The Big Move. Holy Moley

So the big news is that we now live in the country, and have divested ourselves of the city entirely. The last of our stuff arrived today, and we settle on the sale of the Federal Hill house on Friday or Monday.

Are we happy? Yes, we are thrilled. Did we have an organized and stress free move? Not on your life.

Here's how it went down:  I had carefully started boxing items in the house as I had time and was able to locate boxes. Therefore my Christmas decorations, old X-Box games and family photo albums were well labeled and organized for the move.

As the date of the move grew closer, it because increasingly unclear which date EXACTLY we would move, so we had a lot of trouble trying to figure out when to hire the movers.

One Friday night, Hambone said, "Let's try sleeping over night just to see how it is once." So we each packed a polite little bag with one pair of underpants, PJs and clothes for the next day.

On that Saturday, Hamslice woke up and declared that he was NOT GOING BACK TO FEDERAL HILL EVER AGAIN. And he was serious. When we went back to the city that evening he wouldn't get out of the truck. The city was dead to him.

Hambone looked at me, and I at him, as we slowly started unrolling big black trash bags. We then commenced feverishly packing everything we could put our hands on. We must have looked like we were running from the law we were packing so fast. Randomized bags of stuff started appearing in the kitchen. For example take these bags:

• Pens and extension cords as well as three board games and a tea kettle
• 5 blazers, a bag of dogfood and three frying pans
• Shoe shine kit, all of our spatulas, a book on child birth and three pillows

The house had these random bags leaning against the walls throughout the house. There are nearly 50 of them. Our glamorous moving company idea was reduced to Hambone sending "the guys" who are general laborers. Because they are not professional movers, even more chaos was added into the mix. No labels on any containers, giant piles of mismatched items heaped on the floor, lawn furniture in the living room, aie yie yie.

At one point, Hambone even enlisted our maid to pack stuff.

So that was the move. The other news is that the house is not quite done. For example, the light switches are all set to work from a computerized lighting control. However that computer system doesn't work yet, so no  light switches work. We also have intermittent HVAC on the second floor, where the HVAC guy says it's all set, but then the next day the thing is shut off at the safety valve.

Meanwhile we are trying to keep the Fed Hill house in "like new" condition, but one of "the guys" unplugged the storage freezer in the garage with 4 pounds of meat in it. Now the garage smells like the bowels of hell.

And now that the house is "done" Hambone is starting work on a massive patio and 5 car garage. So this has been a lot of hammering and concrete pouring and stuff.

But we are on the way out, back to a semblance of normalcy that we can see "just over the horizon" which I will say is a far cry better than "out there somewhere."