Moving Day

Well, ok, today is supposed to be the moving day. However, plans A,B,C,D, and now E have failed. We are kind of scrambling for a plan F now. Let's catch you up:

Ashley graduated May 14. At the beginning of May, she received several job offers, and the one she accepted is with an archeology firm in Texas. She graduated from Penn State, so, obviously, we're in Pennsylvania right now. That's a quaint 1400 miles away. Just a 23 hour drive!

So, I put in my two weeks' notice, we started packing, and we made a plan. We made several plans, actually. The original five or ten plans included us leaving today to go to Virginia to visit Ashley's family. These plans, obviously, have gone awry. Here's a brief rundown of the plans:

Plan A: Rent a U-haul, load it up, drive it and my car to Virginia, pick up Ashley's mom and sister, all four of us drive to Texas, then Ashley's mom and sister fly back to Virginia. This started out as a feasible idea, but as the totals started adding up, the price tag was starting to go over $1500, and that just wasn't doable.

Plan B: Ashley's sister--C--drives to PA, helps us pack up all the stuff, we all drive back to VA, pick up Ashley's mom--V--, all of us drive to TX. This either leaves C and V down one car for when they fly back to VA or it leaves them with a two day car trip from TX back to VA. People with jobs can't do stuff like that!

Plan C: Portable on Demand Storage. Refuses to deliver in State College.

Plan D: This plan was in two parts.
Part one: Yardsale. The first success! Between posting stuff on Craigslist and putting up signs all over the place, plus sitting outside on the porch for two days, we made a little over $200 on selling our stuff. We freecycled the leftovers. Go green!
Part two: Car topper. They make waterproof fabric toppers that are supposed to fit easily on top of your car. You should see the picture on the box! Everybody in that four door sedan is so happy to be moving a thousand miles away! How easy it is to travel with one of these! You don't even need a roof rack! Oh yeah, we forgot to tell you: it dents in the roof of your car. Woops!

Plan E: We rent a car in State College, pack it up with stuff, Ashley drives one car, I drive the other to VA. $40 a day for a rental is not too bad, right? Wrong. If you drop it off at a different location, extra charge. Gas: extra charge. Mileage: extra charge. Taxes: extra charge. You can only pick it up and drop it off at the airport. Guess what? They charge you extra if you're picking up and dropping off at the airport! Running total starting to surpass $300, and we haven't even thought about how we're getting the second car load of stuff to Texas.


Other ideas have included paying the roommates to drive to Texas, shipping our stuff to ourselves, getting lyme disease (I'll explain this one later)

For now, we are relying on plan F: unpack EVERYTHING, resort EVERYTHING, repack a few things, then try to replace what we need when we get to Texas.

Now, for the lyme disease: On Saturday night, after the yard sale, we sat down on the couch to watch a movie and eat dinner. My knee pit--you know, the back part of your leg under the knee area--hurt really badly. I figured I had pinched it at some point on something and it was rubbed by my jeans all day. I slapped a bandaid--which I hate--on it and went about my way. On Sunday, after the yard sale, it was still hurting really badly, so I pulled the bandaid off. There was a small scab hanging off, so I stared to pull it. It really hurt! It must have still been attached. Maybe it had grown around a hair or something. I pulled really hard, and the scab popped off! Then I noticed the scab had legs. That were still moving. What I didn't realize was that it no longer had a head. When I told Ashley about it later, she explained that you're not actually supposed to pull them off. You're supposed to light a match, stick it to the butt of the tick, and let it back out of your flesh. Otherwise, it pops off body parts so it can still eat away. So, after about 36 hours of having this thing eating its way around my knee pit, Ashley submitted me to the torture of squeezing, tweezing, mashing, and alcohol swabbing to get out the head.

I am trying to keep a positive attitude, but I'm not feeling very good right now.