We're In. Almost.

After our first Goonie weekend in Ammon, I’ve got this to say: My hands hurt.

Cardboard, I’m discovering, has this quality of sucking all of the natural oil out of your skin. I’ve handled a lot of cardboard this past weekend, moving boxes and such, and my hands show it. And feel it: They hurt like the dickens. I can barely type this post, they hurt so much. So I may have to put a splint on them and not do much of anything this week. Except what I’ve got to do: work, type, etc.

We are officially moving into our new house. Won’t say moved in, though we did get three of the four beds set up over the weekend (poor Liam has to wait; his bed is a more complicated affair than the rest).

Some things I’ve learned:

• If you want a king-sized mattress jammed up a stairwell, get Jana Porter to do it. We pushed and squeezed on our mattress for a half hour until it finally popped into place on the stairs, then Jana almost single-handedly pushed it up the stairs, which are now named in her honor.
• Electric heat is crap. That’s what we’ve got in the new house and that’s going to change soon.
• Sugar City, be proud of the welcome you give new people moving in. When we did, we were swarmed by people helping us move items into the house, with bread and other goodies and with a neighbor with a monkey wrench who turned our water on after the city forgot to dispatch someone to do it. Here in Ammon, no one has said boo to us, with the exception of the former homeowner and a fellow delivering Republican caucus fliers. Big city folk, I suppose.
• Kids, left unsupervised, will eat an entire box of fudge Pop-Tarts.
• Speaking of kids, they went on a “treasure hunt” in the new house to see what the former occupants left behind. Their find sofar: eleven cents, some beads and other shiny things, a bobble-head plastic cat of which our daughter has several other varieties, one red LEGO brick, three outlet covers with one screw, a purple clothes hanger and a princess bag to carry it all in. Plus the skateboard, which Isaac has glommed onto.
• Tom Lehrer is a genius. 

• A guy can get dehydrated really, really quickly when moving boxes and furniture and stuff. I swear I drank about four gallons of water this weekend and went to the bathroom once. The rest of it came out as sweat. I feel like that horrible sweaty guy – Parsons – in Orwell’s 1984.
• Ugh. Reading that chapter from Orwell really frightens me now, much more so now that I have kids of me own.
• My hands still hurt.

More updates will follow. Maybe.