THE LAST BOX!!!

If I could insert a drumroll here, I would. So imagine a drumroll, please.

I have officially opened and emptied the last box following the move to our new house that we closed on on November 14, 2008.

When I was packing the boxes and working on 4 hours sleep in a 72 hour period, there were times I would tape up the box and forget what I'd just put in it. This one almost turned out that way, with the 'I think' comment in parenthesis.

In case you can't read that, here it is up close:

This box had three shoebox-sized Sterilite boxes in it, and one 2-gallon Ziploc with the toys in it. I used a lot of 1- and 2-gallon Ziploc bags inside the boxes to move smaller items and keep them contained. And yes, I keep my kids' teeth. I don't know why. Ask me in a few years.

I popped open the box of old photos that were pre-kid, and with the exception of a couple thrown on the top, that's exactly what they were. Some of them made me reminisce, and some of them made me laugh, so I thought I'd share a few with you.

In December when I posted the three-part birth story for the girls (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), I mentioned that we never took any pictures of me when I was pregnant, but that there was one somewhere from the day I got my braces off, which also happened to be the day I got put on bed rest (I got the call later in the day after all the doctors had conversed on the phone). That picture was in this box. You can't really tell I'm pregnant, but I do have some really big bangs.

I also found the picture from our first Christmas card after the girls were born and out of the hospital, so they were just over a year old. I cut the side off since it had their names on it.

I'm not going chronologically, so here is a picture from a military ball of some type, probably the Christmas one, when we were at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, affectionately known to many of us as Fort Lost-in-the-Woods. This was probably somewhere around 1990 or 1991. I'd have to think too hard to do better than that.

This next picture is of our first cat, Cherokee. We got him about six months after we got married. He could be asleep in another room and wake up when he heard a banana being peeled. He loved them. He also loved spaghetti-o's. We also did not have a quality camera.

About a year and a half later we got him a friend. You know, so he wouldn't be lonely while we were in class. So now meet our second cat, Theodore.

Those two boys were best buds!

I will probably regret showing these next two pictures for the rest of my life, but I'm going to do it anyway. The first one is my very big hair, complete with very big bangs, my last year of college. I was working at the time on Christmas break in my aunt's children's clothing store when this picture was taken. Oh, and I even had a perm in my very naturally curly hair just to make it curlier and bigger. It was 1987. The glasses could have been a giveaway too.

During college after Hubby and I got married, he got me watching wrestling on TV. Now it was nothing like you see on TV today. I mean, it was real and everything. Oh, I'm kidding. But we did see one guy hit another guy with a chair once and it actually dented the chair. So one night we went with two other friends to Little Rock and sat in the second row to watch the wrestling matches, and to top it off, it was Fan Appreciation Night! Woo Hoo! So Hubby took pictures of me with the wrestlers as we went down the line and got autographs. Look at me in my floweredy jeans with Dr. Death. Cute, huh?

I guess if that's the most embarassing photo I own I'm doing pretty good, especially in this day and age with all that's out there.

And to think that this started as a post about finally being unpacked.

Memory Monday

From memory:

Psalm 1:1-3
"Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
or stand in the way of sinners
or sit in the seat of mockers.
But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers."

My goal was the entire chapter of Psalm 1 and I only got through half of it. I could give you all the reasons why but I'll just show you a few pictures that might help explain it.

Saturday morning's forecast called for about an inch of accumulation. Let's just say that Hubby couldn't keep the snow off the driveway or sidewalk, and there was more than enough for the kids to play in later in the afternoon. This was the truck from Virginia. These three men didn't know what hit them. They didn't look at The Weather Channel before they left and weren't really prepared. This truck had the 4,000 pounds of things that the military moved and stored for us, which was mostly our heaviest furniture, front porch/shed type items, and about 15 boxes.

Last week also brought our girls' 15th birthday, and I am so tardy in posting their birth story! I am going to do it tomorrow. I might have to make it a two-day story because I think it will probably get lengthy. Then when I'm done with it I will post some house pictures — actually inside! We still need to get our tree up, and Buddy's best friend and his mom are coming in from Virginia on Friday. I'm a little overwhelmed.

