12 Things Learned During Our Cross-Country Move

1. Check every cabinet, nook and cranny before letting the movers leave your house because there could very well be an entire kitchen cabinet that they missed FULL of bulky kitchen appliances. That was fun...but on the bright side we had tons of homemade waffles and burgers cooked on the George Foreman grill during our move! (Not really)

2. Hope and pray that your landlady has already made out your deposit refund check when she comes to do your final walk-through, because otherwise she will try to charge you for not mowing the "lawn" (a.k.a. weeds...this is Arizona, people!).

3. Audio books from The Cracker Barrel are life savers for getting through a cross country drive. (I listened to The Hunger Games and The Island and both were excellent!)

4. Driving across West Texas is really, really, REALLY boring, but you can drive really fast (80 mph). And it hurts me to say that since it's my home state (but we don't claim the Western half).

5. It is possible to sneak a 36 pound dog into an indoor-entry hotel (in middle of nowhere, Texas) that technically doesn't allow pets. Picture this: Dog wrapped in a blanket, tail sticking out conspicuously, me on the lookout. It was reminiscent of the scene in The Hangover where they sneak the tiger out of the hotel room....and it was hilarious.

6. Arkansas is really freaking hot in the summer. Like, 115 degrees, hot. It felt like an oven. Thank goodness we only spent one night there. (Sorry, Arkies)

7. Your husband's bladder is even smaller than you originally thought. Another bathroom stop?!?! No more liquids for you until we arrive!

8. Big rig trucks should not be allowed to pass each other on highways where there are only 2 lanes. I swear it's like a pissing contest for them to see who can get in front of each other and it SLOWS ME DOWN and ruins my cruise-controlled contentment! Just get the heck out of my way!

9. Having walkie talkies while you're driving cross country seems like a great idea at first, until your husband proceeds to interrupt your attempt to listen to an audio book no less than 357 times during the most intense part of the story to tell you about random things he sees on the road (such as roadkill) via his walkie talkie. Apparently he was bored (see #4). He should have rented an audio book!

10. Tennessee is a pretty state, but I hate the highways (see #8). Coming from Arizona, I was in green landscape OVERLOAD with all the trees, rivers and rolling hills.

11. Your household goods delivery men will have at least one lazy one amongst them who will refuse to actually read the label on the boxes and will just put them wherever he wants. Such as boxes clearly labeled "office" or "master bedroom" being lovingly placed in the garage. Thanks, dude.

12. Moving is fun. (not really...see #1-11)

Have you experienced any of these pleasures? Do tell!

This Week in Fitness

Monday 7/25: 4-mile walk with the puppers (had to get her out of the house while the packers did their thang)

Tuesday 7/26: 4-mile walk with the puppers (see above) + POP Pilates: New Body Makeover (A YouTube 30-minute Pilates workout...It was awesome! I can't wait to try more of Cassey's videos.)

Wednesday 7/27: 4-mile walk

Thursday 7/28: 20 minutes on the stairclimber (at the gym) + 1.5 mile jog + some dumbbell arm exercises

Friday 7/29: None -- driving all day!

Saturday 7/30: None -- driving all day!

Sunday 7/31: None -- spending time with family all day! :)

We're staying in a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas tonight so I'm just popping in to say hi! Tomorrow we make it to the location of our new HOME (!!) but we don't actually close on the house until August 4th (Thursday). I'm sooooo excited and anxious to get our new lives started! And so ready to be done with driving hours on end every day! Have a great week!

This Week in Fitness/Moving Time!

Monday 7/18: None (traveling all day)

Tuesday 7/19: None (recovering all day...who knew a 3 hour time difference could cause jet lag?!)

Wednesday 7/20: Jillian's Best Moves from Exercise OnDemand...I didn't do all of it. It's a KILLER workout and would take about 2 hours. I did about 1 hour worth of it.

Thursday 7/21: 2-mile jog + 1-mile walk

Friday 7/22: 1-mile jog + 2-mile walk

Saturday 7/23: Xtreme Timesaver Training (Jackie Warner) DVD

Sunday 7/24: None (although I was organizing for packers/movers to come all day so I still got in some movement!)

The move has officially begun!! The packers arrived this morning to start putting our life into boxes. Today and tomorrow are packing days, then on Wednesday they pick everything up. Friday we leave Arizona for good and start making the long trek towards Tennessee!

Time for a new chapter in our Army life!!

Moving the Military Wife Way

I promised a post or two with my tips for how to have a successful PCS move, so here it is!

Scheduling Your Move:

The first thing to decide is what kind of move you want to do. There are 3 options:

-DITY (Do It Yourself) Move: Basically this one means you do everything yourself. Packing, hauling, unpacking, etc. is all your responsibility. The plus side is that afterwards you get reimbursed by the military for the move and you can actually end up making money in the end. We did a DITY move for our first PCS (permanent change of station) because we didn't have that much stuff accumulated yet and we were moving things from several different locations (storage room, apartment, my parent's house, etc.) It worked for us at that time but I don't think I would do it again now that we have so much more in the way of household goods.

