Peace and Quiet

That's what I'm hearing, peace and quiet. We're all moved, and I'm sitting on the back deck of our "cottage" listening to the wind in the trees. That and the occasional sound of some piece of construction equipment backing up, you know that high-pitched "beep, beep, beep". It is so easy to sleep late up here, because we don't have the sounds of: traffic, sirens, lawn mowing equipment, trains, drawbridges going up and down...all things we had back in the big city, where we lived right on the river, smack dab in the heart of the downtown, with a railroad track on one side, and the river on the other. There were days when I'd get stopped in the middle of the bridge, with the drawbridge up, waiting for a freighter to go through, only to get stopped by a train the minute I got over the bridge. The worst was when you'd get over the bridge, but then couldn't turn into the apartment complex where we lived for another 3 or 4 traffic light cycles because of the backed up traffic. I was always tempted to drive across the grass those times, the parking lot was so close you could taste it. Oh and then there were the rare times when I actually got stopped by the same train multiple times trying to make it home across various tracks precariously situated on my route. Yeah, I'm not gonna miss it.

I came to a deep, profound conclusion this week: Moving sucks! Not only that, but it sucks worse every time we do it! It doesn't help that we never want to pay anyone to move us, so we always do it ourselves. It seems as though every time we move, we prolong the agony more and more. This particular move was spread out over 3 or 4 days and it was awful! Saturday was the final day (except for the last unloading) and it was also our wedding anniversary (12 years!). Mr. Trucker had the job of loading up those last little items that never seem to box easily, but are such a pain to move (like a KitchenAid mixer), while I cleaned the apartment. We were determined to finish it all in one day so as not to spend another night on the floor, but it was 11:00 p.m. by the time we locked the door for the last time, and we still had a two hour drive to the cottage. You should have seen us shuffle into Subway at 11:30 p.m. for our supper. We must have looked about 80! Every square inch of my body hurt so I was moving pretty slowly and Mr. Trucker's ankles were killing him from the up and down the ramp into the U-Haul and the few stairs into the apartment. I told him we should just move right into the nursing home so that we'd never have to move again, but he reminded me that we can't afford to live there. Darn! When we finally fell into bed at 1:00 a.m., I declared that I was never getting out of bed again.

The good news is that (hopefully) this will be our last move, other than moving things out of the trailer into the garage when we finally build, then back into our new home, which shouldn't be too bad. I have to keep reminding myself that's why we're doing this, so that we can have a real home again, albeit a tiny one, one that's all paid for.

We're leaving soon to drive down to Mondovi for orientation at our new trucking company. It'll be fun to go to orientation with my beloved. We've never gone to school together before. I'll have to pass him notes during class and see if I can get him in trouble.