Our First of Many Moves to Come

When the first details about Danny's new job and consequent relocation began to trickle in, I was overwhelmed with the complexity of the arrangements. Apparently, my mind is still swimming in this rip current of interminable logistics. The movers arrived at 9 a.m. yesterday morning to wrap our things in obscene amounts of paper and cardboard. Danny and I slept only a couple hours the night before, organizing, segregating, and labeling everything. But movers on a mission don't have time to read labels like **STAYS!**, and I now have perishable food items that will be perishing away for the next 7 months in a storage facility, next to my melting candles, a bottle of ant poison, and the condo owner's throw blanket, no doubt. Perhaps I would have caught the errors if it weren't for that, despite all our efforts, we were not done labeling before the movers arrived, and I was frantically trying to sort the Master bedroom, bath and closet while the movers did their business elsewhere. Another disadvantage to making split second packing decisions in sleep deprivation and confusion, is that you tend to have thoughts such as, " I shaved my legs this morning! I can put my razors in storage!" Twelve and a half hours later, the truck pulled off with our stuff. I don't know that I had ever been so sleepy in my life. And I will have hairy legs tommorrow to boot.

Danny returned to our semi-vacant apartment today to wrap up loose ends while I stayed home with the kids and did school. When my mom dropped us off in the afternoon, the apartment didn't look all that different from how it looked when we left it last night. I ran around in panic, gathering hangers, emptying trash cans, stuffing suitcases, but it was no use. There was more to do than could be done before church, where we were looking forward to seeing our church family one last time. Now it's midnight before our original intended departure date and we still have hours of work ahead of us to clear out the apartment. We're staying an hour away at my mom's house, which makes for long trips to deliver those random items that weren't quite "storage" but are not necessary in the next 3 weeks. There are an alarming amount of items that fit that description. Like my crochet rug-in-the-making. And all the food in our refrigerator. I packed our suitcases with the wrong time frame in mind so those have to be disemboweled and repacked. Otherwise, we won't fit it all in the van. Which we probably wont be able to do anyway. I'm desperately behind in school lessons (though we did get to a particularly appropriate reading on  nomads today). I suppose even now I still don't know what we're doing, or what I would do differently next time. I don't even know when we're leaving.