Wednesday's fun

Wednesday our movers and packers came—early. And in addition to being early, they were really fast and also nice. The packers finished up around 12:30 and our moving guy had finished loading everything (by himself!) by about 3:00. He helped us load up the trailer, for which we were most grateful since we feared we’d be stuffing a two pound sausage casing with five pounds of sausage.

But of course it’s impossible to move without some sort of mayhem and ours came when the moving driver knocked a huge limb off the sweet gum tree in front of our house. I wish I’d taken a picture because you can’t get a sense of how big that limb was from what I’m writing. Knocked down, it covered our sidewalk and extended into the street a little bit. I called the city and arranged for them to come take it away—thankfully that tree is on city property!

Getting the cats wrangled into carriers was like herding, well, cats. Usually we have Eddie and Wally share the big carrier because it’s plenty big for both. But Wally did the hiss/spit/yowl thing and started immediately fighting with Eddie. So we put Wally in a soft-sided carrier—after all, he’d been using one as his napping spot so we thought that would work out alright. But as we loaded up Chloe and Eddie into the car, Wally (who was still in the house) escaped the soft-sided carrier. So we hauled Chloe back in the house, put Wally in her carrier and her in the soft-sided carrier.

We got going around 4 PM, and as we drove Chloe got more and more frantic in the soft-sided carrier, mashing her little face against the mesh and making very pathetic mewing sounds. We realized we would need to find another regular carrier—as cool as those soft-sided carriers are, all three cats really hate them for traveling.

We stopped at a motel about 10 miles east of Des Moines that night. As per usual for Iowa this summer, Des Moines got plastered by more rain they didn’t need. Oh and the cats completely spazzed out all night long, no exaggeration. As I told Kent, I think I slept about four hours, but in 10 minute increments.