Whew!

O.K. In a nutshell, here's what's happened over the past few weeks (and after reading this you'll understand completely why I've been MIA...):

We pack a bajillion boxes (really almost 200)
Tom and I take the boys to see the Monster Jam in DC
Patti and Henry come to help us move
Max plays several indoor soccer games ona team that has some female ringers (they win their games by a huge margin)
The old cranky diabetic cat runs out the door the night before the move and is not immediately found
Winter finally comes to VA, the day of our move
The movers load us into our new house
We start the tedious process of unpacking
We hit IKEA several times for that sort of nice but not expensive furniture
The cat is found under the neighbors' deck five days after escaping with an attitude adjustment
It snows on the way back from IKEA and as we're picking up the escapee cat it takes us almost an hour and a half to drive four miles
I was a vendor at a Crop for a Cure Event, which raises about $2700 (I sold about $500 worth of products)
Sam decides he wants to pee and poop in the potty for real - still working on this one
Tom gets a PS3
Max attends a birthday party (and discovers that they have Chuck E Cheese in VA too...sigh...)
I narrowly avoids going insane. Oh wait - that's still under discussion. There's no place for me to run and hide here yet. My office is still in boxes and we have no TV's on the first floor. That needs to be remedied quickly...

Anyway, we're in the new place, done with the old place, and are looking forward to the fight with the old landlord about the deposit. There's just something about a good legal battle that gets one's blood pumping. Fortunately for us the new landlord has a clue as to how to be a landlord. He even called to check in after a week or so and has been very responsive to us thus far. What a difference a clue can make...

So, I'll have lots of pics here in a few more days, I promise. Here's one from the old house right before we moved. A picture really is worth a thousand words, especially with these three. I need to get through a crop here at the house tomorrow night (yeah, poor planning on my part) then dig out my office a bit. Hopefully I can get a bit more settled before I need my scrapping stuff (in about two weeks) so I don't go tearing open random boxes and creating an even bigger mess.