Burnsville, MN to Tulsa, OK.

We completed the first leg of our road trip to Houston yesterday.  We left Burnsville about 12:00 noon and arrived in Tulsa around 11:00 p.m.  Suffice it to say, our "adventure" was pretty boring!  There really isn't much to look at on the highways.  We saw lots of corn fields, and wind turbines.

Isn't that exciting? (sarcasm)

Corbin was so exited, he spent most of the car ride like this:

 

 

Really...not much more to it than that.  I wish I had something exciting to report.  The good news is that the weather has been cooperating for us.  The snow disappeared around the Iowa/Missouri border, and it has been clear skies.  We were treated to a nice country sunset in Missouri:

 



Today will be completing the second half of our trip from Tulsa to Houston.  Hopefully it will be more exciting than the first leg of our trip.  :)

Our dog, Cali, has been a trooper throughout it all.  My foot is finally starting to turn the corner - the swelling has gone and it is starting to heal.  I no longer hobble when I walk, so I can at least arrive in Houston with some dignity.

We already miss our girls, but know that they are in good hands with our family and friends in Minnesota.

Stay tuned!!!

Goodbye, Minnesota.

It has been a stressful, whirlwind week.  It feels surreal.

Last Friday I left my job at Pearson VUE.  I was very blessed to be a part of a wonderful team at Pearson VUE.  The people are amazing, and I am so sad to leave my work family.  :(

Yesterday, the relocation company sent over two women to pack our entire house, garage, and shed.  Instead of hovering over them, we left them to do their job.  Yes, you read that right.  We left them.  In the morning, I had a house that was not packed.  When I came home, the entire house was boxed up.

Today, the moving truck came.  It was a HUGE moving van. It barely fit in the cul de sac. The driver has been in the moving business for 30 years.  He knew his stuff.  They loaded our household goods onto the van and now the truck is on its way to Texas.

Our house is now empty and ready to be put on the market for showing.  Chad stopped in front of it so I could take one last photo of our home in Burnsville, Minnesota.

We purchased this home in August 2000.  We have lived there for 13 1/2 years.  Our daughters were 4 and 2 when we moved in.  Corbin wasn't even born, yet.  It was our first house that we have ever owned.  We brought home a cute black lab in November 2000 named Cinder.  Cinder lived her whole life there, until we put her to rest in December 2013, in our living room.  There are lots of memories in this house.  But, we also outgrew this house in 2001 when our son was born.  We made it work for 12 years, but we are absolutely thrilled that this opportunity has come along for Chad.  Change can be scary, but change is good.

After this horrid cold snap we have been having, I have to say, I won't miss the winters.  I will miss our family and our friends.  But it is time to say goodbye.  Tomorrow we begin our journey to Houston.  I can't wait!!!

Paperwork

Today was a day full of paperwork.  It amazes me how one simple fax could cause so much stress.

Our mortgage lender requested some documentation from us.  They sent us a whole checklist of items that they wanted us to send to them.  They requested that we FAX the information to them, and they even provided us with a prepopulated fax coversheet.  (How gracious of them.)

In today's modern age, you would think that they would accept documentation via email transmission (scanned PDF).  This is a major mortgage lender, not some Podunk, two-bit mortgage company.

Suffice it to say, after all of the highly confidential documentation was assembled, my fax ended up being 89 pages long.  I went to our department's fax machine, which is a new machine with lots of impressive bells and whistles, and tried to send the fax.  Do you realize that fax is dialup?  I was immediately transported back to 1994.  The machine grabbed the papers one painful page at a time, and grumbled each page slowly through.  Mind you, the high fa'luten fax machine accepts pages face up, and I am transmitting confidential documentation such as paystubs, tax returns, bank statements, etc.  I do trust my coworkers to be respectful of my privacy, but I couldn't just leave the documents there unattended and feel comfortable about it.

So, page 34 goes through and the transmission ends.  The paperwork was so voluminous, that the document feeder couldn't handle the paper.  Apparently modern technology can only go so far.  So I restart the transmission and to send the rest of the 56 pages.  In the meantime, I have to pee so bad my eyeballs are turning yellow.

By the time the last 56 pages were transmitted, I was about ready to punch somebody in the face.

Seriously.  It's not even noon, yet.

I am jugging this with my regular job, which involves...you guessed it, paperwork.  Part of my job as a contracts administrator involves obtaining signatures on contracts and processing the documents after they are signed.

About 3:00 in the afternoon I receive word from my husband that our realtor in Texas needs us to fill out some applications.  More.....(say it with me)...paperwork.  These things need to be handled during regular business hours, which means I have to get these filled out, scanned, and transmitted to Houston by the end of the business day.

I get it done, with about ten minutes to spare.  However, I am feeling like a wrung out dishtowel.  If filling out paperwork is causing this much stress, how am I going to handle the actual move?  Oy vey!