My wife and I are in Vermont to attend the wedding of some friends from graduate school.  We’re staying with a couple of other friends from graduate school at a ski resort (off-season, obviously) near the wedding site.

After the reception on Saturday, we decided that an evening of psych on DVD plus a little alcohol would be a good way to relax for the evening.  In order to facilitate that, we needed to acquire said alcohol before getting back to the room.  Enter Hannaford Supermarket.

We picked up a couple of summer variety packs of beer, which was fine, and headed to the checkout.  They asked to see ID from the two of us at checkout.  Not a problem – provided.

But wait!  I just applied for a VA license, so my MN license has a big hole in it (since that’s what they do in VA when you apply for a new license).  Fortunate then that I had my quite legal VA-issued temporary ID papers too, right?

Apparently not.  First, the cashier said she couldn’t take it.  Fine – cashiers have no power to think on their own, so we asked for the manager-on-duty (MOD).  But then, neither could the MOD take it.  Why?  Because it wasn’t an unexpired state-issued ID.

Except, of course – it was.  If I can rent a car with it, I should be able to buy alcohol with it.  Perhaps if it was from the great state of Vermont it wouldn’t have been a problem.  Apparently if it isn’t made of plastic, it can’t possibly be real.  In hindsight, we realized that the MOD was essentially saying I had forged identity documents, which I’m pretty sure is a felony.

But fine – whatever.  We can work within the (nonsensical) system.  I’ll just walk outside so that the other three of us, with our non-temporary IDs, can purchase it.  Ahh, not so fast!  We now apparently meet the manager’s understanding of the legal definition of a “group,” and any leaving or returning means that the “group” has returned, requiring all necessary IDs upon return.  Imagine that.

For how long, I inquire?  Is this a 24-hour group ban of purchasing, perhaps for the evening, perhaps for some other unspecified time period?  Ahh, but the MOD is unsure, only knowing that tonight is definitely included in the definition.  Fantastic.

The MOD’s suggestion?  There are several convenience stores in the area – just go to one of those!

And if that’s not upholding the letter of the law, I don’t know what is.

Somewhat surprising to us, it was actually cleaner than when we looked at it in March.  All of the changes we requested were apparently done correctly (at least, aside from converting the two-prong outlets to grounded three-prong outlets), and the walls are all covered in primer, ready for us to get to work.

Tonight, we are in a hotel for hopefully the last night in a while.  Tomorrow, the electricity should be turned on, our mail that has been held for a month should be delivered, our new Dyson vacuum cleaner that we bought on Woot should arrive, we need to buy painting and basic household supplies, we need to call a contractor about several jobs (knocking out a wall, adding grounding to some of the plugs, moving the water lines for the washer/dryer from the kitchen to the utility room, and putting in new flooring over asbestos tiles), we need to set up an install for cable Internet access at home, and we need to set up our new local checking account.

In other words, a full day!

Neko relaxing in the front seat at a gas stop...

Our back seat, taken over by Neko's riding space

Day 2 has concluded, and fortunately with much less drama than the first time.  Although I am still not a fan of moving.

We set out from Bloomington, IL around 2PM and arrived in Charleston, WV around 10PM, without much craziness.  The cat has been surprisingly calm, even when his diazepam should theoretically no longer have an effect.  That’s notable because every time we’ve taken him to the vet has been a nightmare.  Perhaps he is adjusting to us moving him randomly.

We did get one unfortunate piece of news today – apparently the grass is so high at our house that the city put a notice on the front door.  Our real estate agent, Ronnie Hooks, called us, herself having been called by one of our neighbors, to tell us this fantastic news.  So that we didn’t arrive immediately needing to mow the lawn, she was also kind enough to set up someone to mow the lawn before we get there, which is especially nice considering she’s already been paid and has no financial reason to help us anymore.  I suppose she’s just that awesome.

We do arrive in VA Beach tomorrow, although we won’t be staying in the house.  The electricity won’t be turned on until Wednesday morning, so we thought sleeping on an air mattress without air conditioning in the dark our first night wasn’t as pleasant a way to break the house in as we’d like.  We will be visiting the house, though – my wife keeps wondering what terrible things have gone wrong with it in the three months since we saw it last.  I don’t think it will be much different, but she doesn’t seem to believe me.  Fingers crossed…

This time, we thought, we’ll be proactive.  We’re moving across the country (hiring professional movers and everything!), so we should do things right.  Virtually everything small we owned was in a box of some sort.  Anything larger (like our bookcases, although they were disassembled), we left out.  Apparently, that was an incorrect course of action.  When the movers arrived, they came in, looked at our pile of stuff, and sighed.

I didn’t take that to be a good sign, and it wasn’t.  Evidently – and I wish someone, such as, for example, the moving company, had told us this – movers can only take objects wrapped in blankets and packing tape or packed in a corrugated cardboard box.  So the movers set to wrapping every single object we owned in blankets and miles of packing tape.  At one point, I even drove to the Container Store to buy extra boxes into which we could put the smaller non-cardboard boxes.  The movers arrived around 6PM (they described this as “in the afternoon”) and left at 5:30AM.  Oh yes – they spent nearly 12 hours packing our one-bedroom apartment into their truck.  Admittedly, we have quite a bit of stuff.  But 12 hours?  We moved nearly the same amount ourselves in a U-Haul to this apartment two years ago in less than 5 hours.

And it cost us too.  The $1800 estimate we were given was of course based on too little information – an extra $800 in space from the estimate was needed, plus $600 in extra packing materials (including nearly $100 in packing tape!).  We ended up with around a $3000 bill for moving, which I think is a little steep.

The scheduling also put a dent in our plans.  Originally, we assumed the movers would be arriving around 2PM Saturday and spend maybe 6-7 hours loading.  After they left, we were planning to clean the apartment, set up the inflatable bed for our last night, and have a nice relaxing transition to our 24 hours worth of driving.  We had even made an appointment for Comcast to come between 8 and 10AM to pick up their equipment, and we told our landlady that we’d be out by 10.

At 6AM, I went to sleep for a nice 5-hour nap while my wife started cleaning (as one of us needed to be rested in order to drive the 8 hours later that day).  At 11AM, I woke to find my wife still cleaning, although she’d called our landlady to delay our move-out until 1PM and had napped next to me for an hour (although I didn’t notice it happen).  Comcast still hadn’t arrived.  I ran the excess 60 lbs. of clothes that we weren’t taking with us to Goodwill and got back to help with the final cleaning and loading the car.  Our landlady knocks at the door at 1:15PM with her carpet cleaner and basically shoved us out the door.  She promised she’d deliver the Comcast box to the company.  And I don’t think we’ll be getting our security deposit back.

So finally, we are able to pack the car in earnest.  That would be fine except that we never had time to test-load the car and have way too much stuff.  Add that to the fact that we decided to buy a N2N 36″ soft-sided pet crate for our cat to live in during the trip.  Now, this crate is pretty awesome, but it is huge.  It takes up about 75% of the back seat, and I can’t see out the back window.  On the bright side, the cat’s litter box, food, bed, and a cardboard piece for scratching all fit in it simultaneously.  The cat has even taken to standing on top of the litter box inside the crate.  Which is really amusing when we take a corner a little too fast.

As I think I mentioned before, our stuff is being held by the movers for about a month while we install new flooring, new paint, and new drywall in our new house in Virginia Beach.  So we needed to pack enough items to live for a month in our little Saturn sedan, which came down to an inflatable queen bed, clothes, tools, assorted pots and pans, and the cat.  It’s stuffed.  When I open the trunk, various bags literally pop out.

