WE MADE IT!

In classic "Lauren" fasion (I love a little chaos every now and then), we got moved into our apartment on a Thursday evening, and started orientation on Saturday. Wa hoo! Told yall this would be an adventure. And yes, Ryan was supposed to be joining me at orientation, so it's not like I could go to school and he could stay back and unpack. We hired movers to unload the moving truck, which was a first for us-we usually hire family and friends! :) The guys were awesome! Those of you that have helped us move in the past will be especially amazed by this-they had the entire truck unloaded and everything upstairs in 45 minutes. I was speechless-another first.
The drive down here was pretty interesting as well. We loaded the moving truck on Wednesday and decided to just wait and drive the next day. So Ryan drove the big moving truck towing my SUV (a sight in and of itself) for the 5+ hour-long trip through downtown Houston. We decided to tow my car instead of try to drive it because it is 11 years old with 160,000 miles on it...we were afraid that when it saw we were going to Houston, it might just roll over and die. I drove Ryan's truck with Mav, Goose, and Tig. Tig hates car rides and proceeds to meow the entire time-about once every 5 seconds. He kinda sounds like those toys that kids often play with-it's a tube and if you tip it one way, it makes a noise going one way on the music scale (almost an extended "whoop" noise), and if you tip it the other way, the noise goes the other way on the music scale. Well, whether you know what I'm talking about or not, please trust me that it's extremely annoying! Then, the cat starts thrashing around in his crate. The dogs have settled down in the backseat, but the cat is just going nuts in his crate in the front seat, and I had no earthly idea why. He's been on car rides before and didn't attack his crate! Oh, that was another thing, if I tried to put my hand in his crate to soothe him a little, he'd bite me. Jerk. Well come to find out, he needed to poop. And he did. In his crate. We still had 4 hours of driving ahead of us, and my crapped-on cat is sitting in the front seat with me. Isn't that just precious? So I immediately pull off at the next exit and into a Dairy Queen so I can brainstorm on how to get my crapped-on 20-pound cat out of his dog crate without letting him out of the truck and without getting poo on myself, the truck, or either of the dogs who think this is the most interesting thing they've ever seen. My plan of attack was to pull the crate, cat, and all out of the truck and put it all on the ground right next to the truck with the door open, open the crate real quickly, grab the cat in the cleanest spot possible, toss him in the truck, and shut the door real quick. Don't laugh...it made sense at the time. Surprisingly, it worked! And the cat wasn't even a mess at all. However...yall KNOW there had to be another part to that...while I was trying to get the cat out of the crate, my 90-pound Maverick leaps out of the back seat, out of the truck, and right OVER me to escape the truck. Now, my dog is running around the DQ parking lot just steps away from the highway. FREAK OUT TIME! That was one of the few times I used my "mom" voice, heard it, and didn't care. "Maverick Miller, if you don't get your...back in this truck right now!..." Sad day-I'm getting old. But hey, it worked. He came back and jumped right back in the truck with that "I'm sorry, mom..." look on his face and his tail tucked between his legs. Ok, so we are all back in the truck (except the crapped-on crate which got to take a joy ride in the bed of the truck for the rest of the trip), and the cat apparently got his wish to ride like the pups-not in a crate. It was circus.
The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful until we got into Houston and my GPS took me some stupid round-about way to get to the apartment. I'm sorry, I thought this was simple...exit the highway, turnleft, apartment complex on the left. NOPE. We sure did exit and turn left-at the wrong road, followed by a right, followed by missing my next right, some street in an alley of some sort, another right and my GPS told me I had "arrived" at some intersection-no houses, no apartment. Grrreeat...but nonetheless, we all made it safely, and we love the new apartment. I'll get some pics loaded once we finish decorating it.