For next week's Memory Monday I will finish up with Psalm 1. I love Joanne's idea of memorizing the Christmas story from Luke. We used to read/quote it on Christmas at my grandparents' house before opening gifts in the afternoon. I am pretty sure it was in the KJV though. I don't have it completely memorized, so maybe after Psalm 1 I'll move on to it, but it will probably be the only thing I don't do in NIV.

That Was About As Close As I Get To Silence

And coming from a non-stop talker like me, that silence was probably deafening.

Thanks to everyone for the nice words while I was being silent on my blog. Believe me when I say I was not even close to silent in my actual everyday life. It's been a whirlwind. I want to update you, and I'll try to keep to the point, but knowing it's me you might want to prepare yourself. Go get a cup of coffee or a cup of tea, or if you live somewhere that it doesn't feel like the frigid arctic (read between the lines that someone still needs to acclimate here), go get a cold drink. This could potentially take a while.

I wish I was as together as Betsy thinks I am. Ten years ago I was. I used to get unpacked and have pictures on the wall and everything put away within a week at the most. I don't know what has happened to me, and no comments about age necessary here. I thought when it took me four weeks in Virginia it was because our quarters were so small that I was fighting an uphill battle, trying to get around boxes and then trying to figure out what to keep and what to give away. But since it's happening here and I have lots of room, I can't use that excuse. So here are some of the things that have been going on in the last two weeks since we found out we would be closing on our house.

Our 30-day notice for the apartment got turned in on Tuesday as soon as we found out we finally had a closing date. There were some last minute glitches that were fairly minor prior to the Friday closing of our house, the 14th of November. We closed at 4:00 that afternoon. We did end up sleeping at the apartment for several more nights until we had beds and kitchen appliances.

Of course I have had all kinds of delivery people and installers at the house. Blinds were a priority, and we had already ordered them thinking we would close in October; they just had to be installed as soon as we took possession. Internet, phone, and cable, our alarm guy, furniture, appliances, installation of some appliances...the list kind of goes on and on. In between all that I've made numerous runs to Target, Wal-Mart, Home Depot and/or Lowe's for things we have needed or returns for things we didn't. I finally got to the point that I bought things if I remotely thought I might need them knowing I could return it later, just to save a trip in an hour.

Appliances have been my nemesis. I am learning to boil water. Literally, people. I know that many, many of you out there probably love to cook on gas if you're anything like all the other people I've run into along the way in this whole process, but I don't. I'm an electric range kinda girl. Me and the gas cooktop just don't seem to get along very well. The gas cooktop would blame my ignorance. I do everything I'm supposed to, but it just doesn't work for me. I make my flame the right size and everything, but it can take me 20 minutes to boil a stinkin' pan of water to make Kraft mac & cheese. That's absolutely ridiculous in my book. So maybe you can figure out what I made the kids the first night we ate here.

Here's what happened...I had already been to Sears and knew every black appliance I wanted. No, thank you, Mr. Salesman, I do not want stainless. Harder to keep clean with my crew, and in addition the refrigerators have gray sides that wouldn't look nice from the side view in my kitchen. No, thank you, Mr. Salesman, for the 3,246th time, I do not want a microwave hood combination. I do not like them, not one little bit. Yes, I know that most people love them. I have plenty of counter space for a regular microwave. I personally despise them above my stove. I've only had one up there when I lived in Virginia and in this apartment we just had. Guess what? Only my husband can see in them for the most part. And they take away cooking space too. At least it seems like it to me. Gets kinda crampy there on the top of the stove. So Mr. Salesman, I just want the pretty black range hood all by itself, thankyouverymuch. We buy our appliances, instead of paying for them forever in our mortgage, and plan to have a refrigerator, stove, range hood, and dishwasher delivered on Saturday, the day after we close. Appliance installation guy is scheduled for Monday (as in just over a week ago) for the range hood and dishwasher.

As we are standing in the house rather late on Friday night and Hubby is putting boxes in the garage (more on that in a minute), I check out where the clothes dryer is going, because if you remember my full-size washer and dryer in the apartment was made for the childless island couple only wearing bikinis and swim trunks, and I am rather anxious to wash more than a handful of clothes at a time and actually try to get some serious laundry done soon. I think I came close to hyperventilating. The only other time I came close was on an unplanned helicopter ride that had to do with emergency labor and delivery (story coming in December, I promise, but wasn't that a tease?). There is no electric hookup for my dryer. I know what it is supposed to look like. I had to change my four-prong plug to a three-prong plug myself in Virginia. There's no special prong plug outlet ANYWHERE. Just a plain old outlet. And then I spot it. A gas line in the floor, all ready for my electric dryer. We had this discussion when we signed our contract and met with the building superintendent, but when we did the walk-through we missed it. I specifically wanted electric for my clothes dryer and stove. Oh, no, my stove. That's when the true panic set in and I spotted the gas hook-up for the electric stove that was coming the next morning at 8:30.

