Are You Ready For This? Part 2

So, to pick up where we left off, moving overseas with the military sounds like a fun and exciting endeavor, but it has its demons too.  As described in the previous post, there were a lot of hoops that Ryan and I had to jump through in order to prepare for our move to Sri Lanka.  On top of all of these hoops, there is also the deed of organizing, separating and packing a house for this kind of move. 

When you move with the military, you have the benefit of a team of people who come in to pack up all of your stuff for you, which, to me, eliminates the worst part of the moving process.  Going through each room, wrapping and packing all of the millions of knick knacks, toys, dishes, kitchen appliances, etc is such a pain in the neck.  Especially when you have littles that want to unpack and investigate everything you are working on.  And then there are the junk drawers.  Oh, those terrible, no good, very bad junk drawers.  The bane of anyone’s existence during a move.  That’s the box you never want to open, because it was the last drawer you packed when you lost all your packing mojo, surrendered all cares and just up ended the damn thing, dumping it straight into a box with no ceremony or sorting permitted.  We’ve all done it.  And then had to live with the repercussions on the other end, having to sort through the random tiny pieces of whatever ended up in that box.  So, Junk drawers: good idea in theory, terrible reality during the moving process.

ANYway, having people come in and pack up your stuff is pretty awesome.  But, when you rely on this service, you have to know one thing: there is no such thing as a free lunch.  If you want to make sure that things end up in boxes with other things that make sense together, you need to do the work and organize so that your life on the other end of the move isn’t a complete circus.  Movers and packers give literally zero f*%&s about what stuff is in what room and where you want it to go.  They move like Hoover vacuum robots, rolling through and grabbing, wrapping and boxing without any thought toward organization.  Their job is to just get it done, not worry about what goes in what box. 

When we lived in Pensacola, for instance, we had our first experience with a moving team.  We went through our house the day before and put all of the stuff we were keeping with us in our bedroom and shut the door.  We thought this was a sensible system and, in many ways, it was.  That is, until the guys came in and started packing right inside the front door instead of the back of the house, where I expected them to start.  I organized from the back to the front, thinking I would have time to finish working on things in the front while they packed up the back.  I walked in the front door to find the guys mindlessly packing up things I hadn't separated yet, like papers and forms we had strewn about the dining room table still needing submission before we moved. They were also in the midst of packing the shoes from our door mat, including Ryan’s work boots, lined up inside the front door waiting for their next use.  I mistakenly assumed they would look at things as they packed them, considering, like I would, whether or not it should go in a box.  Obviously, that's not their job, nor should it be.  That was MY job before they arrived and, unfortunately, there was no tutorial on how to prepare for a move of this nature.  I had to rapidly reconfigure what I thought I knew about these movers as I started ripping items out of the boxes they were innocently packing while simultaneously scanning the room for other items I hadn’t thought to separate out – like my students’ work that I was in the middle of grading and dishes from breakfast that were still out and unclean.  All of these things would have been mindlessly packed if I hadn’t noticed them, all because I didn’t know better and it isn’t the job of the packers to know what stays out and what goes in.  They just wrap and pack; wrap and pack; wrap and pack; repeat.

So, take that need to organize, and multiply it by 4, because that is how many sets of movers we had coming to our house over the course of a week or so.  Oh yeah, and they wanted our stuff separated 3 WEEKS ahead of time for their walk through, so that they could get an idea of how many boxes to bring for each set of movers.  I don’t know about you, but :

A) I don’t have 3 extra rooms in my house in which to store items so that my kids don’t tear everything I organize to shreds

and

B) I certainly can’t be separating things into separate rooms 3 weeks ahead of time when I need all of these things to continue living my life. 

Who has time, space and patience for this request?  Not me.  Needless to say, when they came to walk through our house, we did not have anything separated.  The best I could do was make a detailed list of everything that was going to be included in each pack up so that they could guesstimate their boxes and supplies.  The guy seemed mildly irritated, but I have trouble believing that he often comes across families that are able to meet these requests.  I have to imagine, more often than not, that people are as (un)prepared as we were for this inspection and, given that, maybe they should change the format/expectation.  Just saying.

So, our move was set up like this: 8 days before we were set to leave Monterey, the first set of movers arrived to pack up everything that was going into storage for the duration of our move overseas.  My sorting and organizing game has come a long way since Pensacola, so, I was able to empty and section off rooms a day or so ahead of time to store everything that was coming with us.  This helped a lot.  It also helped that my mother-in-law was visiting for the duration of this process to keep the kids occupied and out of the house while I took apart furniture, continued to organize around the packers and monitored what was being wrapped and packed.  You definitely get more adept at all of these things the more moves you do, that’s for sure.  These movers started on Wednesday, finished on Friday and took about 75% of everything we own.  We were not bringing any furniture or major items with us, so they really cleared out a lot of space, making it much easier for us to take the weekend to separate the other 3 shipments into clear piles. 

Oh yes, and I might add that I lost my wingman on Thursday for the entire weekend.  He flew to Philly for the funeral of one of our close friends killed in the Marine helicopter crash in Hawaii a few months prior.  Obviously I did not begrudge him this trip at all; I was actually devastated I couldn’t go along, however, this did leave me to sort the rest of our things and begin cleaning the house without him.  This was the same night as the cats' lost flight reservation, if you recall from the previous post.  So, yes.  I did stop at In-N-Out for a milkshake at midnight on my way home from the airport fiasco, because I deserved the damn thing.   And yes.  It was delicious.

