Texas so far..

Moving is tough. I had an idea that this statement was true before.. before when I was moving from shitty college apartment to shitty college apartment every year for the last six years. But none of that compares to this move across the country, from (beautiful home)Missouri to (unknown)Texas. One thing is for sure.. I couldn't have done it without Anna, help from my parents, and a few loyal friends. Thanks guys.

When friends would come into our apartment in Columbia they'd usually say things like, "wow, nice place" "its so homey" "you guys have a lot of stuff." I usually just smiled, thanked them, and shrugged off the "lot of stuff" part. Afterall, it was a small apartment, it couldn't be THAT much stuff... right? wrong. so wrong. I had a lot of stuff. And 4 days (including my birthday!) to pack it all. I spent a lot of time in those 4 days just looking around the apartment, not knowing how to organize things. Slowly putting things in boxes, and taking long breaks to get drunk with friends. My mom came down twice to light a fire under my ass, and there is no way I could have got to Texas on schedule without her.



Anyway, we ended up giving a packed carload of items to Goodwill and pitching everything else we didn't need anymore. We finally finished loading the truck by 12:30pm saturday afternoon, Billie bought chinese food and let us use her shower, and we got on the road by 1:45.

After 2 hours of driving we stopped in Osage Beach at a Target to buy Walky-Talkys. Without those and the 1pm shower, we never would have made the 600mile 11 hour car ride to Dallas. She drove in front of me the whole time and we chatted mostly about billboards, bathroom breaks, and weirdos driving next to us. We were both pumped to get there and wide awake at hour 6, but by hour 9 delirium had set in. The last 2 hours seemed to last as long as the first 8. The next day we had planned to move the majority of our belongings into storage, but were exhausted from the move. So we slept til 5pm, got groceries, and talked house rules over drinks and shots of Jameson with Anna's brother John.

We are living in his house in Plano, a wealthy mostly white suburb of Dallas, for the next few months. The plan is to get jobs, save money, visit Austin a few times, find a rental property there, and move in by November. John is cool, and he works in Florida so we rarely see him, except on weekends. He wont be home for the next 3 weeks.

When we finally got around to unloading the truck Monday morning at 7am, it was 90 degrees. And by the afternoon the heat index was 110. Luckily we were finished by 10:45. Then we slept all day, again.

Since then, we've realized that the mold problem in the last apartment was way worse than we thought. All the clothes that we packed were damp and steamy when we got here and smelled like mildew, so we have been doing laundry all day. We threw out our mattress because the smell was so strong, but are holding onto our couches for now. We'll see how they survive the storage, but we'll probably end up having to steam clean them in Austin.

Today we drove to Ft. Worth and had lunch with Kerstin, the Army Chaplain of the 90th Sustainment Brigade, Anna's unit in Iraq. I felt like I knew her already from all the stories Anna has told. She is friggin awesome, and I wish that all of the chaplains in the army were as cool as her. Ok, she is the only one I've ever met.. but she ordered beer (a beer called Priests Collar) and pizza at lunch and we laughed the whole afternoon. I'm so glad Anna has friends like her in the Army.

We have NetFlix through John's PS3.. so, most of our time the past couple days has been spent watching episodes of Lost, (we're starting from the beginning) doing the laundry, (washing ALL our clothes) and formulating resumes (something I've always dreaded and put off.)

Quotes of the Day:

"There is a hole in my stomach the size of a frozen yogurt" -Anna
"If we were at war, I was your prisoner, and your commanding officer told you to kill me... would you do it?" -Shelly