I thought i'd try and get an estimate from Two Men and a Truck over the weekend.

At their website, they've thoughtfully decided to offer no hints whatsoever as to what I might end up paying. They do offer, however, a ""Quick Estimate"" form. Filling out this form resulted in a cheery reply that they'll contact me by email someday in the future. That's not what i mean by quick.

Today I received the email - there was no information in the body of the email at all. If I was a spam filter, i'd be awfully supicious.

The email included five (5!) attached word documents. Luckily I happen to have MS Office installed... tho my knee jerk reaction is to simply delete the email. Why should i bother?

In the interest of science I opened a couple of the attachements. The first was a long form letter vaguely alluding to the fact that I might pay their workers 92 dollars an hour on weekdays, 115 or so on weekends. Unless I need more men, then, of course... blah. That's as far as i got.

The other attachments were a random assortment of forms to print out, checklist to peruse and the odd bit of marketing fluff.

So anyway, I think this could be made much simpler. Just shoot me a form letter (in the BODY of the email... that's what it's there for!) in which you bullet point the important information... namely, these are our hours, this is how much it costs, etc. Then a nice link or web address with the instructions ""Click here to Schedule a Move."" Then, instead of having me print out a Word document, fax or mail or ... well, i don't know, do something with it, then making phone calls.. then... you see, i'm not sure where this process ends!

Lets enumerate some steps and get on with it. 1. Look at these prices... still interested? Good, then 2. Fill this out. 3. Ring Ring... Hello, you want us to do stuff for money, ok, how's wednesday at 2ish? 4. Do stuff 5. Money changes hands, handshakes all around, cheers - hurrah hurrah! 6. Nothing. We're done.

Instead, I just deleted the whole mess and got on with my life.

Speaking of which, i'm moving right now. And chile can crawl like a banshee. If banshees crawl.

Chile is learning to crawl. He's got the basics down and you can really see the neurons firing as he plants one knee after the other on the carpet. Kid is gonna need knee pads.

We signed the lease on our new digs today. We're moving up to the ground zero of STL surburban sprawl. It's a nice place. Amy is already getting all Trading Spaces about the move.

I uploaded a new set of pictures to the site. These are shots of our trip to california for my brother's wedding that we took earlier this month.

Amy covered our phone in buttons today.

I'm halfway through Stephenson's ""Snow Crash."" I finished ""Cryptonomicon"" earlier this week. It's really hard to read with a baby - your idle hours are severely cut. Good books all around tho.

Max's new fun habit is trying to feed everybody. If you give him something to gnaw on he pushes it at your mouth and won't stop until you try some. It's terribly adorable.

I had to go in to work on Saturday to rescue a wheezing database server. The transaction log had filled up the hard drive and was coughing up a lung. In the process of detaching the database... something happened. So the ten minute procedure turned into a five hour one. I eventually had to attach a VERY old copy of the database, restore from a backup that was much to old, then perform a magical series of hacks that pushed the data from the old mdf into the newish ones, back into temporary ones than over to the final copies. I'd offer details... but i'm too kind.

We're back in St.L after a week in the SF bay area. My younger brother got married and all that. I'll tell ya about it sometime... happy mothers day!