So it's still July and my last post was in June so I think I'm doing pretty good as far as consistency goes. Ok, maybe not. I've been meaning to blog for awhile (I think I say that in almost every post), but this time I have a really good excuse. Really. Really. Ready? Ok, we moved. To Idaho. I never thought I'd be back here (went to Ricks College '98 and '99), but here I am. Here we are. Why are we here? Good question. There's a lot of things to factor in. 1) We were quickly outgrowing our townhouse apartment. It was great when we first moved in. Then we had a baby. Then that baby started crawling. A crawling baby and an apartment with stairs = not good. We knew we weren't going to be there forever. It was good while it lasted and being the apartment managers there wasn't terrible either. However, we needed more space. 2) Ryan owns a house in Idaho. He was living in it when we met and loves, no seriously LOVES this house. He'd always talked about it and I'd seen it twice before he moved out to CA for me. Heck, I helped him pack up this house when we moved him out. It's a terrific house; built in 1915 when people knew how to create quality homes. It's got a lot of character and by character I don't mean that it's falling apart in places. Ok, so maybe the floor is torn up in the bathroom and there's a couple broken windows here and there, but seriously, it is a one of a kind house. I've never been the kind to want to live in a neighborhood where all the houses look the same, and well, I don't have to worry about that here. So, we had an opportunity to move in (opportunity = current tenants were trashing the place and needed to be evicted) and so we took it.
Ok, so maybe there's not A LOT of factors going in to our decision to move here, more like just 2 factors. But they're 2 important factors. Ryan came out here at the beginning of July to start a new job and that left me, with Zoe, continuing to handle the apartment managing, to pack up our entire belongings and move on out. It was harder than I thought to be home alllllll day with Zoe. She's a great baby and I adore her, but it's hard doing it all day by yourself. I thought about single parents, and even those that choose to be single parents, and I don't know how, or why, they do it. I would imagine most of them have jobs that give them a bit of a "break" from their babies, but still. Hard work. With the help of great family and friends, we got our apartment packed up and cleaned up, loaded up a Budget truck and my dad and brother drove it out here while lil' Z and flew out. I wasn't about to endure a 14+ hour car ride with a 10 month old. I'm all for adventure, but somehow that kind of situation borders on crazy.
We had quite an ordeal with Budget too. I'd never rented from them before and to be honest, I can't say that I ever would again. This is really too long of a story for me to get into here, so let me do my best at summing it up. Our tow dolly wasn't ready at the scheduled pick up time. In fact, it wasn't ready for almost 4 hours after our pick up time and that threw off our truck loading and was a headache to deal with. We had to call in 24 hours in advance to confirm our reservation of the truck and dolly so it would only seem appropriate that they would have our reserved items for the time of the pick up. Oh, not so my friend. It reminded me of that one Seinfeld episode where the person knows how to "take" the reservation, but they don't know how to "keep" the reservation. The dolly eventually appeared and I made them bring it to my place. Anyway, some great guys came over from church and loaded the truck. It would have made the Jenga creators jealous. It was awesome. My dad and brother left Friday afternoon, and would have arrived Saturday afternoon, but oh darn, the truck broke down about 2 hours from its final destination. While things have since been cleared up with Budget and they did reimburse me some money for all the hassle we went through trying to get the truck up here after it had broken down, I gotta say they have TERRIBLE "emergency" roadside service. It's a good thing nobody's life was on the line, because they would have lost it. Budget was awful about returning calls or even being on top of things. Their customer service line wasn't a whole lot better either. And oh, their gracious nature wanted to reimburse me 15% of the cost of the truck. Poor saps there didn't know that that wasn't good enough. I talked with customer service reps, the manager and finally someone in an executive position before I walked away with what i felt was reasonable compensation for their terrible service.
Our truck finally got towed up here and Ryan literally backed the truck up to our front door. The ramp at the back of the truck came inside our house. That was awesome for unloading and we didn't have a shortage of helping hands either. It was unloaded within an hour. Awesome. There are boxes strewn about the place but that's ok. I'm not in a huge hurry to unpack all the books. Zoe finally has her own room and has been sleeping so great in there too. It's kind of weird for us to have our own room too. In our last place, we shared our upstairs loft space with Zoe so she was always ~right there~. Now she's got her own room and can have her own space. I love the kitchen. I keep unpacking kitchen boxes and thinking I'm going to run out of room, but I keep finding empty drawers and cupboards. Talk about a problem I'd gladly take. It's wonderful. Our little town is so friendly and I can go for a walk w/o even locking my doors. We are renting the basement apartment out to Ryan's brother and sister-in-law and they love Zoe so we've got built-in baby sitters too! Could it get any better?
We are loving it here and if you're making any plans to come to Idaho, drop us a line and let us know! Depending on who you are, we'd probably love to see you!
