Just in case.

I think I'm ready...

Ready to talk about the move.

Let's start with the reassurance that all is well now. As you see, one little explorer is finally comfortable enough with the place to venture into the thinner atmosphere of the mantle:


However, it was not always so, for everyone involved. I'll warn you here, though, this may be terribly boring. It was traumatic to me and, like a no-good-very-bad hangover, has me saying I'll never move again. I think it's mostly a testament to how ill-prepared we were. At any rate, I won't be offended if you stop reading here ;-)

A couple of weeks ago, I began the task of reserving a truck. Uhaul gets terrible reviews and ain't cheap. Ryder and Budget are, you know, there. And are a little cheaper. But Penske seemed to be the best deal around. We got a 16 foot truck, including insurance and tax, for 48 hours and with no miles restrictions for the same price as a 17 footer from Uhaul for 24 hours with 85 miles before tax and insurance. I thought this seemed like the way to go just in case. Just in case we needed to make 2 trips. Just in case something happened to the truck. Just in case we needed to make a few extra stops. I didn't see any of this being an actuality, but...you know...just in case.

Day The First. We go to the mattress place with the truck to pick up our Denver Mattress (I know not house related, but I'd like to extol the virtues of Denver Mattress of Springdale, Arkansas in a later post). Well, the warehouse is closed on Thursdays and so a salesman-- the ONLY salesman-- had to get our mattress for us. A bit of a wait.

Then we had some car jockeying to do. This involved the jockeying of usable car batteries as well. And then driving 2 of these cars to Adam's parents' house. Then we had to rummage through his dad's tools to find allen wrenches that fit the passenger side mirror of the truck (it was waaayyy loose). By that time we needed lunch.

Speed up to the end of the day...Everything didn't fit. Everything we'll keep probably would have. However, we hadn't really thrown everything away that we'd planned to or taken everything to the salvation army. Trips to the landfill cost a small fortune in that town and we have some ridiculous extra cahrges for each bag of trash that sits outside the ONE trashcan. It's good for restricting waste, I guess. But bad for cleaning out the house. Fort Smith, on the other hand, has none of these problems. So we drove it down packed full of our furniture, unloaded our new mattress and slept with plans of returning the next day.

Day The Second. We got up early, unloaded the truck, drove it back up and loaded it again. Glad we had unlimited mileage. Glad we had 2 days. This time, we filled it with a lot of trash in addition to our stuff. We had also planned to clean and be done by day's end. Well, midnight rolls around, we have a sleepy ten year old and still have done no cleaning. So we leave. Unload the trash that night into our trailer. Unload the cats. And here's where it got really bad.

Our little guy you see up there? Totally laid back. Very chill. Nothing perturbs him. Easy going. The girls? They are total neurotic messes. One cried the whole way down, the other had to be cornered by two of us, one with a sheet and the other with a carrier and stuffed into her box. She kept trying to bite when we tried the more conventional route of, you know, just putting her in the box. Anyway, we took all their favorite blankets and toys and litter boxes and scratchers and cleaned out the laundry room for them. We didn't really think they'd need to be restricted to one room. This was just in case.

Well, we let the little man out of his box and he growls, bites, hisses, snarls, spits, grunts and otherwise acts like nothing we've seen from him. He won't let one of the other cats out of her cage. He cowers and lashes out at us. Meanwhile, the one that had to be trapped like a wilder animal than she is, was fine. She sniffed, she was interested, she let us pet her. It was very strange, indeed.

However, you can see that all is now well. It took a few days, but we're ok now. Better than before, I think. We'll see. So back to the move...

Day The Third. Get up at 6 am and unload truck. Return truck. Take trailer to dump. Wait in line at the dump for 45 minutes (it was $5 day at this landfill, making it a popular spot). We passed 30 cars in line on the way out. I'm not sure it would be worth saving the money at that point. Lunch-- mmmmm IHOP.

And a little leisurely unpacking, doing a few loads of dishes-- yeah that's right! We packed our dirty dishes. And our dirty clothes. Gotta test out the new appliances, right?

And here was the nice part-- it was 70º all weekend. Beautiful. Sunny. We grilled out and spent much time on the porch and patio.

Day The Fourth. Mill around house in the morning, and spend all afternoon at the old house cleaning, saying goodbye, and otherwise reminiscing.

And now we're in. It's been a long, long weekend. But we've cooked a couple of meals in the kitchen. Used all the appliances. Run into a few problems with the hot water heater. I'll post about some of those things later.

It just seemed like the move alone deserved a little special attention all by itself.