The perils of moving and satanic TV sets: Editor’s Note

I spent the last two weeks moving into a new home, and I can honestly say my arms are about 6 inches longer.

I’m covered in bruises, and the thought of scrubbing out a grimy fridge sets my teeth on edge.

This happens to me every time I have the chance to pick up and live somewhere else.

About a month before my move, I’ll look around my apartment, usually from a prone position on the couch. My eyes take in just two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen.

Piece of cake, I think to myself. Then I yawn and go back to sleep.

Fast-forward to moving day, and my tiny apartment has somehow transformed itself into a hall of horrors. I swear it’s as if gremlins are hiding surprises for me around every corner and under every piece of furniture.

What was just a room with a couch, an armchair, a bookcase and a television set has become an entertainment warehouse, with about 6,500 videos and CDs, bobbing on a flow of another 7,000 video and CD cases that don’t match.

My dryer, seemingly taking a cue from the living room, begins sucking socks, shorts, shirts and underpants into the black hole that exists between itself and the wall.

There are even clothes from people I don’t know lurking behind the dryer. Yesterday I pulled a large pair of men’s bathing trunks from the nether regions of my appliance. Neither my daughter nor I have ever harbored an urge to go for a swim in men’s oversized boxers. I’ll assume these were from the last guy who lived here.

Moving right along, we’ve got the refrigerator that seems to keep multiplying large, useless jars of pickles. I honestly do not recall buying a jar of pickles in about a year, but I’ve found about three barrel-sized units of the things, now that I have to empty the fridge out.

And I am faced with the same question I have with every move that involves pickles: How long are the darn things edible?

And then there is the salad crisper at the bottom of the fridge. I’m sure I’m not the only one who on the first day they moved in, put an actual vegetable in it, for the first and last time.

Fast forward five years, and I’m making the acquaintance of that veggie once again, only now it’s turned into some horrible crud thing eating its way through the so-called “crisper.” Left for another five years, it will probably take over the kitchen and start paying rent. At this point, I am not certain what the vegetable even was.

I haven’t gotten to the bruises part of my story yet. And it’s good. Suffice it to say, my apartment on this move had it out for me. Not unlike H.A.L. of the “Space Odyssey” saga.

My most impressive set of injuries came gratis of the television set, which was hell-bent on keeping me from putting it in the dumpster. I won the battle, but only barely, and limping on one leg.

The TV, a college-student reject from Goodwill, never had a remote control, and the channel-changing buttons had fallen out, forcing us to stick other things into it, to change programs.

We’d actually used it like that for years, euphamstically calling it the “fitness TV,” because you had to get up off your butt to make it do anything. It was time for this crummy piece of hardware to move on, fitness niche or not.

So on moving day, I hoisted the set up to carry it out the door and to my car. It nearly popped my arms out of the sockets, because the cord wrapped itself around my leg on the way up.

Hurting and furious, I dropped it onto the ground and grabbed the cord, preparing to rip it out for good.

But the fight wasn’t over yet.

When I yanked the cord up, the set actually did a complete somersault in the air, smashing into my shin, and landing with a crunch on top of my foot. I saw stars from the pain. I couldn’t even move to get it off my foot.

When I finally did wrench it off, it was grimly satisfying to drive the cursed thing to the dumpster. Lurching like Quasimodo with my bum, throbbing foot and shin, I hobbled over to the dumpster and rolled it in.

I peered into the dumpster and grimaced at it. The set stared balefully back, with its one cathode-ray-tube eye. H.A.L. could take a page or two from this thing.

So, finally, with that chapter, and a few more unsavory moments behind me, the keys have been dropped off, and I am ready to start anew in a beautiful townhouse with my family. We will unpack boxes, and just as it happens in motherhood, the pain of the moment will be a thing of the past.

And, once again, when opportunity comes knocking, I am certain I’ll find myself laying on the couch, happily making plans for an upcoming move, completely underestimating what I will need to do.

Maybe next time someone should offer me a pickle and force me to look in the crisper.