Furniture is Fabulous

So I have already mentioned this, but our moving truck was days and days late arriving to our house here in Salt Lake City.  It actually didn't leave Dallas until after we arrived here in Salt Lake City, a fact which filled me with regret at not planning a much longer cross-country drive involving the Grand Canyon or something.  Some of the orders ahead of us in the moving company's queue ended up going way over their estimated weights, so ours had to be bumped to a later truck.  The company that did our move paid us $150 per day that they were late and they ended up being 5 days late so we were not without recompense, but given the choice I definitely would have taken getting our stuff on time.

We had with us a couple of suitcases of clothes, the toys for the car, inflatable mattresses, and not much else.  The original plan was for us to be here in our house 3 or 4 days without any belongings but it ended up being closer to 10.  Ten days!  Without a single dish!  Or a place to sit!  We decided that we would make very bad Buddhists.  I am someone who abhors clutter and am something of a minimalist when it comes to furniture and decoration and all that, but this was taking things TOO FAR.  I am also a bit of a homebody (I am not antisocial but I do not regularly go out in the evenings and I have a pretty high need for unscheduled downtime) so it was so weird to have "home" be such an uncomfortable place.  Anyway, our big moving truck finally arrived and it has been such a relief to have real beds to sleep in and bowls for our cereal and chairs to sit in.  I think it has been a big relief to Grace as well; she was definitely showing signs of stress at all this upheaval.  One day when we were eating lunch at a restaurant, she started weeping, saying that she wanted "to lunch at a HOME."  And now that we have our stuff, her bedtime prayers have included thanking God that we have our furniture and our house is "more like normal".

Anyway, my memories of the days without any stuff are already starting to fade; it must be like childbirth where you eventually feel all hazy about the horrible details and thus you do not immediately recoil in horror when the thought occurs to you to move again/have another baby.  It's probably a good thing that I didn't have regular internet access during that period or else there would be whiny, complaining blog posts to commemorate my lack of moral fortitude.

Having our home be such an unpleasant place did give us lots of opportunities to be out and about and do fun things, although the fun did eventually grow wearisome, especially to Grace.  We ate at a ton of fun restaurants and hung out at the beautiful downtown library and visited parks and so forth.  The other thing we did was go see a bunch of houses with our realtor here.  We weren't planning on house-hunting until the fall but, well, we were looking for something to do. :) And now we have found some houses we really like so we might end up moving forward pretty soon on some of this.  As Rob and I were unpacking the boxes when they finally arrived, we would look at each other and say, "Hey, I know! Let's MOVE AGAIN!"