Busy, Busy, Busy

So, other than the occasional quick note or a post with new photos, we haven’t been that great at keeping up with our “weekly” blog posts lately. We’ve been a little more busy than normal the last few weeks – actually, ever since returning from our house hunting trip to Rochester in April things have been a little extra busy around here. We enjoyed a great week down in San Diego visiting my family and enjoying Disneyland, the beach, the pool and jacuzzi, and having fun with family.

And when we returned from our trip, we got back to real life and have been busy every day since then trying to cross things off of our typed page-long list of “things to do before the move.” (Actually, the other day Michael was feeling too overwhelmed by the long list that we keep crossing things off, but keep thinking of other things that we have to add to, so he asked me to divide it into things that we really have to do before the move, and things that we would like to get done but don’t really have to do, so now it’s a little more manageable, but still lots of work to do).

And Michael has had a pretty terrible schedule so far for this surgery rotation. There was a schedule change at the beginning of the rotation which increased Michael’s number of overnight 30-hour shifts at the hospital this month from 6 to 8, plus it made it so he’s been mostly q2 this week (meaning he’s overnight one day, gets home in the afternoon the next day to sleep, then goes back in for another overnight call the following day). Usually q3 is considered a pretty hard schedule. The one good thing about his schedule being so busy right now is that it won’t be quite as busy the last couple weeks of this rotation, when we will need to be spending the most time finalizing our packing and getting everything else ready for the move.

So, we’re starting to get things all sorted out for the move. We have set the reservations for the moving truck and the tow dolly (to tow Michael’s car behind the minivan). And we’ve scheduled a date for when we plan to arrive at our new house in New York to sign for them to deliver the moving truck and the ‘pod’ that has held the other half of our stuff for the last year in storage in New York. We’ve called to ask for help packing the moving truck here in Utah, and I think Michael just e-mailed the people from church out in New York who offered to help us unpack when we get there. And we have been working with our realtor, the lender, and our attorney (attorneys are required to do the paperwork for closing on a house in the state of New York) to sign a pre-possession agreement with the sellers (so that we can rent the house from them for a few days between the time we arrive there and the actual closing date), and to get the closing date scheduled (looks like July 2nd, unless anything changes between now and then). Plus we have been getting quotes and calling several different companies to decide on where we will go for homeowner’s insurance (and auto). Today I spent several hours going through information about different banks and credit unions near our new house to try to choose one to set up a checking account with (since we’ll need a cashier’s check from a local bank for the closing costs of the house just a few days after we move there, I’m hoping that we’ll find a good bank that will allow us to set up an account with them online before we move so we don’t have to worry about that after we get there). Plus I’ve been trying to cross a few less important things off of our list that I wanted to get done before packing – like filing a pile of papers in our file box and backing up our computer files. And now I’ve got one more big thing to deal with – our car.

Late Saturday morning Michael got home from an overnight shift at the hospital and said that he was still feeling alright (even though he only got 3 hours of sleep), and he wanted to try to help me get some things done before catching up on some sleep that afternoon (he has been feeling pretty bad lately about not being around much to help me get everything done that we need to do). So, I told him that the day before I went to run get some groceries and one of the tires on the van was totally flat. I pumped it up with a bike pump enough to get to the gas station and fill it up with air, but by the time I got home from the grocery store it was about half full of air again. We have also had some problems with another tire loosing air (although not as bad as that), so Michael took the van to Discount Tires, where I had a couple of the tires replaced several months ago, because those tires were still under warranty. They showed him that the metal parts on the wheels where actually deteriorating, which they said would make it hard for there to be a good seal between the wheel and the tire, so they ended up replacing those and repairing the tires that had problems, costing us about $500. Then Michael stopped at an auto glass shop and had two small chips in the windshield repaired (because I was concerned that in the cold weather of a New York winter a chip might crack and cost a lot more to repair). So that was another $20. And then he stopped and got 3 new windshield wipers for the van, at a little under $30 total. And we were feeling pretty good about our van being totally prepared for the cross country drive. When Michael got home, he was pretty tired after being up all night, but we fed the kids lunch and I had gotten them all in their swimsuits so we went out and let the boys help us wash both cars and Michael got the new windshield wipers on. When he was doing that, he noticed that one of the wipers had been opened and broken before he bought it.

