The Cake Lady Goes West: things

wow, almost a month later and i finally have more than two minutes a day to spare!  it's been a super crazy month, but really exciting.  after class on 24 july, i got on a plane and flew back to IL to pack up the house and move our stuff to our new place in colorado.  since then, i've been juggling unpacking, school, and fun time in the mountains.  here's the beginning of the story of this crazy adventure.

upon completing a full day of chocolate show piece work (details on this to come) at school, i headed to the airport and got on a plane headed for chicago.  i arrived in chicago at 0130 and met mom and alli who had spent the day shopping in schaumburg.  it was very strange to leave the mountains and be driving in corn and soybeans just 3 hours later.  i've driven to and from chicago so many times in my life, that i could do it in my sleep, but it was already strange to be back in illinois.  my brain has very quickly shifted to living in colorado and illinois already seems a little foreign.  

we pulled into the driveway in champaign around 4 am to be faced with a very LARGE moving truck.  i knew when i reserved it that it would be big, i mean 24 feet is like 4 times my dad, but holy fog horn, seeing it made the small pit in my stomach grow to the size of a cantaloupe.  i thought mom was going to have a heart attack.

dad, carole, mike, amanda, and andrew actually spent all day on saturday loading the truck with the big furniture and packing up what they could.  i was amazed when i walked in the house because everything was already moved and packed up.  it made me quite sad that i couldn't just bring the whole house out here with me.  i loved everything about that house and it was a great place for bryan and i to start our life together.  

after a whole 3 hours of sleep on an air mattress in my very empty bedroom, i got up and started sorting through the things that were left in the basement.  we ended up with 3 large piles of stuff, well 4 actually.  move, sell, toss and adopted by alli.  since she was planning on moving in the near future, she kept adding things that i wasn't taking to the pile of stuff for her new place.  i thought ron's eyes were going to bug out of his head when he saw how much she was keeping, but that is probably because she moved several times last year.  

several hours of hurriedly stuffing things into boxes, everything i wanted to bring with me was on the truck.  dad, mike, and andrew worked serious magic with getting things onto the truck.  i've never seen anything packed so tightly or efficiently.  we actually had some space left in the back of the truck, which made me feel a little better about the amount of work it would take to unload.

while i was packing up the stuff on my desk, i was fortunate enough to come across a gift certificate for a hotel room that i purchased at the central high school trivia night.  what a god send the wingate was that night!  instead of sleeping on the floor in my empty, but kind of dirty house, erin and i got to sleep in a bed.  an extremely comfy bed.  if you ever need a place to stay in champaign, i would highly recommend it.  

at 6:30 monday morning, erin and i climbed into the very large moving truck and headed west.  

i was quite impressed with the speed that could be reached in such a huge truck.  24 feet of portable storage could move at a good 60-65 miles an hour, which was significantly faster than i expected.  once we got used to the whole driving a monster of a truck down the interstate, the first half of the day was actually not bade at all.  we made pretty good time and didn't have to stop for gas as often as expected either.  in the end we were only getting between 7 and 8 miles to the gallon, but with a 50 gallon tank, you can make it pretty far on that kind of mileage.  

illinois and missouri went by very quickly and before we knew it, we were in kansas.  the very exciting thing about this trip was that we discovered the secret to driving through kansas.  lots of daylight and a goal of significant distance.  the eastern half of kansas is actually quite pretty with all of the hills and trees, however the line dividing eastern from western kansas, somewhere near salina is amazingly distinct and a little scary.  we decided that we were going to make it all the way to colby before we stopped for the night.  colby is on the far west side of kansas about 53 miles from the colorado border.  by driving through most of kansas on the first day, you are significantly less frustrated and bored on the second day.  

colby is actually a pretty neat little town.  because it is the last place to stay in kansas, it is actually very busy for a little town and we found really good chinese food and a decent bottle of wine.  always a bonus in our book.  

it was truly exciting to head back into colorado and have it be home.  i love my new state and everything here.  we arrrived in the parking lot of my new building at around 1100 on tuesday morning and immediately started to tackle the task of unloading the truck.  within 3 hours, we had unloaded everything that we could carry on our own.  by the end of the evening, we just about had everything we had brought up unpacked or stuffed somewhere so that we could unload furniture wednesday morning when our helpers arrived.

due to unpacking in the heat and not sleeping very much of the past days, we got a little delirious by the end of the evening.  erin had a great deal of fun organizing bryan's military gear.  maybe a little too much fun in fact.  

on wednesday the helpers that i found on craigslist showed up to help unload the truck.  i was a little concerned that i might end up with some seriously crazy people who would then know where i lived, but in the end the two guys that came to help were fantastic.  they worked very hard and it only took a little over two hours to empty the rest of the truck.  i felt rather bad that these two men were working so hard to carry my heavy furniture into the house, but was very grateful for them.  getting the armoire into the bedroom was a serious feat and it didn't even get damaged in the process.  it was a rather impressive day overall.  

in order to get the moving truck back on time and not continue to piss off my new neighbors with it parked in our lot, we decided to get it returned wednesday evening rather than thursday morning.  sarah from school was nice enough to follow us to the rental place and give us a ride back.  we had not, however, counted on there being a home rockies game that we would have to deal with.  i still haven't figured out who thought it smart to put a moving truck rental shop in the middle of a fairly large city.  not smart at all.  we finally got the truck fueled up and returned and were able to go have a good meal and a beer.   by the time we went to bed, erin and i both had a bed to sleep in, a couch to sit on, and a clear path to the bathroom.  

the list of events that have occurred since then is long and detailed and will be shared in the days to come.  however, today i finished all of the unpacking and settling in that there is to do.  all of the boxes are unpacked, all of my pictures are on the walls, and all of the furniture is assembled.  here are some pictures of the new place.