Well, one refused delivery later, another trip to Sears to purchase a stove that was not my first choice and a gas clothes dryer to replace my four-year old electric clothes dryer that really wasn't efficient anyway, we have our appliances. The builder would have come and at least put electric for the clothes dryer, but we decided that as many clothes as we do in our house that we will probably save significant money by having that gas dryer. But no, Mr. Salesman, I do not need a matching washing machine.

Hubby rented a 26-foot Supermover from U-Haul, again, to unload the two storage units where the majority of our things were located. Well, everything that wasn't in the apartment or apartment garage. He did that on the Friday morning we closed with a friend from work, and then on Friday night he unloaded it all in the 3-car garage. Until about midnight. While I was fuming about the appliances.

We had been moving over vehicle-loads of things from the apartment but it was going slow. Plus we got an email from our contact at the complex and it looks like we will not have to pay for the full 30 days like we thought. So we started busting our tails to get our stuff out. I don't know how we managed to create the chaos we did in just three months, but that is definitely how I would categorize it. I also don't know what people normally do when they leave an apartment, but we cleaned it. We are used to clearing military quarters, so it's kind of normal for us. Personally, I would like my deposit back and not get charged the extra days, so anything I can do to make someone happy, I will. Getting out of that apartment has truly been an awful experience for me. It just seemed to go on and on with no end in sight. We just finished yesterday, so that is no longer a cloud hanging over my head.

In between all this, our battery was dying in one of our vehicles. Our newer, bigger one, of course. It happened the first time when we were out at the house getting ready to leave to go back to the apartment to sleep. The second time we were at the apartment and had just loaded up both vehicles. I took it in to Sears and thankfully I only needed to have a battery and the alternator was fine. The kicker is that my speedometer is still messed up. It works part of the time, usually when you just start driving, and then after a while you're going 0 mph. Fun...

We went to Ikea on Saturday (four days ago) and rented a trailer to bring the stuff we bought home. We also knew that we could use it to clear the rest of the things out of the apartment garage, so there was a dual benefit. Hubby carried all those Ikea boxes, and I'm not telling how many, up flights of stairs, while me, Sparky, and Buddy, switched off or paired up on the other end of the boxes. We carried them in on Sunday afternoon between morning and evening church. You could say we all had muscle failure. Not a single lick of that furniture has been assembled yet. I told Hubby he could do that instead of watching the Cowboys play football tomorrow. What kind of a look do you think that got me?

When we brought the cat over, there was no furniture yet, since it was getting delivered in a couple of hours, and apparently that was a problem for him. He was a little freaked out and went upstairs to hide in a closet for a little while. After we showed him where the litter box was, of course. Which, by the way, Hubby does not like my choice of placement, but we can worry about that later.

On a happy note, Hubby will not be placing the cat in the dungeon, as he affectionately calls the basement, because the cat is using the litter box.

By the way, we've had snow, ponds are starting to freeze, I have to use moisturizer on my face morning and night, and my face feels like it's freezing when I go outside. It's a little bit cold here. Hubby threatened to get me one of those face masks you pull over your head with the holes. You know I'm doomed when it really does get cold here, because I really am smart enough to know that it's going to get a lot colder.

Even though we have our Christmas tree ornaments, I don't know if we have a Christmas tree. I think the government movers have it. We may have to buy an inexpensive Wal-Mart tree, because I'm not waiting until the second week of December.

I also have no pictures, because although I have some on the digital camera, I have no idea where the cable is to get them from it to the computer.

But I went commissary shopping yesterday and have a fairly full kitchen. And a turkey for tomorrow! Now I just need to find the boxes in the garage that have the dishes to cook everything else in.

We're Official!

We are now official Michigan residents. What would that make us? Michiganites? Michigonians? Northerners? Our families might just start calling us the Yankee relatives.

