(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Moving Update [1] ['View Profile', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Eric Yonce', 'Chloris Creator'] Date: 2026-04-24 Good morning, Daily Kossacks. This is my second attempt at this post because this new engine is…not optimal. What happened to me is that I messed up with the title image and I couldn’t correct it. I ended up with two of the same image and I couldn’t remove one. So I copied the text and moved the post to the trash, then tried to paste it into a new post. Guess what? That doesn’t work either. So here I am having to recreate it. Put me down as not a wordpress fan. Anyway, on to the update! (And there are STILL 2 images in the preview! Holiest of F*cks) Many of you will remember that I am moving from Texas to New Mexico because my state leadership has made it very clear that while they find gay people icky, they find trans people abominable and I feel like my freedom will soon be in danger. More than it is now, I mean. I’ve been enormously busy as my lease here is up on May 18 and I really don’t want to pay another month at a month to month cost increase. The management has been working with me though and since I won’t have any help unloading at my destination until the first week of June, I was going to move the last week in May. I’ve learned several things while tackling this move, the most important of which is the fact that the long distance moving industry is a cesspool of gaslighting, creative fees, surcharges and endless, unrelenting spam. I’m going to describe my experiences while avoiding directly naming companies for the most part. My wonderful brother, who is a staunch ally of mine, having finally ceded that I was correct politically in 2016, (no, he didn’t vote Trump, he’s always voted Libertarian before) and a very strong ally of the LGBTQ community, offered to help me leave the state if I could find a safe place to go. I was just going to get him to send his donation through PayPal but as I discussed it with him, it occurred to me to start a GoFundMe. I had never done one but I’ve donated to a few, so why not? I started the fundraiser and several of my dear friends donated on top of my brother’s $3,000 in seed money. The fundraiser is still up at https://gofund.me/79ef372b8 if anyone cares to donate. It has been doing okay but has stagnated at the level it is now for a couple of days. I’ll say it like I’ve told everyone else: if you can give, I’ll be very appreciative but you should not feel obliged to give, nor should you feel guilty for not giving. It’s up to individuals and I’m not harboring ill feelings toward anyone for not giving. It’s not going to change how I feel if you don’t or can’t. Plan A Fundraising begun, I began searching for transportation by calling PODs, (yes I’m naming this one because they can’t call this a slander or besmirching their business). My good friend used them to move from San Antonio to San Jose a few years ago. and he had a great experience with them! It cost him around $1,100 at the time, which was only about 5 years ago. I figured it would cost more, since Trump has been starting wars in the Middle East but that would be moderated by the fact that the distance of my move is roughly half the distance he moved. Ha! As if! PODs told me that they don’t serve my destination zip code, period, end of story, stfu about it. Ugh! That left me researching more conventional moving companies. Plan B I started Plan B by googling moving companies, (yeah, I know and I’m still paying for it). I found a likely looking moving company that claimed to have an online tool that you use to get a free estimate of moving costs. I filled it out; pick up location, destination location, moving dates, contact information…. After I filled it out, instead of an estimate, I was given several phone numbers to call and I immediately started getting phone calls and emails from all sorts of moving companies from Florida to Timbuk fucking tu. It turns out the “moving company” was actually a broker and they sold my information just as soon as I typed it in. I learned a couple of lessons then and I proceeded by carefully searching moving companies with duckduckgo instead to limit my footprint. But even with an incognito browser, the damage was already done. My YouTube feed is still wall to wall moving ads and I’ve blocked more emails and phone numbers in the last month than any other time since the beginning of my cyber presence. For future reference, do NOT fill out online moving estimate tools. They are nothing but spamming begs. I started looking at reviews and trying to separate agents from brokers and finally settled on a very well known company which anyone who has ever driven on a highway in North America would be familiar with. They had a stellar reputation, solid reviews and most importantly, safeguarded my information. I filled out their application online and was contacted by their agent and we set up a meeting at my place so she could inventory my belongings. We scheduled it for 4/17/2016 at 4pm. The day before that was to take place, she called and said that she had injured her back and we would have to reschedule. Okay, that’s a little odd but shit happens so I agreed as long as it wouldn’t affect the moving date. We rescheduled for Tuesday, 4/21 at 3pm. When Monday came, I got another call from her, asking if we were still on for Tuesday at 10am. WTF? Didn’t we schedule that for 3pm? I have it right here on the scratch pad I keep handy on my desk. No, she said, she had to be in Buda at 3pm and we had scheduled for 10am. By now, my Spidey sense was full on tingling but there was nothing for it but to move forward. It really put a crimp in my plans for the day. I had arranged to pick up some boxes and packing supplies from my old workplace and run some other errands but now I had to rearrange everything around the new schedule. Imagine my surprise when she called me the next morning just before 9am, asking which apartment was mine. 9am? We scheduled for 10am! Nope, she assures me that we were supposed to do it at 9. Bullshit and now I’m in full blown doubt here but she’s outside