Moving Pain

The past month has been hectic, with coast to coast travel for Christmas and the quick move to Virginia.

Tony and I were able to make it out of town just hours I guess before a winter storm dumped like a foot of snow in Concord.
We stopped in Hartford, CT for that night since we hadn't left until later in the afternoon, and then the next day we spent the night in Hershey, PA. On the morning of the 31st, we went to Hershey's Chocolate World. Not quite what we expected since we thought we'd be getting a tour of the actual Hershey's factory, not a simulated one, but still nice. When is chocolate not a good idea? We also planned to go through Amish country, but a few wrong freeways and a small confusing map later, we gave up and headed for Virginia. We'll go back up another time, since it is only a couple of hours away.

I suppose that I am predisposed to dislike the DC area, since again it is on the opposite coast from our families, I don't like politics, or at least the way politics are discussed and argued over, and I don't love big cities.
The DC area does have positives, like nearly endless shopping areas, with every store and then some available, and plenty of historical and national places to visit, but so far it has more points against it than points for it.
Take for instance the trouble we've had moving into our apartment. We arrived at 7:45am on New Year's Day for our scheduled move in. I go to the front desk and ask for our keys, and I'm told we can't move in. "What?" I exclaim, figuring I'd heard wrong. The guard then proceeded to tell me that since the service elevator was broken, we were not able to move in for at least 2 weeks, AT LEAST! Our landlord was in China so we could not get a hold of him, and I was just too upset to know what to do.
Now it doesn't happen very often, but when I get really angry, I cry. Well as long as I don't try to talk, I'm able to remain composed. But since I needed to figure out what to do I had to talk, which resulted in my eyes watering up, and my being temporarily unable to speak without sounding emotionally unstable. This annoying reaction to anger only served to make me madder, which meant that I couldn't stop crying. I had to sit in the car for like 15 minutes before I could calm down.
One thing that was extremely helpful is that the ward here turned up to help us move in. Once they saw that it wasn't going to happen, instead of completely abandoning us to our own devices, we were offered several places to spend the night and we were taken over to a family's home, where they let us do laundry and kind of just hang out until we could figure out what to do.
Luckily a friend of the landlord was able to threaten/convince the property manager that it would be in their best interest if they didn't want a lawsuit to let us use one of the 3 other tenant elevators to move in. Once that was finally decided, people from the ward showed up again to help us move in. The missionaries even showed up to the building for a referral and ended up helping us move in too! I don't think it took much more than an hour to get everything in with all the help we had! They could of just saved us a lot of time and unnecessary stress and just let us move in at our appointed time.
One bonus is that the building is much quieter than I expected. There are 15 floors and we are on the 9th, (count 9 floors up directly from the bottom middle area and that's our balcony) but we almost never hear anyone, and we've only seen people in the parking garage or the elevators. Even the halls are quiet, except for oddly enough when the wind is blowing, then in the halls sound like a whiny ghost. Eerie.
It also stays really warm. We've yet to turn on the heat even when it's like 25 outside. In fact we've been keeping one of the windows cracked or else it gets too warm. Negative is that we have to park in a parking garage, which I hate. Tony has pointed out to me that I have a some what irrational fear of parking garages, but hey, can you really blame me? I grew up in southern California that is prone to earthquakes. In fact I felt the 4 pointer we had while I was there for Christmas. Honestly it's not the parking garage I'm afraid of, but the whole building above me coming down on top of my head and crushing me. Not the dying part, since if that happened I'm sure it would be quick, but the possibility that I would be alive after having 15 plus floors fall on my head. Yeeshh, it gives me goose bumps just thinking about it!

Any way I guess that's all we are up to so far. More to come from us on adventures and the life in Virginia.