Migration From St. Louis

Some of you might know that when we moved to Alaska (Michael in June '05 and me in January '06), we moved via USPS. That's right ... everything we moved from St. Louis to King Salmon moved by parcel post. That left a lot of stuff behind. We sold a lot on Craig's List. We had a fairly successful yard sale. We gave away a very motley assortment of things (a two-hole three-hole punch, anyone?) at a party we had that was most definitely not a going-away party for Michael.

And that left the things we really cared about. My grandparents' dresser. The chair given to Michael by Patty Jo. Books. CDs. CD jewel cases. My wedding dress. And virtually all our wedding gifts because I couldn't bring myself to send our new dishes to Alaska and risk having them all break. We rented a storage unit and filled it up.

And then we paid for it. And paid for it. And paid for it. Last summer, we considered going to get our stuff. But gas prices sky-rocketed and truck rentals were expensive, too, so we put it off. And paid for it. And paid for it some more. But no more!

We are all done with paying for storage because our stuff is all here in Cima! It's very, very exciting, let me tell you. Even with the pictures of the full storage unit, we had still managed to forget some of the things that were in there. Olivia poster? Totally forgot that we had a framed Olivia poster, but Darcy has now claimed that as her very own.

In theory, I'd love to go through some of those boxes and totes and get rid of some more stuff before we move next month. After all, we've lived without it for almost four years. There must be some of it that we could continue to live without. But it's not in an easy-access format right now, so we'll see how much of that gets done. If not here, we'll do it in Crescent City where it can live in half of our two-car garage while we work our way through it.

We owe a huge thank you to Michael's brother Stephen for flying out to St. Louis and helping with the packing and driving. They did an amazing job of packing and unpacking quickly -- the whole trip was only about 72 hours.






We enjoyed an extended visit with Juliana and Henry, too! They came out on Friday and spent the night so they could take Stephen home after the unpacking was done. Henry seemed keen on walking around outside in the desert. He and Darcy had a good time together!

Out here, company is always nice, and we had even more over the weekend. Our friend Matthew, an undergraduate student while we were at WashU, was on a whirlwind trip to the (wild) west, and stopped last night for dinner before heading on to Vegas (last night) and Zion and Bryce National Parks today.

It's been an eventful week, but with a lot of fun and satisfaction in the mix. It's going to be very nice to set up our new house in Crescent City with ALL our things instead of just the parcel-posted stuff plus what we've acquired over the past four years.