We've moved

Does moving get any easier with practice? Last month, Mark and I completed our sixth move in the last four years (something probably not atypical of college students). We had TONS of help from my family (who undoubtedly got burnt out from moving, since every single person but one in my family of ten moved during the month of August). Our family's kind of like the moving company Two Men and a Truck...only better described as Four Men, Six Women, Four Kids, A Van, A Truck, and Two Trailers. Not quite as catchy, but probably more efficient. And cheaper. And exploitable.

For this move, since we would be unpacking as little as six hours after we packed some boxes, I didn’t pay as much attention to keeping like things together, instead going for the ideal weight per box. This resulted, to Mark’s amusement, in one box that was packed with underwear, lingerie and bags of brown sugar. Mark amused me by trying to pack things according to the former labels on the boxes. [What are the chances that I would have remembered that the wok and the rice cooker snuggle up perfectly in that long box? Good thing I got my mom's obsessive labeling gene.]

There were a few casualties in the move. Our desk fell apart on the way out the door. One box, containing chocolate chips, sat in the sun for a little too long, and morphed into bricks of chocolate. [I have no doubt those will make AWESOME chocolate chip—I mean brick--cookies. A half a bar per cookie should be about right.]

When I showed up with the kids at our new apartment (an hour or so after Mark and my family members had begun unloading), I found an unknown guy with black hair and blue bangs working in the living room. My heart sank, thinking this was our new landlord. Fortunately, he was just the internet guy. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to install our internet. Being webless for a few days made me feel vulnerable...and rather productive!

Eliza wasted no time in breaking in our new carpet in her own special potty-training way. But it didn’t set us too far back, since there is an omnipresent, lingering scent of cat urine in our living room. The girls started calling this apartment “the kitty house” when we first visited it, and we found the managers cats were living here. (I still want to know how much they were paying for kitty rent.) Unfortunately, in spite of two carpet cleanings, we still have Scent of Cat Excretion issues. It drives Mark crazy, but I have to smile secretly and count myself lucky. In my quest to decrease Mark’s love of everything feline, I think more progress has been made in the last three weeks than in the other six years of our marriage.

The canine kingdom seems to be well represented in our new neighborhood—something you don’t see much in a college neighborhood like the one we moved from. One evening, we went for a walk, and Eliza noticed a pile of dog poop sitting on the sidewalk. She looked at me with confusion and said, “That’s a poo poo chunk!” Then her tone changed to one of reprimand, and she said “We DON’T do poo poo chunks on the sidewalk, Mommy.” Oh, thank you, wise two-year-old.

The best part about moving was our first morning in our new house, when Mark left for work FOUR MINUTES before he needed to be there. And he made it there early!!! I can’t wait to see what we don’t have to pay in gasoline bills this month.

So if anyone's passing through Salt Lake, and needs a place to stay, bring your noseplugs and come visit us. We'd love to have you. If you're lucky, we might even take you down to the city council building to meet our mayor.