Let it be known that I hate moving. Usually the process is a giant pain in the ass and just thinking about it I can feel my blood pressure rise about a hundred percent. For the past three years, I have made it a habit to be a kind of nomad pack-rat who can’t stay in one place for too long. In 2006, I decided to move out of my parents house and moved around the greater Seattle a few times, to different places. When I decided to go back to school, unfortunately the college I attended still did not have the Bachelors degree program in web design. I am sure I have talked about all of this before so let me break this down for you before I talk about the move preparation:

• 2007 – Seattle, WA to Phoenix, AZ; Phoenix, AZ to Phoenix, AZ (moving in together with Mack in new apartment)
• 2008 – Phoenix, AZ to Jacksonville, FL
• 2009 – Jacksonville, FL to Tacoma, WA

Now you, the reader, might notice a pattern with my moving habits: I don’t like moving within the same state. No, I pretty much try to pick the longest distance possible between locations that I can physically accomplish. And notice, as well, that the distance grows further and further apart with each possible move?

With my 2007 move, I did the whole move myself. This process was, on the whole, not that difficult other than my Mom broke her finger helping me load the moving van. My half-brother was awesome enough to help by driving the van and, overall, the move wasn’t that stressful… especially compared to 2008. Someday I will stop alluding to this move but a year later I still bear the emotional scars and thinking about it still makes me break out into a cold sweat as I rock myself, promising it will all be okay.

Well before our July move date, we started processing and going through our stuff. At first, it wasn’t actually that we knew that we were going to move— rather we had a lot of stuff we had to go through and decide what to do with. For example, we had about seventy shirts between the two of us that we decided to part with. SEVENTY. That is a pretty significant number, at least in regards to shirts. I was surprised that we owned that many shirts, personally. Although, if you asked Mack he’d probably mutter something that sounds like “we have too much goddamn stuff” which would make me roll my eyes and tell him to shove it.

But I digress.

Before the ex-roommate moved in with us, Mack started going through items that we didn’t want to necessarily get rid of but didn’t need in our apartment for when we got a storage unit. Although we had lived in our apartment since July of 2008 we still had boxes around our apartment since we didn’t know what to DO with them. One of my co-workers, upon seeing all the boxes, was like “Geez Anne! Didn’t you move like, a year ago?” I laughed airily and said no, those weren’t from the move! We were packing to move. Someday.

Cough.

Unfortunately, due to the MOVE FROM HELL, the boxes that we had around the apartment with stuff still in it was for the most part squished and otherwise mangled due to… wait, breaking out into a cold sweat so I won’t go into it since it reveals too much about the move and brings up those memories. So most of the stuff had to be re-packaged for the Seattle move which was AWESOME so we could further process all our stuff.

While I seem to be going off on a tangent about how MOVING SUCKS I have to state this: this move didn’t. I think it is because a) NOTHING could be worse than the Phoenix to Jacksonville move, and b) we were so well prepared. From processing and going through stuff to figuring out movers about a month before our actual move date, the only time I really stressed out was the day before we were setting out to drive and all our boxes and stuff had been picked up.

I had been told by the movers that they would be showing up at 8:30AM Monday morning (July 27th). Naturally, we assumed this meant 10AM+, in regular business people terms and decided to wake up at 7AM in order to organize a little, before they showed up. Imagine my surprise when, at 7:45AM, I got a phone call informing me that they were on their way to our apartment. Five phone calls later for directions (during which the phone was handed to Mack since, if you know me, I have no sense of direction) the movers showed up. Now, shall I tell you dear readers how WONDERFUL it was to sit around and watch the movers do their job? Not to be lifting the boxes and generally KILLING ourselves? All the stuff that was in the apartment Mack and I had to personally haul in ourselves. That two piece L shaped couch? That was an Anne and Mack operation. Trust me, the tears were real as I helped Mack get it into the apartment in the 98F weather with 86% humidity.

Ugh.

So, to get back to it, the day before the actual move was filled with a lots of sitting around and watching other people do their jobs. And let me tell you: it was fucking amazing. Watching the movers load all our stuff up? Full of rainbows, kittens, and other fuzzy feelings which the thought of NOT MOVING BOXES makes me feel. Having a professional carpet cleaner clean the carpet even though Brutus made sure we wouldn’t get our deposit back? Oh my god you can’t imagine how wonderful sitting in the closet with Mack, Bob, and Hayley was.

The following few posts will be an accounting of the 3,056 mile drive (trust me, I checked multiple times) with lots of stories and pictures. Please, contain your excitement because trust me, I can hardly contain mine.

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