Monday Moves

Here we go again! It's packing party week! Here's the truck with our 27 pallets of cartons and flat boxes, and it's hard to believe in just a week, Lord willing, they'll be pulling the four trucks of packed boxes on their way to Charlotte.

The truck arrived bright and early this morning but there was a snag when we found several pallets had been turned upside down when loaded by the shipper. This meant we couldn't get a pallet jack under them and THAT meant we had to hand offload several pallets of cartons of boxes. It took nearly 2.5 hours to complete the job of pulling all 27 pallets into place but our stalwart workers did it!

Here's the cartons sitting out waiting for us to empty a pallet so we could re-palletize them to move them with the pallet jack. It's an old saying for our shoebox team but still true..."Who has more fun than we do?"

After the unloading we tried to make sure we had everything we ordered. I think we came up two cartons of boxes (200 boxes) short. Maybe God didn't want us to fill those? And we're hoping we have all the cartons we need because some of them are ones that have been used before and aren't in bundles. God knows that, too. 

Meanwhile, there was lots of moving going on today. Jim and Myron took the truck to Pam's and loaded the 400 boxes of school packs she packed in her home and got them back to the church. Then they got the many boxes of stuff that Joe and Karen were storing in their home. 

AND the box folding got underway at about 1:00 pm and we folded until 4:30.

Here's the hallway of the church before we started placing boxes there. You won't see it look this way again for another 5 days! We got 864 boxes folded in just 3.5 hours today with 10 volunteers. I was pretty excited about that.

Then we headed out to Kit's house where the bulk of the stuffed animals have been stored in her front living room all year. Our crew transferred them from her house to a donated pod in her driveway that will be transported to the church on Wednesday.

And somewhere in there Ellen went to Walmart, found pencils on sale, and bought almost 10,000 for our 2020 boxes. Gotta shop those sales!

Tomorrow Myron will have the truck here at 8:00 am to get the stuffed animals out of our attic and spare bedrooms, then at 11:00 the guys will go to another warehouse site that donated space to us to pick up water bottles.

We're actually ahead of last year! Praising God for all these Monday moves.