All those who are nave enough to think all of my hassles of buying and selling a home

would end on moving day, raise your right hand.

OK, I have to put my hand down now, because it is too hard to type with just my left hand.

In the first year of writing this column, I wrote a piece called Much Ado About Stuff. It had to do with the fact that just about everything in my sons' lives at the time could be summed up with their one favorite word.

Stuff.

They had school stuff. When they went out, they were going to do stuff. Perhaps most perturbing was the green stuff I'd find growing on plates under their beds, whenever I would begin to wonder why we no longer had enough place settings for a dinner for two.

They were teenagers at the time. We no longer have anywhere near that amount of stuff to deal with in our lives. It has more to do with the fact that only one of them still lives with us, than a decrease in their penchant for leaving the remnants of grilled cheese sandwiches on the plates under their beds.

When moving day arrived last week, I discovered that my wife and also have a lot of stuff. In fact, it was enough to fill a five-ton truck to capacity. The movers expected to load up in a couple of hours because we were just moving out of a two bedroom apartment.

They weren't prepared for our stuff.

It took six hours to load the truck. Apparently, they've seen people with less stuff in four-bedroom, double garage, split-level houses.

We only moved five blocks. I was really wishing I could have convinced the movers to charge by the mile instead of by the hour. I was picturing money with wings flying up into the sky, the way it used to in cartoons, with every passing hour.

No matter how prepared you think you are for moving day, there are always last minute items to deal with, and stresses that you could not have predicted.

Diane and I sat in the living room on the night before the move and congratulated ourselves for being so prepared. When the movers arrived, we quickly determined that our self-praise was premature. While they started hauling all of our stuff out to the truck, we were madly rushing around the apartment doing all of the things that still needed to be done.

Who knew that there could be that many cables to detach from the back of the television set, or that unhooking the internet and telephone would mean having to prostrate myself under a desk for twenty five minutes?

Naturally, we should not have expected the weather to cooperate. Moving day was the coldest day of the year thus far. It rained. It hailed. Even the odd snow flake fluttered to the ground, despite the fact that I thought snow was banned in this part of the country.

When I went to take a load of stuff to the car, I spent ten minutes looking for my coat. Finally, I asked Diane if she had seen it.

She had.

She packed it, and it was already somewhere on the moving van.

"You packed my coat?" I asked trying hard to imagine what logical excuse she could have.

As I have said many times before, I know that no matter what, the meager fact that I am the husband in this relationship means that Diane will always have a logical reason for doing absolutely anything. Any doubts that I might have about the rationale will be wrong, because if a man speaks in the forest of a marital relationship and there is no one there to hear him, he is still wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

"You must have left it in the packing zone," she said.

I thought about pointing out that the entire place was currently 'the packing zone." I thought about it, but I was smart enough not to say it.

So now I am sitting in the new house; the unpacking zone, if you will.

I still haven't seen my coat.

2006, Gordon Kirkland