I'm back!

Holy cannoli, has it been a long, long, LOOOOOOOONG few weeks.  We closed on the house in Valpo, stayed at my parents' condo in Lexington while I packed up the rest of the house, and moved to Valpo all within less than four weeks.  So it should be no surprise that I have been offline for a little while.  I'm tired.  Really tired.

Overall, things on the Lexington side went well with The Move.  The movers showed up when they were supposed to at all three locations: the condo, T's office, and our house.  It was a crazy-long day for the movers, but luckily it had cooled down to the low-90's after having been 100 degrees just days before.  The guys all worked really hard all day and into the evening.  I was with them most of the day until it was time to get the kids from T's parents and get them ready for bed.  T stayed at our house to supervise the last few hours of the move, and at 6:59 PM that evening, I got a text from him that said, "They might not be able to get everything into one truck."  At that moment, I wished I had some smelling salts because I felt some true Victorian vapors coming on.  The movers ended up taking everything to their headquarters in Louisville to do some rearranging, and somehow, we only ended up needing one truck.  One enormous, tightly packed truck.

All of our earthly possessions were piled on the front lawn.  Classy.

We drove up to Valpo on Thursday: Trevor took Judy in his car and I took the kids.  I think he made it in 5.5 hours, but it took my crew about 8 hours.  We had more potty breaks, obvi.  The kids were great, though, and the trip was pretty smooth.  Lottie didn't seem to be quite herself, but I figured the excitement of the whole process was too much to handle.  I was wrong.

Friday morning, the driver from Lexington, Mike, showed up with the ginormous truck.  I was hoping to see the rest of the crew from Lexington with him, but I was sorely disappointed.  Instead, we had three guys hired from a random day-labor company who were supposed to help Mike unload the truck and move all our stuff.  I have nothing against day-labor workers, but these three guys didn't know the definition of the word labor.  Poor Mike was the only one who knew what to do and how to do it.  We had AJ, a friend of my niece's there to help us, but he couldn't do as much as he wanted to do because the truck just wasn't getting unloaded.  My brother, who has experience in the moving business, texted all morning to see how things were going.  I texted him at noon with the news that the truck was maybe 25% unloaded.  Plus, one of the three stooges left before noon, mumbling something vague about needing insulin, and never came back.  So we were down to Mike and two doofuses, and backup promised by the company was nowhere in sight.  About 45 minutes later, my brother, my knight in shining armor, showed up to show the guys how things were supposed to be done.  He got right in the truck, clapped his hands, and told the guys to get things moving.  With Matt's help, things finally got unloaded.  I guarantee that without Matt, we would have been unloading that truck for days afterwards.  Not a lot was where it was supposed to be, the house was an insane maze of boxes, and everyone was tired and sweaty and peckish.  But it was done.

My parents spent the day tag-teaming between helping at our house and watching the kids at their house.  By Friday morning, it was obvious that Lottie's ennui was more than just The Move: she was sick.  My mom took Lottie to the doctor and had to hold her arms down while the nurse did a throat swab.  Serious gaggage.  Lottie didn't have strep throat, but she did have an ear infection and tonsillitis on the remnants of the tonsils that were removed three years ago.  She had a temperature of 103.5 and fell asleep in the doctor's waiting room, and if you know Lottie, you know that the last time she napped was at the end of the Bush era.

My poor girl mid-yawn.  

With some meds and a lot of rest, she was back on track pretty fast.  The same couldn't be said for me.
That will have to be the next blog post, though.  There's only so much drama one can handle in a single report.  But I'm back and I'm home.  It feels good.