Moving Day is May 25
The move in Bay Weekly’s future is an 800-pound gorilla making a big mess in the here and now.
1629 Forest Drive is still our office, and will be until Tuesday, May 29. We’re doing business here, and putting out the paper as we’ve done every week for 19 years. At the same time, we’re letting go, demolishing the space we’ve worked in since December, 2007.
We’re only moving across the street, literally, but that doesn’t play the way husband Bill Lambrecht’s earliest move did. He used his little red wagon to help his family move from to 603 to 609 Maple Street in Bloomington, Illinois. If we were to try that across Forest Drive, we’d be losers in a human game of Frogger.
So movers are coming May 25.
Moving is a good time to take stock of all you’ve accumulated. In our past offices, we’ve been blessed — or cursed — with ample storage space.
Now we’re trying to get rid of tons of stuff so the movers won’t have to lift it. More salient, so we won’t have a full 19 years of collected paper, electronics, plastic and cords to cram into our new space.
So these days, when we’re not newspapering, we’re delving, touching, sorting, remembering, boxing and preparing to relocate all sorts of stuff.
Production manager Betsy Kehne was the early bird. Her once well-appointed office was stripped and boxed weeks ago. Now she’s working behind barricades of boxes, likely as much for efficiency as for space’s sake. The boxes keep us from bothering her while she’s creating ads for our annual Summer Guide coming May 24, as well as making each week’s paper.
Betsy and most of us are sustainably minded, thus loath to throw away anything reusable. That habit makes us think very creatively.
Leigh Glenn’s feature story this week, A to Z Recycling, was written with us as well as you in mind.
Much of our gorilla’s weight is in paper. Historic paper, so there’s the compulsion to read every piece before consigning to Arnold Elementary, the Knoll kids’ school, to add to the Abitibi Paper Retriever to help raise a bit of money for school projects.
Photos are especially demanding. Our recycler doesn’t accept them. Will the discards have to be thrown away? That possibility — and the 1,000 words of story each one tells — means I’m on my third round of purposeful sorting.
We’ve got enough cords to plug in all of Annapolis. For them, I bumped into a bright idea. I’ve got an appointment at Best Buy to get my car fitted for the 21st century with a radio-CD player with Bluetooth capacity. On that trip, I’ll be taking cords by the boxful to shove into that store’s electronics recycling bins.
Our brightest idea is Annmarie Garden, to be creatively repurposed into art. For the new artLab at Calvert County’s art center, we’re packing everything but the kitchen sink. We’re leaving that.
Into Annmarie boxes we’re packing CDs, old tapes, the plastic cases for both, old index, note and business cards, plastic sleeves for name badges and lots of quirky oddities. It’s no problem that Annmarie wants donations in quantities of a dozen or more similar items so they can be incorporated into lessons. We’ve got plenty of everything.
As I write, Patuxent Roll-Off’s big dumpster is arriving. That doesn’t make the landfill the fate for all that goes into that big red box. It will be delivered to a sorting station and every useful bit of its contents broken down for recycling.
This is the day of reckoning at 1629 Forest Drive.
At the same time, we’re home-making at our new office. Lisa Knoll managed the purchase and reconstruction of Suite 1A at 1160 Spa Road, making it all look effortless when it was anything but. On the first workday after settlement, reconstruction began. Since the mid-1980s, our space was the office of ophthalmologist Dr. William Ahern. As well as walls that didn’t work for us, we had hand sinks in every room. Thanks to Chuck Barton, odd walls and sinks alike are gone.
A crew from Annapolis Painting rejuvenated our walls. And any day now, Floor Systems of Dunkirk and Deale is laying new carpet.
All advertisers, they are Bay Weekly heroes.
One more paper plus Summer Guide to go here. Vol. xx No. 22, on the streets on May 31, will come to you from 1160 Spa Road.
That’s the plan, and we’re sticking to it.