the scene, provided of course that we also do our best to actually fix it.

Which we did. Our next attempt was to use some netting from the trunk to further secure the mattress to the front portion of the roof. That helped somewhat, and when we started up again, Becky slowed down a bit more, which helped too. But we still had to contend with the mattress sticking up at roughly a 45-degree angle. It seemed stable enough, though, so we kept going.

As we drove along with our uplifted mattress, I called Shannon’s cell phone with my cell phone and told her about the mattress situation. (Shannon and Bob were still a ways back along the road in Bob’s van.) Apparently Shannon told Bob, and apparently Bob had the same nightmare scenario in his head that I did, because he sped up, and before you know it, he was just behind Vikki and Kristy, trying to keep an eye on us.

He arrived just in time to see a tractor-trailer truck pass us, creating a huge wind tunnel that again sent the mattress flying almost straight up. Bob flashed his brights at Vikki, who flashed her brights at us. We pulled over. So did Vikki. So did Bob.

As it happened, the spot along the side of road where we stopped was right next to a large cow pasture, so it smelled rather unpleasant. But that didn’t stop the girls from continuing to revel in the hilarity of the situation.

Finally, though, we had a man with a plan: Bob. Although he didn’t have any rope in his van, he did have a 100-foot-long outdoor electrical extension cord, and as desperate times now called for desperate measures, that cord was going to become a rope.

With Shannon’s help (the other girls mostly stood around and joked, and I mostly took pictures), Bob strung the cord around and around and around the roof rack, until the mattress was thoroughly secure. “That thing ain’t goin’ nowhere,” he said a couple of times.

He was right. From that point on, we made it home safe and sound, without so much as a significant budge by the mattress.

But yeah. It was quite an adventure.

Click here for a complete gallery of photos of the Great Mattress Adventure!!!

You can’t see it through the clouds and rain here in Buffalo, but right now the Sun has a sunspot as big as Jupiter. Check it out!

Here are the matching tattoos!

We are all done moving Shannon’s stuff, despite a drama involving a mattress nearly falling off the top of Becky’s van — look for pictures of that soon. But anyway, Shannon is officially moved back in, for now, with her parents. Yay!

Packing the van, again, with Shannon’s stuff.

We are helping Shannon move today. Already moved a van load and a car load of boxes, now going back for more.

The Cat Formerly Known As Ugmo, Froggy, has gotten so big! Awww!

Ruuuuuben is on stage now! Check out the audio posts below for clips of Clay and screaming girls. :)