So, after getting all the boys down for naps and taking a shower, Michael was going to try to get a nap while I exchanged the broken windshield wiper, picked up something for dinner at the grocery store, and tried to find some boxes for packing. Courtland woke up right before I left, so I took him with me so Michael could get some sleep. On the way to the car shop, I was driving down the road and I glanced down at the slip of paper in my hand to confirm the address of the shop and when I looked up the car in front of me was stopped and I didn’t have time to stop and ran into it. It hit pretty hard and deployed my airbags. I was pretty shaken up, and Courtland started crying, so I got him out of the car, but he was fine. I was fine too, except for a scrape on my arm from the airbag. I felt awful, especially looking at the van and seeing how badly it was damaged and thinking about how we had just gotten everything ready for the move, even down to washing the van. Luckily the girl in the other car wasn’t hurt, and although she mentioned some damage to the inside of her trunk, her car didn’t look nearly as bad as mine except for some denting all across the back. I was glad that she wasn’t mad at me – she said it had happened to her before too and she didn’t even act annoyed at the fact that I’m sure having her car fixed will be an inconvenience to her. A police officer came and got our information and gave me a citation. He said that he was giving us a big break because our van still has Wisconsin plates and I still have a Wisconsin driver’s license (neither the license or the registration is expired, so I had just planned on keeping them until we moved to New York and then getting new ones there, rather than paying to get them here when mine weren’t expired yet). But apparently it’s not only recommended that you update that stuff as soon as you move to Utah, but it’s the law. He told me that he should have given me a ticket for that, and that the ticket just for the registration would be $1000. (Although I think that’s an incredibly high amount, I’m just glad he didn’t give me that ticket). Our car was towed to the tow yard, and Michael picked me up (I felt bad for waking him up after he got only about 15 minutes of sleep and then he didn’t get a chance to get any rest for the remainder of the day). We made a claim to our insurance, and are still waiting for the appraiser to go look at the van and tell us whether they want to repair it or total it (although the adjustor that I’ve been talking to on the phone said that she thinks it will be totaled based off of my description of the damage and the year of the van). So, now we are just waiting to see what they say. This couldn’t have come at a worse time (well, ok, if it happened the day before the move I guess that would have been worse, or even worse yet, during the move with the whole family in the car).

I’ve been trying to look up the value of the van on Kelley Blue Book in case it is totaled (although I don’t know if the insurance will try to pay the private party value or the retail value – which would make a difference in whether or not we could get a van that’s as nice as ours was or not). And I’ve spent a little time making a list of comparable vans for sale in our area – because I’ve been told that if an insurance company wants to total a car and offers you less than what you think it would take to replace it, you may be able to show them what similar cars are going for in your area and they might be flexible on the amount they will pay. But I haven’t spent too much time on that yet, since we don’t know for sure if they’re going to total it or not. For us right now it would be a lot more convenient to just repair the car, especially with this move and everything else we need to get done this month. But we’ll just have to wait and see. Michael is frustrated that we spent that money on the van right before this all happened – he said he wants to go take the new wheels off the van if they total it, but I told him I don’t think it really works that way. (I did tell him that he might be able to get away with putting the old windshield wipers back on and taking the new ones, though, although I can’t really see us doing that). :) The worst thing is that we really like that van. Besides being a good car that was in good shape and having the power sliding doors and back gate, which is really helpful to me when I’m carrying in sleeping babies, it had lots of nice little extras, like heated seats, a built-in carseat, a 4-disc CD player, etc. We’ll just have to see what we can get if we have to replace it. And I am really hoping that if we do have to get a new van that it won’t have to be registered in Utah right before we move to New York and have to pay to re-register it. Oh well. I guess I shouldn’t worry about that until I have to.

Well, today was spent running errands with the kids – getting some new flip flops for a couple of the boys who’s other ones were already breaking (it’s barely even summer yet – those sure didn’t last long), getting a bunch of moving boxes out of the dumpsters behind Barnes and Noble, getting some orzo (a kind of pasta for a salad we really like) because I am borrowing a canning machine tomorrow to get several food storage items canned before we move, and taking the kids to a park to eat a late lunch and play on the playground (but only for about 7 minutes before we had to go home because Eli had to go potty), and then comparing checking accounts at several different banks online while the kids napped. At least we’re getting down to the point that a lot of the things on our to do list are things that we can’t do yet – like waiting until Courtland’s doctor’s appointment next week before I pick up all the boys’ medical records from the pediatrician’s office. All except packing.

We could definitely start on packing, but both Michael and I have been avoiding it like the plague (well, really we’ve just been trying to do everything else possible on the list before starting to pack). But since we are planning on packing the moving truck on the 18th (we’re sending the stuff before we actually leave, because it takes up to a certain number of days for them to deliver across the country and so we decided it would be better to go without all our stuff for a few days here at Grandma’s house where we can still use her furniture, dishes, etc. rather than arriving at our new house and having to wait several days for things like beds, spoons, and lamps). So, I guess we’ll actually have to get started on the packing sooner rather than later. I can’t wait to move into our new house and start this next part of our lives – but I’m definitely not looking forward to the actual moving – the packing or the driving.