[ Sorry to be late. Picking up parents from the airport. ]
My other brother, as mentioned, accepted a job in Massachusetts, and he'd asked if there were anything in my storage locker he could use to set up his apartment. He needed everything. I had pretty much all the contents of my old grad-student apartment, and I was glad to donate whatever might be useful. The past two weeks I've been cleaning out my storage locker, partly to arrange stuff which might be to his needs, partly to just clear out a path so that we could get the queen-size bed free. The key element getting things up would be my sister, who was originally going to bring stuff up in the trailer she uses for the horse ... things ... she does, but it's an uncovered trailer and it's been raining weekends the last several months. And only this month hit on the innovation of not raining during the week, too.
So she rented a trailer from U-Haul, and was irritated by the trailer the size she wanted only being available from way out of the way of where she lives, or where my parents live, although it was curiously near where I work, which I didn't go to Friday (and it wouldn't have simplified anything anyway). She had called me, in fact, to see if I were free earlier, but I called back and left messages which she didn't receive --- I say because she never answers her cell phone --- and so she arrived while I was out at the library and she was frustrated waiting for me to get back. Well, I'd left messages saying when I expected to be back, so she ought to have been able to find other things to do.
She did, when she came, bring her dogs with her. She's had one for years, and picked up another at a shelter while her husband was away for the weekend and the comical irrelevant name she gave it as a placeholder name became permanent by the time her husband got back. Anyway, she brought both dogs here, and they were eager to have all sorts of new things to poke around on, and to make the cats vanish into Panic Dimension. The dogs actually like cats as a general concept, but the cats need time to learn that, and they weren't taking the time. Too bad.
Trivia: Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa's Robot Patent of 1775 restricted the time peasants were required to spend laboring for their masters to between one and three days per week, leaning toward the longer time. It was still challenging keeping the limit respected. Source: A History Of The Habsburg Empire, 1526 - 1918, Robert A Kann.
Currently Reading: The Story Of Philosophy, Will Durant.