The deed that made it official? Not our house purchase quite yet, but getting Michigan drivers' licenses, license plates for our two vehicles, and registering to vote. We did get vanity plates to show where our true loves lie though. Without putting the exact ones on here for the whole bloggy world to see, one will be a short form of RAZORBACKS and one will be a short form of IHATECUBS. We were all a little concerned about driving a vehicle to church that has "hate" on it, but some of the sports lovers in the family decided it only had to do with a sports team and it was just the Cubs anyway, so it wouldn't matter. We decided to try it for a year. If we get blackballed from church or our tires get slashed, that might be a sign we should change it.

I'm just happy to have a picture ID that looks like me. My picture on my military dependent ID was taken over three and a half years ago and shows me with layered, short hair that's above my shoulders. My last driver's license photo was over two years ago when my hair was quite a bit shorter than it is now and was the one day I decided to dry my hair out smooth, which really isn't very smooth, but enough that it doesn't really look like me.

I mean, do you really think they look like I look now? Sales clerks, the military guard gate people, bank tellers, my friends I've known for several years, my family that lives with me — they all have to double check to make sure it's me when they look at one of my old IDs.

I guess underneath it all the face was always the same. But I'm still glad I'll have that ID that looks like me.

The Big (Albeit Temporary) Move

Spoiler warning: You may get sick and tired of seeing messy rooms and looking at pictures of boxes before this post is over.

This is our master bedroom in our old military quarters. No, it did not usually look like this. We were trying to pack boxes and get things organized. Yes, organized. Doesn't look a bit like it though. We had just participated in a yard sale with a good friend and sold our chest of drawers and dresser, so we were using the recently emptied toy drawers to hold our clothes, clothes which were not yet in the drawers, thus part of the mess. The second picture is really blurry, but I had to include it to fully illustrate the mess.

This picture is the improved master bedroom with my scrapbooking supplies and some other things packed up. The bookshelves were next. These are only a portion of the books in our home. We are avid readers. We use the library too.
This is the girls' room in the old house. It was absolutely tiny! We had to buy bunk beds for them just for this house. We sold them at the yard sale too. This is the room in some form of chaos. It actually got worse. Hubby and I are in disagreement on that though. Prior to the movers coming (they took 11 boxes and the heaviest furniture - altogether an estimate of about 3,500 lbs.) the areas had to be cleared of boxes and "stuff" for them to get to the things they needed to take. Hubby's version of cleared out and mine were a little different, and his version of how to go about it and mine were very clearly different. He got the kids out of bed (air mattresses) military style at about 6 a.m. and had them running through the house clearing things out of every room and literally throwing it in the girls' room, where the movers would not need to go. Do you know how long it took me to pack the stuff in that room after that? Hubby still thinks it was a smart move.

Remember that this room is chaotic but still prior to the "throw stuff in the room" chaos.

Here we are lining the walls with boxes in that room as it got better.

Here's the boys' room full of boxes. I was standing at the very top of the bunk bed ladder. See the two sports balls in the bottom right corner? They are two of four different globes to a sports lamp that we don't have anymore. I had to make choices at the end on what to get rid of...but more on that in a minute.

Here is the living room during some part of the boxing process:

Here is the truck when Hubby started filling it. It looked like it was plenty big enough at this point and might have some extra room.

My only request during this whole DITY (do-it-yourself move) was that we move our boxes and our washer and dryer. Somewhere about this point of filling the truck Hubby said something about moving our bookshelves. I kept asking about having enough space; he kept saying we had plenty. This was the weekend also, so the movers were still yet to come on Monday, so we had time to decide what we did and didn't want them to take. But once we decided what we didn't want them to take and they drove off, that was it.

Now several days after this I find out that when Hubby said bookshelves what he meant were what really qualify as entertainment unit - three large pieces that house my doll collection (glass doors and shelves), the tv, stereo, scrapbooks, games, movies, and dvds. No books really involved. I assumed he meant bookshelves in our house, of which we have many. And that turned into everything that remotely belonged to the bookshelf family - wire shelving, cubbies, etc. I talked him out of taking the three large pieces (still unaware that these were the only three he meant to take) because of how large and heavy they are, since he would have to move them by himself into our new house and probably up stairs alone.

