Moving Day(s)

So I think actual moving day was horrific enough to deserve a couple paragraphs. It went like this:

Find out Budget moving van we rented 2 months ago is available, but not tow dolly we rented 2 months ago. No one at Budget really seems to care, they string me along until actual moving day, when I give up and finally get one at U-haul (and u-haul didn't have any either, but one showed up at like 4pm.) Pay about $200 extra because the dolly with budget had been a package deal. Meanwhile, our large group of moving helpers has dwindled to just a couple. So...takes us 9 hours to pack up the van, which includes when we drove the van to get the dolly and a bookshelf toppled over in the back, which made a gallon of paint spill on a bunch of stuff. Including the one piece of furniture I've ever bought NOT at Ikea or Target. Awesome. We roll out of Ventura at around 7pm and quickly discover that when Budget tells you not to go over 55 mph they mean it...what they fail to mention is you can't even go over 40. So we roll into some place south of Sacramento at about 2am. This is the one bright point of the trip. It was a Holiday Inn Express and it was NICE. Super comfortable bed, really cool bathroom. I didn't want to leave. Did I mention the A/C was broken in the moving truck? And it was literally 103 degrees outside most of both days? And both dogs wanted to be on my lap? And I get a rash from Jack that starts out as little bumps and turns into giant welts and itches like crazy? So I was covered in sweat and rash and dog hair and the seat was burning my thighs. It was awesome. Oh, and the first leg of the trip was immediately after packing everything. We didn't take showers. At least I wasn't driving. Brian really got the short end of the stick. We finally got to the new house at about 11pm on June 28th. Climbed through the truck to get the box I had set aside to be the LAST BOX PACKED. It was labeled LAST BOX. It was nowhere near the back of the truck. Thanks to my limber monkey skills I was able to get the flashlights, air mattress, blanket, and dog food. Then we went into the house and I went into a full blown panic. Keep in mind I had only seen the kitchen in pictures...and all those "before" pictures? That's what I was seeing....and let me tell you, this house photographed amazingly well. It was much worse in person. To put it in perspective, one of the first things I did was lift up the toilet lid to use the bathroom....and then scream and run out of the bathroom. The toilet was filled with black gunk that was much worse than any sort of toilet matter, or mold, or both. It seriously looked like someone trapped some kind of animal in there. We got new toilets very soon after that incident. Luckily, after a couple days (really once we got all our stuff in the house) I was no longer convinced it was haunted and/or should have been condemned.

Here are some pictures to commemorate the occasion:
(The one of just me was after we packed everything and cleaned the whole condo, right before we locked it up. The picture is too small to actually tell, but I was 95% dead.)