Moving to a new home is always going to be an ordeal. One collects so much crap that when it comes time to move, you not only have to go through the process of packing it all up, but you will have to decide what will go.

Decision time: should you bring the pine sol. You will need pine sol, you have pine sol, but it could spill. Or there isn't enough. Or it will cut into the space of something you really need to bring down, like old boxes of presents that you hated but haven't pawned off on someone yet.

People come to help, and their helpfulness slows you down to the point of working backwards.

"Yes, I want to bring the spices... no, not allspice, I never use it, but all the other ones."

"Yeah, I want the kool-aid... there is nothing wrong with that kool-aid and it doesn't take up any room... What's that, it's what flavor? Eww, no, I don't want that then."

No matter how many boxes you have, you don't have enough. My workplace was selling off divisions, downsizing in others, so there was literally hundreds upon hundred of professional moving boxes. I would siphon off ten a day for weeks. I gave some to my mother who would be making the move, and I held the rest. They took up so much room in the house that I was considering throwing away some of them. We used every one, and had to use garbage bags for our clothes.

Then there was the decision of either getting a moving company or renting a truck. We decided it would be cheaper to rent the truck, and worth the hassle.

I rented the biggest truck I could, and figured I would have half the truck empty for some of my mother's stuff that she would have to move down eventually when she would finally sell her house and move in with Marissa and I. We had about maybe a fifth empty by time we were done moving our stuff.

The ride was planned as such, I would drive with my mother in the truck down, towing my VW Van, and Marissa would be in her car with her mother. Mapquest said it would take about ten hours to get down. We would wake up and leave by five am, and get down in the afternoon, with plenty of time for a breakfast and lunch break.

The day of the move, we wake up and we were on time leaving. Taking a truck on the Long Island Expressway is tough in Queens to begin with, having plenty of experience when I used to be a remote satellite engineer for the news, but towing a car dolly, in narrow constructions lanes is something you just can't prepare for, especially on limted sleep.

We cross over the Verazzano bridge without incident, and have an awful breakfast in New Jersey. I am having some difficulty, so it is suggested that maybe Marissa should drive with me, which I readily agree with. Now, we originally had the mother's seperated for two reasons; one, for the bonding experience with their children, and two, they tend to fight with each other.

The first five hours were a breeze. We stop for lunch right after we pass through Washington at a Cracker Barrel, and I am drained of energy. When we are outside, I ask my mother if she is okay with the driving arrangements, and she says she's fine. Our dog, on the other hand, is going crazy. She can't wait to get out of her cage. We give her a nice break, some more fresh water, and then we are off.

According to directions we got, it should have taken about ten hours to get to the new home. At hour fourteen we started to wonder if we would ever get there.

We arrive seventeen hours later, and all we want to do is sleep. To sleep, we have to unpack quite a bit of the truck so we can get beds out.

It took days to unload the boxes out of the truck, and we are now two months living here and there are still a few boxes that need to be unpacked.