Um… what day is it? Where am I? That is how I have felt all week long. After loading all of our belongings on a moving truck on September 2, we had a plan to stay with family and friends through last week until Friday (the 8th) when I was going to drive out to California to begin living in our house, waiting for the moving truck to arrive with all of our belongings so I could begin getting our new life organized. Dave was going to hang out with my family this week until his defense when he would then join me in California.
Over Labor Day weekend we visited and stayed with Dave’s parents. While there we continued our Labor Day weekend tradition by going to the Colorado Balloon Classic to take pictures to enter into the photo contest. I haven’t had the opportunity to go through all of my photos yet, but there are a few good ones :-) I promise to post the better pictures once I have time to go through them. We were also able to visit with friends Trisha and Chris, and their daughter Makenzie. It was so nice to be able to visit with them!
On Monday we headed to my parents’ house to celebrate my mom’s birthday. Can you believe she turned 29, again?!? Neither can I… We spent the night there and then headed back to our now-former home town so I could finish up my last week of work and Dave could continue to work on his dissertation at his lab.
But here is where our plans changed.
On Tuesday we got a phone call from the moving company around noon telling us that our stuff would be arriving in California at 8:00 a.m. THE NEXT DAY. That is hardly the 24-72 hours notice we were told we would get before the delivery. The kicker was that if we were not physically present to accept the delivery, we would be charged $2,500 for storage. So, Tuesday afternoon I booked an evening flight to the Bay Area and a reserved rental car and headed to the airport all by myself while Dave stayed in town to continue to work on his dissertation. Then, my original flight was delayed for three hours which would put me arriving at the airport later than the rental car counter was open so I had to switch flights at the last minute and then change my rental car reservation since I was flying into a different airport. I finally arrived and uneventfully supervised the unloading of the moving truck on Wednesday morning. I spent the afternoon trying to do a little unpacking before I had to head to the airport at 2:00 a.m. to catch my 6:00 a.m. flight back to Colorado. It was a whirlwind 48 hours. Luckily, I was able to take a few pictures of our new house while I was there! Please excuse the boxes - they should be gone; someday.
Then I returned to work on Thursday to train my replacement. It was hardly believable to be training the person who was going to be taking over the job that I love so much. I did my best to explain everything I do and how I do it but I wasn’t able to get through everything by the end of the day, so I agreed to come in on Monday to finish up. By Thursday night I was exhausted and was definitely ready to crash at our friends Brianna & Rob’s house.
On Friday we headed back to my parents’ house to stay for the weekend. We were hoping that Dave’s advisor would have scheduled a date for his defense, but on Friday we still had no date and no real plan of what we were doing or where we were going for the upcoming week. Seriously, this process is so frustrating and we were just taking everything moment by moment (or crisis by crisis so it seemed) since we had totally lost control of everything. I walked into my parents’ house Friday morning and was greeted by my mother who informed me of two smaller family crises that I then had to (emotionally) deal with. Everything is okay, but seriously, those issues were just the flame on the candle on top of the cherry on top of the sprinkles on top of the icing on the cake. I was spent, drained and unable to function anymore. I just shut down and settled in to just hanging out all weekend.
Sunday night we headed back to our now-former home town and checked into a hotel that my aunt gifted us with by booking and paying for our stay. (Thank you, Aunt Pat!) After everything the past week threw at us, this is just what we needed to relax and unwind while I finished work and Dave finished the third revision of his dissertation. We enjoyed staying with friends and family, but we were ready for a more private retreat after being “homeless” for over a week now and to give us a better space to deal with all of our stress - you know, like trying to figure out when we would officially be moving to California since Dave still had no defense date.
Yesterday I finished training my replacement at work and had a nice lunch with co-workers. I will miss those folks so much! They even left me a special surprise in my car to help me feel at home in California. Its a long story, just know that it was really funny!
Some good news is that yesterday Dave was able to set a defense date for his PhD dissertation! Of course, this is pending that all of his committee members get back to him to confirm that they are available. Fingers crossed!
So it looks like Dave will be defending on September 23rd, giving him a week and a half to prepare his presentation. After some discussion and family brainstorming last night it looks like Dave and I will be driving out to California together on Thursday, then he will fly back next week before his defense and stay with my parents, then he will drive our other car out to California after his defense and start work on October 3rd. As long as we don’t have any other crazy surprises this will be our plan. Hooray for finally having a plan!
This whole process has been so draining & frustrating and I can.not.wait for it to be over soon. Here’s to praying that things will play out as they are supposed to!
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Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts!