What a long strange trip it was.... has been...continues to be...

I'm back amongst the living, so to speak. We got our internet hooked up yesterday so now I can chat, and visit, surf, check my 200 or so emails... think about etsy again...

It was a nightmare getting to this point but was all worth it in the end. Bennington is a beautiful place to live and best of all... hubby is doing much better. He has a broken back, in case I haven't mentioned that before. He wasn't able to work the last four years that we were in Hawaii and had slowly been getting worse. Now he is doing well enough that he will be able to help unload the container, if it ever gets here, and is even talking about getting a job at some point.

The worst part of the move was giving up my "kids". The girl that was renting our place had agreed to take them so that they wouldn't have leave their house. Then less than a week before we were scheduled to fly out she had the landlord call us and tell us that her father was making her take all the cats (five of them) that she had at his house and therefore wouldn't be able to take ours. We all cried because it was too late to do anything else and I had to take them to the humane society.

I say nightmare because everything that could go wrong did every single step of the way. But at the same time someone always stepped in and saved the day. We found two young guys to help load the container while at the Toyota dealer trying to sell my car three days before leaving the island and on the day that the container was delivered. Up until that point there was me and the guy who had replaced me at work who offered to help. We lucked out though and ended up with four helpers. Granted... we had to rent a U-Haul because they couldn't get the container up the driveway into the yard which meant that everything had to be loaded and moved twice. Ugh.... then the U-Haul almost got stuck in the same mud that prevented the container from getting the hill....

That is only a small portion of our trip; we are thinking about writing a book someday. The house that we are renting smelled so bad when we got here that we were seriously thinking about breaking the lease and finding someplace else to live. We have decided to stick it out and and are spending many hours cleaning a house that apparently hasn't been loved or cleaned in years.

On the bright side... I have a new RAV4 with a V6 that goes really fast and is fun to drive. Now the snow won't be a problem this year. The weather has been wonderful... sunny and warm almost every day. Good thing too; our blankets are all in a container slowly making its way to here from California by rail. That is a story for another day but hopefully in two more weeks we will have all of our belongs once again.

I even have a chair to sit in once again so can start spinning in the evening. I didn't have a chair the first week we were here so was standing all day long. You would be surprised how much you miss the little things once you don't have them.... chairs, extra glasses and mugs, fabric, forks, spoons, knives, fabric...

I wasn't planning on writing a book here but with an adventure this big it is kind of hard not to. Hopefully things are back to normal now and I will be able to post more often. Oh yeah... food is a lot cheaper over here. :)