Weeks Roll By

It’s a tired cliché of blog­ging: apol­o­giz­ing for not post­ing in so long. The excus­es are always the same, and this is no dif­fer­ent. There has sim­ply been too much going on here take any time to write down [or type — ed.].

The Job

I start­ed my new job at the begin­ning of Jan­u­ary (before the move, for those keep­ing track of such things). I received a warm wel­come (most­ly all by e‑mail) and did my best to get right into things. My posi­tion is sort of a new thing, though, and not per­son­al­ly know­ing peo­ple I was work­ing with made get­ting much trac­tion dif­fi­cult at first. I did fly out to South­ern Cal­i­for­nia1 to meet a num­ber of my co-work­ers and high­er-up types. That proved to be a very good trip and I real­ly enjoyed get­ting to meet all the peo­ple there. I feel con­fi­dent that I made the right choice in this career.

Fly­ing home through Chica­go in the dead of win­ter, how­ev­er, was incred­i­bly dumb. In my defense, it was also not my choice to do so. I sin­cere­ly wish I was able to make my own busi­ness trav­el arrange­ments again.

The Move

As soon as I got back, it was time to try to fin­ish pack­ing the house, get a U‑Haul van, and let the movers do their work. Of course, mov­ing is nev­er sim­ple. This was off the scale, though. Despite the best efforts of many of our friends2 and all of Ange­la’s hard work box­ing stuff in my absence, we sim­ply were not pre­pared for mov­ing when the time came to do it.

I’ll keep it sob sto­ries short, but after rent­ing a sec­ond truck plus tow-dol­ly for Ange­la’s car and putting all of our gar­den­ing and pow­er-tools on a mobile stor­age unit left in Rich­mond and not fin­ish­ing doing touch-up paint in the house before leav­ing, we were still a day late in get­ting out of there. For­tu­nate­ly, every­thing worked out just fine (as life does more than not, thank God). How­ev­er, the last night lay­ing on an inflat­able mat­tress in our house I was so sick to my stom­ach I just could­n’t sleep. To be hon­est here, I think that night I got more plan­ning for the remain­der of the move than I had done in the weeks and months up until that point.

When we final­ly got it all packed up and were ready to leave, a sense of relief swept over me. That real­ly seemed to pick up my spir­its for days to come. I need­ed it, because it was a tru­ly sad moment when we left our keys inside and locked the door of our old home one last time. We loved that house very much and had put a great deal of time and effort into it. In yet anoth­er bout of poor plan­ning, I had packed my cam­era away some­where in our SUV and nev­er got a chance to take one last pho­to. I’ll make it up dur­ing our next trip up there, but I don’t think it’ll mean as much to me.

Then again, as painful as some of the oth­er pho­tos we did take there recent­ly have been to look through, it may be just as well. It real­ly feels like a part of us is gone. Angela and I had­n’t lived in a place for that long since our child­hood homes (both of which are no longer in the fam­i­ly, either). Despite all of us being con­tent where we’re at now, think­ing about what we gave up — hav­ing those friends close by, a home we loved to be at, just liv­ing in Vir­ginia — kind of hurts.

…The New Place

Though it’s tak­en us about three weeks, we final­ly feel like we have a nice home in our apart­ment. Though going from a home of your own to an apart­ment kind of sucks, it was nice to just call up some­one to come fix leaky kitchen faucet — and not have to pay them. Ains­ley made out great, with her new room being more than twice the size of her old one. It feels like most of that square footage came out of our bed­room, though! The best part though has to be the closets.

My God! Clos­ets! Appar­ent­ly, usable clos­ets weren’t invent­ed until some­time after our old house was built.

Even though the dri­ve down was on a nice sun­ny day, the day we end­ed up unload­ing the mov­ing vans into our apart­ment (and garage and stor­age unit…) was cold, wet, and windy. The movers were great, though; and Dave even drove down to help out for a bit. We got it all moved in and most­ly all in the right places. Ange­la’s par­en­t’s came down the next day and stayed with us for the rest of the week. That helped out tremen­dous­ly. Angela and I were able to work while they watched Ains­ley and we were able to unpack bit by bit in the evenings.

We’ve been unpack­ing ever since, it seems. How­ev­er, at this point there is just one last small box of engi­neer­ing books by the door that is wait­ing to make its way down to the garage. Oth­er­wise, there’s lit­tle evi­dence of all the recent tur­moil around our lives.We’ve got some paper­work still to fill out and make it all offi­cial, but we’re Ten­nesseans again.

1. Orange Coun­ty prob­a­bly isn’t the most scenic part of Cal­i­for­nia, to tell the truth. How­ev­er, it did make a num­ber of Arrest­ed Devel­op­ment jokes sud­den­ly make sense, so I’d say it was worth it. [↩]
2. I would be com­plete­ly remiss if I did­n’t give a huge thanks to Jason J. for dri­ving that 26′ U‑Haul giant down to TN for us. Just to tell you how much we trust him, we nev­er gave a sec­ond though to the well being of most of our Earth­ly pos­ses­sion being in the hands of a guy whose nev­er dri­ven any­thing big­ger than a fam­i­ly van. Also, Michelle and Robert P. were absolute­ly tire­less. They gave up their whole week­end to help out and were in a good mood the entire time, which is prob­a­bly what kept us sane. Kushal S. also came over to help pack things up. Thanks, guys. [↩]