August Self-Portrait

Deciding on what to do for my August Self Portrait was pretty easy, because this month was totally consumed with moving this family of four from North Carolina to Pennsylvania.  I made three (yes three) trips back and forth between NC and PA in the month of August alone!  To say that I am exhausted is an understatement.

Not to mention that, like my sister, I like order and organization in my life, and it is just plain not possible right now, which is a bit stressful.  We are so incredibly blessed that Tina and Jay have selflessly taken us in and opened their doors to us during this time of transition.  It has been truly wonderful and their house is prefect for all of us :)  It will be nice though, when we sell our NC house and are able to buy one of our own up here in PA.  I just want all of our things to be in one place!  Right now we have stuff in our NC house, stuff in storage, and stuff in Tina and Jay's house.  Which means we are constantly wondering where things are.  Annoying, but I keep reminding myself that it's only temporary.

A huge part of the current stress is our unsold NC house.  It is not ideal at all to own a house 7 hours away from where you are living.  Mike and I went back there last week to rent a U-Haul and do a 36 hour power move.  We had been gone from our house for just over a week and when we got back, we discovered that the hot tub had started leaking.  It was NOT a good time in the Hetrick house upon that discovery, let's just say that.  I can still totally picture Mike sitting there at our breakfast of pancakes out of a box (because that was all we had in the house), head in his hands saying, "This is the worst thing that could have happened."  He pushed his plate away and said, "I can't eat right now."  I looked at him, eyes wide, and almost started laughing.  Leave it to Mr. Dramatic to make our leaking hot tub into a life or death situation.  I just shook my head, cleared the table and said, "There are much worse things in life than a leaking hot tub."

But in his defense, we had literally only 36 hours to pack our entire house and move it to PA.  We had NO time to deal with a leaking hot tub.  No time to spend the entire morning shop vac-ing under the deck and calling around to hot tub repair men.  Mike was wayyyyy stressed and I understood.

So back to the beginning.  Tina nicely agreed to keep the girls up in PA so that Mike and I could power through the move alone. But we had to be back by Wednesday so that she could get back to work on Thursday.  We drove to NC on Monday night, arriving there around 2AM on Tuesday morning.

At some point during our trip down we realized that we only had 5% oil life left in the Yukon.  So on Tuesday, amidst the hot tub debacle and the crazy packing schedule, we had to get an oil change on our only vehicle.  Annoying.  So we left the Yukon at the car place and drove the U-Haul to our house to get started on the packing.

 Packing, of course, didn't even start until after noon because we were dealing with the hot tub all morning.  So, come noon, we had the U-Haul and it was time to get started.  I went to put the first box together only to discover that we were 100% out of packing tape.  And we had no vehicle with which to go out and get some.  Sigh.  So Mike looked at me and said, "You're going to have to ride your bike to go and get some."  OK, no problem.  Except I haven't ridden a bike in a good 5 years, so the tires were beyond flat.  So Mike starts hunting for the tire pump.  He finds it, pumps up my tires, and I pedal off.  I got 4 rolls of packing tape (just to be sure) and returned home to start the process.

All was well for a few hours.  I was packing boxes and Mike was loading the U-haul.  We were cruising along like the well oiled packing machine that we are.  That is until he showed up in my doorway and said, "The U-Haul is too small."  Then there was silence.  Are you kidding me???  I remember putting my face in my hands and shaking my head.  This day just kept getting better and better.  "What are we going to do?" I asked.  "Fit as much as we can, and leave the rest for the movers when we sell the house", was Mike's response.  It was fine I guess, but that wasn't part of the plan.  The plan was to take EVERYTHING except our furniture.  Well our plan, despite how well thought out it was, fell through.  We ended up leaving an entire attic of boxes, as well as most of the stuff in the storage space above the garage, and essentially everything in the kitchen.  Five years and two kids later, and the Hetricks accumulated A LOT of stuff!

So here I am, in all my packing glory:

This has been a crazy month to say the least.  Lots of stress, thousands of miles on the cars, and endless hours packing and unpacking.  But we will look back on it some day, shake our heads at our crazy selves, and laugh.  Heck, we already are ;)