But it does fit.  We stuff everything in, fed the cat some diazepam, and set off.  That’s when the meowing started.  Apparently, preventing the cat from feeling anxiety enables him to express anger instead.  Fortunately, we found the secret to stopping the meowing – my wife let the cat out of his gigantic crate and simply let him sleep in her lap.  Problem solved.

As I told my wife earlier today, I consider this first day of the move not my first act as a new professor but my final act as a graduate student (even though my defense was several weeks ago, the school officially graduates people at the end of the month – in this case, 5/31).  This of course means that if it had gone smoothly and as expected, it just wouldn’t have felt right.

So now, 30 hours into this adventure, we are in Bloomington, IL at an Extended Stay America.  And surprisingly enough, in terms of the overall trip, we are on time.  I can only hope that tomorrow will be a little smoother…

Not us, but sometimes it feels like it... image courtesy somedaynurse.wordpress.com

We’re now only about a week out from our last day in Minneapolis before moving to Virginia Beach.    We’ve been packing for about four days, trying to figure out what we’re taking with us and what we’re not.  Of the things that we aren’t, we sold 72 books at used book stores and are in the process of getting rid of about 50 items on Craigslist, only about 4 of which have been sold so far.  We considered a yard sale, but we don’t really have enough inventory to justify it, on top of the fact that we’re in an apartment building, which makes the whole thing logistically tricky.

Of the things that we are taking, we’ve got 7 small boxes, 7 medium boxes, and 3 large boxes now full of things from our living room, which includes two desktop computers.  I’ve also disassembled 5 bookcases (so far), as it’s less expensive to have movers take several planks of wood than an assembled bookcase.  Plus IKEA bookcases tend to disintegrate if you try to move them whole.

In further preparation, we took our cat, Neko, to the vet in order to get his teeth cleaned.  He has several chipped teeth, and more surprising to us, several missing teeth.  Evidently his pre-shelter life was a little worse than we thought.  We’ve also been trying to connect with a vet on the phone in order to talk about some anti-anxiety medication for him.

Oh yes.  You read that correctly.  We’re going to drug our cat.  You see, he’s a little anxious, probably due to that aforementioned pre-shelter life.  Any time he’s in the car, he curls up into a corner of his carrier, stops purring, and moans very loadly every couple of minutes.  So the thought of him in a 22-hour, 1361-mile drive to Virginia with him moaning for all 22 of those hours seemed a little more than we could take.

We’re splitting the drive over 3 days, which means we have to find cat-friendly hotels in three cities: Bloomington, IL, Charleston, WV, and Virginia Beach.  You may wonder why we have to find a hotel in Virginia Beach – well, there’s no power in our new house at the moment, and Dominion Power refuses to turn it on unless the circuit breaker inside the house is off.  Of course, we could have them send a tech out anyway.  But if the tech discovers that the breaker is on, then he won’t turn on the power anyway, and also won’t call or notify us in any way that he couldn’t do so.  Then, we’d show up, find the breaker was on, and have to reschedule the tech, which for some reason takes 2 days.  So instead of sending him out there anyway and risking an extra day without power, we’re taking the safer route, and scheduling him for the day after we should arrive in town.  And yes, I anticipate great customer service from this company.

Anyway, this will be quite a drive.  Here’s the route.  It’s technically about an hour faster through Chicago, but the thought of delays in Chicago traffic were quite unpleasant, we we’re swinging south instead.  Here’s the list of the moderate-sized and the interesting cities that we’ll pass through:

1. Minneapolis, MN (start)
2. St. Paul, MN
3. Eau Claire, WI (brief stop)
4. Madison, WI
5. Rockford, IL
6. Bloomington, IL (overnight)
7. Urbana-Champaign, IL
8. Indianapolis, IN
9. Dayton, OH
10. Chillicothe, OH
11. Charleston, WV (overnight, crossing the Smokys in the morning)
12. Charlottesville, VA
13. Richmond, VA
14. Williamsburg, VA
15. Virginia Beach, VA (arrival!)