-Government Move: The military hires a moving company to pack, move and ship everything to your new station. You do not get reimbursed for any part of it, but everything is taken care of for you. A downside is also that you are trusting someone else with all your household goods and you have to accept that fact that some things WILL get broken/lost/stolen. You can get reimbursed for those things that are broken/lost/stolen but it is a pain to file the paperwork and such.

-Partial DITY Move: This is a combination of the first two options. Basically, the military will still contract someone to move/pack/ship everything that you ask them to, but you also have the option to move some things yourself and get reimbursed for the cost to move those items. This is the option we chose this time because we have a long window in between when we checked out of our old location and when we check into our new location (about a month). Therefore, we have a lot of things that we are carrying with us to get us through the month-long homeless period (clothes, a few kitchen items, etc.) and we might as well get reimbursed for those items.

As I mentioned, we chose to do a Partial DITY so we were contacted by a moving company who was contracted by the military to set up our move.

The first thing the moving company will do is schedule you for a time to get packed and moved. You request a time period and they do their best to fit you in during that time. Our moving company had to schedule us a week sooner than we wanted, but that worked out okay in the end.

After you are scheduled, the moving company will set up a pre-move consultation, in which a representative will come to your place of residence to do a scan of your household items. The purpose of this is to answer any questions you might have and to make note of how many large items, fragile items, etc. that you are requesting them to pack and move. The representative should also tell you how to prepare for your move and what they will and will not move for you.

Prepping for the Move

Prepping for the packers and movers is probably the hardest part of doing a government or partial DITY move. Here are some important things to do before they show up on your doorstep the day of the move:

-Go through your house and get rid of everything you don't need. Moving is the perfect time for purging your clutter and unused items, and there's no need to move something that you're only going to throw away when you get to your destination. Donate it, trash it, give it to a friend, just get rid of it if you don't love it.

-Remove all items above arms reach from cabinets, shelves, closets, etc. The packers will not touch anything they can't reach so you must move everything above that down to counters or tables.

-Take everything off the walls (pictures, art, etc.) and place on the floor.

-Place all your silverware in a large ziploc or small container of some sort and ask the packers to just pack the container/bag as-is. If you don't do this, the packers will individually wrap every piece of silverware and it will take forever to unpack. You can apply this method to other small, unbreakable items too such as hairbands and clips.

- Place all your clothes into garbage bags and ask the packers to pack them as-is.

If you don't do this, the packers will touch all of your clothes (including unmentionables) and have been known to use your clothes to help wrap other household items. It's also a good idea to toss a dryer sheet into the garbage bags with your clothes to keep them smelling good (or just use the Febreze brand of garbage bags like we did).

-Move everything that you do not want them to move into a designated closet or room.

It's too much for them to try and remember not to pack certain things that you tell them to, so just make it easy by only leaving out items that you DO want them to move. We had a lot of things that we were moving ourselves, so we cleared out the entire guest room and then used that as our "off-limits to packers" room. It turned out to be really nice to have a separate room that they didn't need to go in at all because we were able to hang out in there while they were packing and not be in their way.

-Unplug any appliances and electronics that you want them to move. If you have a deep freezer, you need to unplug, empty and defrost it at least 3 days before the move.

-Drain all oil and gas out of anything that would contain it (i.e. lawnmowers).

There are some things that the moving company will say that they won't move, but I recommend just leaving those items out because sometimes they actually WILL end up packing and moving those items. Their job is to pack as quickly as possible so they just want to get it done, and often won't bother with fishing through the items that they aren't supposed to pack. Just take your chances and hope that they pack it.

Here are some things I recommend keeping with you and not letting them move:

-Cleaning supplies, vacuum, broom, mop

-Paper towels and toilet paper

-Bath towels, hand towels, washcloths

-Food for your pets (you don't want to starve your poor pets do you?)

-Shower curtain (I forgot to keep this one and I regretted it immediately...it's hard to shower without a shower curtain)

-Air mattress, bed linens, and pillows (for sleeping on after they take your bed and/or when you arrive at your new location but don't yet have your furniture yet)

-A plastic bin or two (This has a double purpose...the first is to use them to pack your items that you are taking yourself, the second is to use them as a table when all your furniture is gone.)

-Fold out chairs (so you don't have to sit on the floor)

-Firearms (In my opinion, it's just better to move these yourself. Less liability.)

-Pots, pans, baking sheet, knife, cutting board, wooden spoon, etc. (Just the bare essentials of what you will need to do basic cooking in the kitchen. You will get really tired of eating out and/or fast food so it's nice to have the option to cook something yourself.)

