We've Arrived

It's currently 89 degrees in our living room as I write this entry at 9:23 PM. It's been a very long day and I'm drinking a lukewarm Goose Island 312 while I sit on the floor in front of the laptop. Luckily our apartment has free internet so we can sit down on the floor tonight and watch Netflix on demand as we pass out from exhaustion.

This morning we woke up for the last time at 1406 Drummond Street and finished our last minute packing. This included shoving three very grumpy and disoriented felines into their carriers and packing them in the car. We both shed a tear as we locked the house for the last time. Kaia picked one last handful of beans from our garden (the only vegetable that we planted this year) and we ate them in between tears. As we drove away we were sad to leave but excited about the road ahead (the metaphoric one, not the literal one). After it was all said and done, seven and a half hours later, we arrived at our new home in Champaign, right on the edge of the cornfields and a stones throw from the U of I athletic complex.

Yesterday we had friends and family, including my sister and her husband Jim, Chris Hahn and his wife Kerstin, Kaia's mom and Randy, and many others come by to help us load the truck or just to say goodbye. We celebrated one last night in Eau Claire with pizza and beer on the floor of our living room. Chris Hahn stayed until 11:30 PM (some things never change). It was a wonderful night and we are grateful to everyone that helped make our move successful. Tomorrow we will have Twin City Movers come in and unload the truck for us.


Our apartment is much nicer than we both would have thought. We never actually visited the place and we chose it because it would be the least amount of hassle to deal with in the long run. It's a nice little two bedroom on the third floor of a small building (thus the movers) with a view of the credit union next door and the corn across the street. It will do just fine.

Here's our living room:

Here's the kitchen:


This is the hallway from the living room to the bedrooms:

And here is our room (look how big it is!):

Now we just need the air conditioning to work FASTER!!! It's hot. That's really all there is to it.

We are close to the finish line on this marathon of the past couple weeks. Tomorrow Kaia and I watch, I mean help, the movers with the truck, tidy a few things up around here, return the truck and car trailer (no problems on the way down by the way) and then get back in the car with the cats and head up to Oswego, a suburb of Chicago. There we will spend the night at Rinee and Greg's house (Kaia's aunt and uncle) and leave the cats with them when we depart for the Czech Republic on Wednesday. My goal is to sleep the entire way to Prague so my jet lag isn't too bad. Through sheer exhaustion I think I'm well on the way to achieving that.

By the way, the picture at the top of the post is the view from our bedroom window.