Hi Honey, We're HOME!!!!

We made it! We had a nice uneventful trip, with about 22 hours worth of driving spread over 4 days, 1200 miles, and 10 different states!

This afternoon we went straight over to the house to empty out the trailer into the new house's garage, although we aren't officially moving in until Wednesday.

More pictures will come a little later, for now we're in a sea of address changes, insurance changes, school supply purchases, and utility installations.  Today we went over to Pensacola and chose a new living room set and boy is it different from what we have had for the past 15 years!  Ironic how we opted for the red couch after we left Nebraska, huh?

Timmy's happy to be back in Moe's country, that's for sure!  We stopped there tonight for dinner after our furniture shopping.  The one in Bellevue had closed just 6 months after we had moved there, so poor Timmy had been in a two-year-long Moe's drought!  Relief, finally!

Happy Thanksgiving!

This fellow "Major Mom" is currently spending Thanksgiving at Camp Eggars, Afghanistan. She got to see her family via webcam thanks to the Today Show.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Moving 101 -- Keeping it Fun for the Kids!

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

I saw these at Target while I was shopping for gift cards for the boys' teachers. CUTE! It's a small Lego set that you get when you put money on the gift card! So I put $5 each on two of these and just now gave them to the boys when we got to our hotel tonight. It took them no time to assemble them.

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

Weigh Too Much Stuff!

When you drive some of your belongings during a military move, you can file to have the government reimburse you at 95% of what the government would have had to pay a shipping company.
To do this, you have to weigh your vehicles before and after loading. Here's our completely loaded Pilot with trailer (the trailer was weighed separately) at a scale at our local nursery this afternoon. Trees, Shrubs and More on the corner of 36th and Cornhusker, for our local readers. We probably have about 2000 lbs of stuff we're hand carrying.

In the Home Stretch

I'm stealing this picture from Dave and his latest blog entry. Tonight we loaded up a U-Haul trailer with his model train layout. By leaving the legs up on the two parts of the layout, we have a plethora of space underneath that I found no problem filling with a couple dozen bankers boxes with assorted papers, liquids, and cleaning supplies.

It's going to be VERY cold tonight, so I have held off on loading my violin or my worm bin, both of which won't do well for too long when it's <50F.

Tomorrow we will do the final packing while the boys are at school.  Dave checks out of the base, I will turn in the cable box and turn off the cable/Internet and then we'll get the kids from school and hit the road.

This is our first serious cold-season move, so we're working with very limited daylight right now.  I don't want to do tag-team driving in the dark, so we're trying to give ourselves enough time to get down to Overland Park, KS before dark (about 3 hours).

My next post will be from on the road!

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

Almost Homeless....

So here I am, sitting in an empty house.  It took about 3 1/2 days, and it filled 2/3 of a 53' trailer!  But it's done, and we now are living with a minimum of stuff in our house.

Folks have been asking "Why aren't you in the Transient Lodging (on base hotel, more or less)?" or "Why aren't you staying with friends?"

Several reasons.  First of all, we enjoy our space.  We held on to sleeping bags, cots, air mattresses and camping chairs and are doing pretty well.  We kept our small TV, our Wii system, and laptop computers.  We still have our WiFi going (and will until 6 hours before we leave!), so I can still come to you from our empty house.

Secondly, we know Howie does much much better when the family is with him.  We could have kenneled him, but he doesn't sleep well at the kennel, and he tends to not eat.  Better for Howie, for sure.

Finally, unless it was filled up, we'd have had to use Offutt AFB's lodging, which we used on our way into this assignment in July 2008. They're gracious enough to have a pet-friendly lodging room that we were able to get, but it was very small and very old. The 4 of us, plus Howie, weren't too comfortable, so we decided to save the government some money and stay in the house until we vacate it on Tuesday.

So here we are in the house. I'm down to just odds and ends...we have all utilities set to turn off later this week in our current house, and our Florida house will have utilities coming on early next week.

Enjoy some pictures from our packing up...and our life in an empty house:

I ran an errand to Kohl's to use some Kohl's cash that would expire while we were on the road.  I came home and saw this ENORMOUS truck parked in front of the house.  I was tickled by the map of Florida painted on!

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

Those who were packing our boxes did a nice job stacking them neatly so we could still maneuver around.

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

The dining room.

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

The furniture pads helped protect the larger items while crammed into the truck.

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

This is the fridge getting loaded up onto the truck.

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

The packers were kind enough to leave two chairs for us until the very end.  That computer table wasn't coming with us, we're leaving it for the next tenants.

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

The fridge coming down the stairs out of the kitchen.

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

As one of Dave's Facebook friends pointed it, seeing our stuff get loaded was like watching a game of "Tetris".  That's our fridge, washer and dryer across the bottom there.

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

Howie's old hat at this -- this will be his 4th move in 10 years!

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010

This is from this morning.  My boys have a "Breakfast with Spongebob" tradition on the weekends.  Today was no exception.

From 2010 11 11 PCS2010