Somewhere around the time Hubby realized he was running out of room for things, he decided to be funny. This is his version of a shower cap for my dryer. He called me in from another room where I was packing boxes just to see it. He was so proud of himself.

Now this is the 26' Super Mover by U-Haul. It's supposed to move a 4+ bedroom house. Ha! In who's dreams?

Tuesday night the 29th Hubby and I pulled an all-nighter packing, and still weren't done. And for some reason it just didn't look like there was any progress being made. Wednesday morning was when I was made fully aware that we would not have enough room in this truck that was supposed to move a 4+ bedroom house, of which ours was three, and we weren't even moving much furniture. Go figure. I called the smaller U-Haul place right off post and amazingly they had a 6' x 12' trailer available.

Now as nice and new as the truck was (only 5,000 miles and very clean) this trailer was as old as the hills. When I started up my vehicle on Thursday morning to keep the cat air-conditioned when we had to get it out of the house to clear quarters, the battery was dead. The wiring had drained the battery, so every time we stopped on the trip, I had to pull the plug. To top it off, there was a short, so I'd have to jiggle it to make sure the lights were working after I plugged it back in.

Thursday morning, after three and a half hours of sleep, we called and postponed our clearing inspection by two hours just to get the stuff out of the house. From Wednesday morning until we left we also had two good friends that came by to help us, so there were four of us and we just made it. One of these two people was the lady who drove our van, while I drove the other vehicle pulling a trailer (which I was not happy about), and Hubby drove the big truck.

When we cleared quarters our sidewalk was still full of stuff. Since I couldn't find my cameras at this point, as well as most anything important other than my purse, I have no pictures. But I had to start choosing what was most important to me. Hubby's orders. There was not room for everything. After we went and got a 6 x 12 trailer! After I asked him if there was room for bookcases! Which supposedly he didn't really want to take anyway, just those three heavy things which really aren't bookcases, but I think I'm belaboring the point. So my neighbor got two floor lamps and some really nice Sterilite boxes, and the closest donation place got some good stuff too, including my three little Charlie Brown Christmas trees, which I'm still missing. They were under $20 at Wal-Mart a few years ago and I am so hoping they have them again this year. I will really be sad about those if they don't. They are probably the one thing I will really miss.

On the trip the trailer I was pulling was ornery. The brake lines on the front two tires broke. We stayed in a hotel that first night, and so the next morning Hubby used masking tape to tie up the stuff hanging down on one side. A little while later he called me on the phone and had me pull over at the next service area in Pennsylvania because something was hanging down on the other side. Turns out it was just the other side of the same brake line, so he used one of our bungee cords and tied it up. We finally pulled into our apartment close to 10 p.m. It seemed to take a lot longer than it should have.

I don't have pictures of the storage units where our stuff is stored until our house is finished. We get one free month with a one-way truck rental, and then we just pay by the month until we get it out, which will hopefully be two months or less. I don't have pictures because at the time the cameras were still AWOL. But I found a camera and took pictures in the one-car garage that comes with our apartment before we started opening these boxes. All of these boxes won't be opened, but many of them are clothes and school things, or just things we didn't want to put in the storage unit.

This is in the back of the garage on a little ledge.

I had mentioned in a previous post about the large quantity of baseball cards members of my family have. Well, these may look like a lot, but these are only some of them. These don't include any of the books (of which there are at least 20, and I'm being conservative) or any of the individual team boxes, which would completely fill up at least two of those shelves. And these aren't all the boxes like this. But my family members that collect these cards love them and love to look at them and enjoy them. They don't just sit around and collect dust, and they only collect people they love. Buddy even learned to alphabetize and put things in numerical order with baseball cards so when it came to that in homeschooling, I really didn't even have to teach him since I'd already shown him. And where the kids are concerned, they've always picked good people so we've never had to draw the line and tell them they couldn't collect a certain player's cards, because we would if we felt like we should.

Altogether in the three vehicles we moved just shy of 14,000 lbs. That added to the mover guy's estimate of 3,500 lbs. that they took is our weight limit: 17,500 lbs. If we go over, we just don't get reimbursed for all of the weight we had with us, but it would be pretty close because we've never gone over by more than about 500 lbs. Doing most of this move ourselves is what is helping us buy new furniture for our new house. It was a lot of work, and it's not actually over until all our stuff is out of storage and in our new house.

At least there are a couple of months in between.