and there’s was no reason to refuse her entry. She came in and looked around, making notes, asking the expected questions and it wasn’t an unpleasant interaction. It turns out that it costs significantly more to move the week of Memorial Day. No big deal, if I move it up a week I won’t be overstaying my lease and having to pay a prorated, daily rent. We settled on a move out date of May 21st. She plugged all of the information into her laptop but when she announced the cost, (north of $3,800) I had to haggle with her a bit because that was bumping the limits of my budget. When I told her I was moving the electronics myself, she lowered the cost by $300. That still seemed a little high for an 800 mile move but the reason why PODs didn’t service that zip code is because it’s a podunk town an hour away from anything that can be remotely called a “city”, (and trust me, even that is pushing it). I can see why it would be a little more expensive considering the truck would be more than half empty going to that place so I didn’t balk much, just shrugged my shoulders thinking it is what it is. “Okay” she said “I just need to check…Oh yeah. New Mexico has a fee for moving trucks entering the state….It’s only 300 dollars. But you’re lucky that it’s not New York or New Jersey”. Yeah, you read that right. The $300 I had just saved by moving my own electronics had suddenly been evaporated by a portage fee that I had never heard of outside the realm of hazardous material transport. I didn’t have a way to argue at the moment and I would still have enough to move, if everything was turn key, paid and done. She promised that it would be, then made up a contract, we affixed our respective signatures, she said she would forward me the details, we shook hands and went our separate ways. Whew! That’s out of the way…or so I thought~ The next day is Wednesday, April 22nd and I picked up a very lucrative shift at work because it was Administrative Professionals Day and I made a decent bit. AT this point I had put in notice with my workplace, based on the conversation with the agent the prior morning. With about an hour left in my shift, I got a phone call from the agent. She told me how she very regretfully had to inform me that since my move didn’t meet the 4,600lb minimum weight, they would need to tack on a surcharge of an additional $1,000. How very mightily she had struggled with the powers that be against it but it was to no avail. I had to pay more. Get that? I didn’t have enough shit for them to find worthwhile, although it’s not like it would cost them less to move more stuff. Well, needless to say, I pushed back. Aggressively. I pointed out that we had a contract and she promised to bring that up with the executives. A little bit later, she called back and she had gotten them to agree to the original contract but that my move time would now be a 3 day window, instead of a date certain and my delivery would be in a 4 week window. They wanted me to sit on floors, potentially until early July while, while my shit languished in some truck somewhere with other people’s shit being shoved onto it. I told her thanks but no thanks and as she has already breached the contract, I was under no obligation to continue. On to Plan C then… Plan C After that fiasco, I decided to take back the control I had ceded. I had a couple of options; I could rent a truck and a car dolly and move my own shizz while towing my car behind. I didn’t like this option because I had towed a much smaller car from Houston to Oxnard once and it wasn’t the most pleasant experience. I could rent a truck and drive it to New Mexico and fly back to get my car and drive it up. I really didn’t want to do that. I could rent a trailer, install a towing kit on my 2016 Honda Pilot and tow the trailer up there. As I really don’t have a lot of belongings, (like I pointed out, well under 2,000lbs) and there aren’t any super steep grades between here and there, I settled on that being the most likely to succeed with the least pain necessary. My car is in good shape, I just had my mechanic go over it with a fine tooth comb and the only reason I am renting a 12 x 6 trailer is because I need the taller entrance for my big bookshelf. So I put down a deposit on the trailer and scheduled pick up/drop off times, then I hired a small crew that works with Uhaul for help loading. I need tires for my automobile though. My tires are by no means illegal or may-pops but they are far too worn for me to be comfortable driving such a distance and especially while towing a load. So the next thing I did was visit the Discount Tire website and bought 4 new mid grade shoes for my car and scheduled installation. This morning I got up and went to talk to the nice gentlemen at Alamo Truck Parts here locally and paid for the towing package and scheduled installation. Now I have a couple of days to rest before it’s back to work. Next week I’m having tires installed, air conditioner looked at and possibly repaired, (though it’s likely to be out of my budget without new funds), and my old co-workers at TPS are feting me with lunch! Working people are the finest types of folks and I’m going to miss those men and women dearly. The week after is when I get the towing package installed. So that’s the update until now. Hopefully I won’t have any more surpr…. LMAO! I nearly said “no more surprises”. Okay I’m going to hope for no more show stopping, plan ending surprises. That’s all. If you got this far, thanks for reading. If you’d care to donate, I’ll be your friend for life. If not, heck I’ll still be your friend for life. I’m not promising anything extra but gratitude. I love you all and will keep you posted. I hate leaving just when it’s looking like we might take Senator John (Scyphozoa) Cornyn’s seat but no matter who occupies that one, I’ll still have Greg Abbott and Dan fucking Patrick to contend with. I’d rather leave in good order, under my own terms than have to flee in a panic. Be good to one another and take care. I’ll be back asap. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/24/800026720/community/moving-update/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/