Okay well that's all I have time for right now. I'll try to do another post in the next week or two with the rest of my abundant knowledge on moving. ;-)

I have to give credit to my friend Angie for a lot of these tips. She is an expert Army wife and several of these tips came from a blog post she made about moving.

Turning my Frown Upside Down

Moving can be kind of a downer, especially if you're moving far away from all that you know. But there are some things that are helping to turn my frown upside down...

1. An excuse to drink Starbucks every morning, because the coffee maker is en route to Arizona.

Tall coffee with a pump of Cinnamon Dolce syrup, leave room for cream please! I'm becoming a Starbucks ordering pro!

2. The fact that I can still spend 30 minutes a day with my beloved Jillian DVD, even in a furniture-less house.

I purposely kept my 30 Day Shred DVD, hand weights, DVD player and yoga mat back from the movers for this very purpose. :)

3. My current nail color

Russian Navy by OPI...it makes me happy everytime I see my nails!

4. The fact that we can still have delicious home cooked dinners, even with the bare minimum of kitchen tools and food.

Last night's Beef & Veggie Spaghetti. It may not look pretty, but it was so satisfying.

5. The fact that our air mattress is SO MUCH more comfortable than I ever anticipated. I was DREADING the nights of sleeping on an air mattress, but it turns out it's not nearly as bad as I thought.

I highly recommend this brand of air mattress. It really is EXTRAORDINAIRE! :)

Moving Madness

I disappeared from blog world. Forgive me? Please? I have good reasons.

The past couple of weeks have been a mish-mash of traveling (Thanksgiving), finishing up at my job (last day was this past Friday), and prepping for the impending move.

Today was the day the packers came and packed our life into box after box after box.

116 boxes, to be exact. (According to the packers, this isn't that much, but I beg to differ!)

There are piles everywhere I look. Piles of boxes, piles of things to be donated to Goodwill, piles of things we are moving ourselves, piles of dog hair on the floor since I decided there was no time and/or reason to clean (and now that I see the state of my house after the packers came, I think I made the right decision).

At least one person in the house likes all the piles...

More things to nest on makes for a happy dog.

But there's also a lot of emptiness in the house (and it's only going to get worse when the movers come to pick up all the boxes tomorrow).

Empty shelves.

Empty closets.

Empty pantries. Empty cabinets. Empty stomachs (okay, not really...we've been surviving on a Pizza Diet...the diet of champions).

Now that most of the hard work is over, I should have plenty of time to catch up on backordered blog posts over the next week and a half.

I'll need something to keep me entertained, since I'm now "gainfully" unemployed and living in an empty house for the next week and a half before we leave for good. (You should see the amount of stuff I posted on the Book of Faces (facebook) today...it was borderline ridiculous, but I was bored!!)

I also plan on writing a couple of blog posts about doing a military move, since there is so much that goes into it.

So get ready for some fun. :)

Operation: Pantry & Freezer Clean Out

Earlier this week we had our pre-moving consultation, where a representative from the packing/moving company came to our house to make note of our items that will be moved.

During this consultation, the woman mentioned that the moving company "will not pack or move any opened food items, any liquids of any kind, flour, sugar, rice, etc."

Crap. Crappity crap crap.

Our pantry currently looks like this:

You better believe the shelves behind the swivel shelves are all full too...yes I have a problem.

And our deep freezer currently looks like this:

Lots 'o Food piled in there.

This doesn't even take into consideration the full fridge and regular freezer! Apparently, I have a serious problem with overbuying food, and yet, somehow, I still always feel like "there's no food in the house" unless I've gone to the grocery store that week. Maybe my problem is that I buy useless food.

Either way, it's officially time for Operation: Pantry & Freezer Clean Out. The packers come on December 6th, which means I have less than a month to use up stuff.

I'm morally opposed to throwing out perfectly good food so I'm using up as much as I can and then either donating it to a food pantry or taking it with us and using up valuable space in our cars. More likely the latter, since I'm cheap and I hate the idea of not using food that I paid good money for!

I'm probably still going to go the grocery store once a week, but I'm going to try reeeeeeally hard to limit my purchases to things like milk, eggs, bread and fresh fruit & veggies to supplement our pantry meals.

I'm also planning on baking up a storm to use up all the baking supplies I have. (Remind me again why I JUST replenished my huge-ass flour container? Sometimes I'm really smart.)

So if you're my friend and/or coworker, be prepared for me to probably pawn off huge amounts of baked goods on you.

Or maybe I'll just take care of them myself. It is practically the holiday season, right?!? Gaining weight is a natural part of the season! ;-)

If I was a good blogger I would have already made several example freezer/pantry clean-out meals and have pictures and recipes to share with you, instead of just rambling on about what I'm planning on making.

But I'm not a good blogger. So you'll have to wait and see what creations I come up with. :)