Well, we made it to NC. We drove down from Chicago overnight Monday and got here early Tuesday morning. It went really well and A slept most of the time. We switched drivers every couple of hours, though neither of us was really able to sleep much when we weren't driving. We would try, but we ended up talking and had tons of nervous energy that goes with a big move. The hotel let us check in when we got here and after a quick nap we made rounds around town. We went to get keys from the rental place first, then to utilities. The rental place was interesting. They are excited to have our place rented out and were doing a bunch of work on it as we were about a day earlier than we had anticipated getting into town. They found out the basement flooded when the cleaning ladies tried turning on the washer, so that was interesting. Everyone that we talked to had something to say about what a drastic change this is going to be for us. We'll see how it goes.
On Wednesday we went by the university. I got to meet the department chair and she was quite nice. She walked us around campus picking up forms for Chris to fill out. He will do an orientation his first day (Wednesday) so it should be interesting. Towards the end of our walk she talked with me about what I was going to do here. She says that there are regularly non-tenure track chemistry faculty positions available, so I may try for one in the summer or fall. Hopefully that would come through as we are in a great location for the uni, and it would be a good way to get into college teaching.
Wednesday our moving people came as well and delivered stuff. It ended up being the same team of people that was in Chicago. So far we've unpacked a lot of our boxes and have only discovered one broken glass. They packed us up on Sunday (well, packed all of our stuff in the truck). Originally I was against the idea, but now I'm not so sure. Chris and I talked about the whole experience on our drive and helped to sort things out, at least in my mind. Apparently the movers didn't realize that part of the reason we wanted them was for their driving ability, since we didn't really want to go up into the mountains with a truck ourselves. That and Chris didn't think an extra day of just me and A in a car would have been a good idea. They came in an really overestimated what we had. On Wednesday after talking with them we also realized how little they were paid, which is another reason that they wanted us to pay them to move our stuff in a UHaul. Ah, the inner workings of companies.
One of our fun conversations we had around the Ohio River was exactly how many states A has been to. She is just over eight months old, yet she has been to or through: Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina. We opted not to go the route through Ohio just for saying that she's been there as well. We are close enough to Ohio that we could take a trip there for something if we really wanted to.
One other thing that we've realized is exactly how much kitchen stuff we own. We are down to the last dozen or so boxes left to unpack and most of them are kitchen. We aren't entirely sure how we fit all that kitchen stuff in our condo, it really is a seemingly exorbitant amount. However, when you spend as much time in the kitchen as we do, it makes sense that most of our stuff would be from there. Thankfully the basement has a kitchenette and we can put some of our unusable stuff there. For example, we have a small oven and anything over a 12x14 cookie sheet doesn't fit. This isn't such a big deal as I still have some cookie sheets from my grandmother and they all fit perfectly.
Well, it sounds like baby girl is up from her nap. Hopefully she is adjusting to sleep patterns here with a new time zone, new house, new lots of things. It has really helped all of us to have our own stuff around. Today it is super windy outside (30 mph) and raining (it should be snow!) so we will have a lazy day I imagine. We all need the sleep desperately as A hasn't been very good about sleeping this trip. She's been kind of stressed and has actually slept best with us. We aren't super happy about that, but it helps us all sleep and we will deal with the repercussions later I suppose.
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