The moving company has disavowed all responsibility for the teetering pile of bagged packing paper and significant stack of flattened boxes in my garage. I am so done with Sheffield Moving & Storage; if I had the skills to hex them, I’d do it with glee.

My back is on strike again after I picked up the cross-cut shredder to move it upstairs on Monday. Yes, I performed a proper squat and lifted correctly; no, my efforts did not make a whit of difference, except maybe that I didn’t displace a disc. Five steps up, as I turned on the landing (box-stepping), I felt that old, familiar feeling — CLUNG! — as the web of muscle across my back at the L5-L6 level went into spasm. I put down the shredder right there and left it until Tosh turned up this morning, apparently recovered from the plague.

The furniture repair people sent a brace of real bruisers to take the four pieces damaged by the movers off to rehab. I enjoyed watching them not bang or break anything on the way down and out, working their way through Tosh’s tools and pieces of stair.