it's been a while so I'll start with the trip West

I've been meaning to update this for MONTHS! ha, as you can see, it's been months and I'm just now getting around to it. So we left Pittsburgh the 1st of July. Or somewhere close to that. I have pictures somewhere. I'll have to add them later. We used ABC trucking to move our stuff which means we had to load it up ourselves. When the guy dropped the truck off he backed into the wires attached to our house and the truck was charged and I got seriously shocked. OUCH! anyway. he moved the trailer and we got to loading. I wasn't about to have issues stacking boxes to I went to Home Depot and we bought all the boxes. I wanted them to all fit together nicely, which they did when stacaked in our garage. I had all the books in small boxes and all the fluffy big stuff in the big boxes. Next time, I'm loading the damn trailer myself. I had boxes marked HEAVY for a reason, that meant they went on the bottom. The people that packed the truck didn't seem to realize that and just stacked stuff willy nilly. So when we got here stuff was smashed. I don't think anything was broken, but I think we were just lucky. We thought we had everything loaded in the truck and what was left would easily fit into our Pilot with the 2 cats. I was wrong. ugh. it was so frustrating. we had to go get another car carrier to go on top of the truck because we hadn't put enough stuff into the big truck. So instead of getting to Akron at noon like we wanted it was more like 5pm. o well. we got there eventually. We stayed over there then headed to Iowa to stay with DeAnn It took 2 days and the back of the truck was a disaster and stuff we really needed we couldn't get to because of the way I loaded it. We got to DeAnn's on the 3rd and stayed for the 4th and left on the 5th.

 I unloaded everything and repacked it. We also had our bikes on the back so we had to have everything available through the side doors. The cats traveled ok. They didn't like being shut up in the rooms while we were with family and in the hotels. Sean had to travel the entire time with his back in the brace. He had been semi-released from the Dr. so we could travel. Once we left DeAnn's it took us 2 days to get to Utah. There were 2 huge accidents on the way that slowed us down. One was a totally smashed RV. I hope they were okay. Sean was actually able to help drive the second part of the trip, so it seemed to go a lot faster. Once we got to Utah we stayed with a friend and on Tuesday morning went and got the keys for the apartment. We had the truck delivered and started unloading. With no help at all. No one from our church came except for 1 guy. thanks people. A friend of mine sent her husband over after she brought us dinner. And then our friends we stayed with brought some of their guys over. The first guy, Scott had a meeting to go to but before he left we managed to get the couch stuck in the hall. I do have pics of that to share, I'll post them later.

Then my friends husband and I were able to unstick it and get it into the living room where it belonged. We were actually contemplating chopping it in half. We were able to get all the furniture off the truck the first day & into the apartment. We got the bed set up and went to sleep. The second day our friends Audre & Jerry sent some of their guys over again to help us with the rest of the boxes. Then we realized that we didn't even have enough room in our place for everything. We had moved from a 1000 sq ft house with a shed & garage to 900 sq ft. Yeah, not gonna happen. So we need to get a storage shed, but that took about a week. So we lived with boxes piled all over the place until we could get them out. In the meantime we realized that the carpet was gross and the kitchen cabinets were not the best and the toilet was falling through the floor and we didn't have a shower head. sigh. so much for looking online & having friends look at a place for us while we are 3000 miles away. Luckily we have a Bissell and can clean the carpets once a week. they will probably be cleaner when we leave. The cats got settled and so did we. The ward (our church) is great (even if their skills for helping to unload a truck are suspect), and I've actually met several friends that are friends with people I know back east. Small world. Classes started at the end of August. And I'll have to write more about that later.