Strawberry/Vanilla - Hello, Beautiful.

This brings us to Monday before departing Monterey, the next set of movers arrived to pack up the other 3 shipments: Express (a small shipment of essentials, scheduled to arrive 30 days post pack-up); Household Goods (a larger shipment, usually containing any large items, scheduled to arrive 45-60 days post pack-up); and Consumables (all of the food/house related items we bought at Costco prior to leaving, also scheduled to arrive 45-60 days post pack-up).  This was all completed in just one day, instead of the 2 that were scheduled.  Since it was all being done by the same guys (different from our storage packers) and the amounts were relatively small, they were able to knock it all out in one day like the champions they were.  This gave me one whole extra day to clean!  Which, as you may know, you need all the hours, minutes, and seconds you can get – so, woot!

All was going according to plan and, despite our extreme exhaustion towards the end of this process, we were really lining up to finish on time.  We officially moved into the hotel at NPS on Monday night after having spent the weekend sleeping on cots in our almost empty house.  There was nothing left but packing the bags that would travel with us on the airplane and cleaning the house.  That was, until I woke up in a cold sweat, early on Wednesday morning, realizing I had no idea where our passports were.  Strike that, I knew where they had been and I knew that I didn’t remember seeing them in that spot before I left the house late Tuesday night after having gone back to spend a few extra hours cleaning walls, baseboards and floors. 

T-minus 28 hours before we were scheduled to drive out of Monterey for good, we raced over to the house and tore the place apart.  But as we searched, I just knew.  I had that sick, knowing feeling in my gut.  That feeling you get when you continue to look for something even though you know it isn’t there.  When you know you have a good idea exactly where it is instead.  And yes friends, it was true.  Our passports had been accidentally packed up and boxed by our movers.  Of course!  We called them immediately and, fortunately, they had not shipped our containers yet.  Unfortunately, though, Ryan had to miss his graduation in order to drive up to the facility, where he and another guy started pulling open crates and cutting open boxes looking for the black and white file folio that housed our passports, birth certificates, social security cards and immunization records.  We still have no idea how it got from the safe place I set it and the pile of clothes in which it was found, but I have a feeling it was a combination of little hands and gravity.  Just a notion.

Needless to say, we got them back and, by some miracle, Ryan only had to open 3 or 4 boxes to find them.  They could have been in any one of about 100 boxes, but he managed to find them in a box he almost didn’t open because it was labeled "clothing."  Thank goodness for small miracles.  He made it back just in time for our walk through with the property management company, while I was still clearing out the fridge and keeping the kiddos handprints off the windows and fingers out of our packed bags.  I was really wishing for a clone right about then.  Which reminds me, thank God for Grandma Jan.  Did I say that yet?  Because I should have.  At least a dozen times by now.  She really saved our tails helping, not only with the kiddos, but with the cleaning and readying of our house as well.  We had driven her to the airport the night before this whole passport searching/refrigerator clearing/property management walk through chaos went down.  I was missing her so much in that moment.  She’s a saint, that one.

Oh, and speaking of saints, let me also mention, in the same breath, our friends the Attigs, without whom we might never have made it out on time.  The Attigs, who we lovingly refer to as "The Jesse's," (due to the fact that they share the same first name), have been friends of ours for many years.  We met them at the beginning of our Marine Corps life and became close friends during our time in Pensacola.  They were coincidentally stationed in Monterey as well, arriving about a year after we did, allowing us to reconnect after living on opposite sides of the country for 6 years.  In our last few days they, as always, jumped right in to help us out.  They cooked us dinner after we moved into the hotel to save us a night out and took a lot of pantry and fridge items off our hands that we weren't able to donate.  Then, in an 11th hour save, Big Jesse arrived about 20 minutes before our walkthrough with property management and picked up a suburban's worth of trash, recyclables and extra items to take to the dump.  Because Ryan had to take our car an hour north to retrieve our passports, we weren't able to do a final dump run.  Jesse swooped in and saved us - I definitely owe them a 5 course home cooked meal when we meet up again.  You can bet on it!

8 checked bags, 5 carry-ons & 2 kids

I will fast forward through all of the other cleaning, walking through and driving away bits.  Just know it was a tornado of throwing things away, last minute scrubbing and shoving random items into random pockets of suitcases on our way to the airport that day.  Somehow we made it out of Monterey exactly at the time we wanted to and then had to drive 2 hours north to San Francisco airport to fly back to St. Louis for the next phase of this crazy journey.  On our way to the airport, Ryan and I both commented on how normal it seemed to be making that drive, even though it was anything but that.  It was our last drive out of Monterey as a family and our final farewell to this place that we had come to love so very much.  It felt so normal because we had done that airport drive so many times before, but that kind of robbed us of that notion of finality you often get when you drive away from a place for the last time.  I’m kind of glad for that, though.  I have a lot of trouble with goodbyes and I didn’t want my farewell to Monterey to be a blubbering, tear stained mess like all my other goodbyes.  We found so much beauty and adventure during our fantastic life there for almost 3 whole years.  We were #blessed to have so much time in such a wonderful place and, since Griffin was born there, it will always be so close to my heart.  It was a shame that we had to leave in a flurry of chaotic madness, but, honestly, I’m glad I didn’t have too much time to dwell on it.  Monterey and I have an understanding – that wasn’t goodbye forever, it was simply so long, until we meet again.  Because, by golly, we will.