Move (nearly) complete

Around this time last year I was in something of a reeling mood as an engineering contracting position in Iowa was cut short after only a month thanks to an upper-level asshole that had an issue with my looking for an apartment online while at work with nothing work-related to do. I remember thinking that that would be a month I wouldn't mind wiping from my memory banks, Eternal Sunshine style. Now, I'm thinking something of the same sort of thing with the entire past year, which was completely wasted in Wichita, an area I might have actually gotten to enjoy had I had any desire to meet people or do anything other than learn my new trade.

The good news is, I'm out. Like, totally out. I rented a moving van, a car hauler upon which to put my Malibu, I had my friend Brian fly down to Kansas City for work, picked him up on Thursday night, drove him back to my place, and had him help me pack up the moving van on Friday. Saturday morning he jetted out, driving back up to Wisconsin in my 350Z, while I finished with the packing, made my final preparations, and drove the hell out of there. About 6pm I closed my garage door for the final time (on the fourth try; that goddamn thing never did want to stay down) and pimped on out in a 26' van with a car hauler towing behind it.

I only made it four hours that night, before exhaustion pretty much set in; I found a Super 8, paid with a hard-earned $100 bill from a night out at the casino some time past, called Brian to let him know where I was, and collapsed on the bed. I got a reasonably early start the next morning (~7:00) and drove just about straight-through, with only the occasional stop for gas and food, until arriving at Brian and Cam's house, where I will be living for the foreseeable future, at around 6pm. What is normally an 11 hour drive in a car took me around 15 in the van, as the damn thing started to shake if you got it up to 65 or so, making me just about the slowest thing on the road.

Then began the chore of unpacking. As, in the past year and a half, I have progressed from a 3 bedroom house to a 2 bedroom apartment to renting a room in a friend's house, I have a great deal of stuff accumulated, and that amount of stuff will in no way fit chez Brian, meaning a storage locker. So I had to unload the van into Brian's garage, separate out the stuff going into the house from the stuff going into the locker, then load back in the stuff going into the locker (obviously I didn't unload it completely, but a lot of locker-destined items had to be moved out of the way). Then I had to drive to the storage locker and unload my stuff there, then return the van to a U-Haul place, and work on getting my room habitable while clearing the stuff out of Brian's garage. I'm about a third of the way done with that job, but yesterday, after three full days of hard labor and a full day of packing, my body was finally saying to me "All right, listen up mother FUCKER, enough is enough, and if you don't knock this shit off, you'll have a full-fledged insurrection on your hands." Camille could see I was totally spent and said I should probably take the day off. I didn't disagree. Instead I got my computer up and running, connected to Brian's wireless, and put my room into some semblance of order.

So, there's maybe 20 boxes (some of them heavy) I need to get into the house and split between my room and his basement, and eventually Brian and I are going to move my couch and loveseat down to the basement as well, which will be a hell of a production.

Poker isn't really on my mind, even, right now, and I don't want to get back into it until I can feel I'm focused. I haven't played in a couple of weeks and am a little sketchy to just hop back in.

I did, however, order a 24" flatscreen monitor from the Full Tilt store which should arrive some time in the next 6-8 weeks. So that's good at least.