Well, I can't say it has been a particularly smooth move, but we're here.
Before we left Washington, Mike & Eytan & I managed to harvest some broccoli and dry beans (and yes, moved the beans with us!) (oh and apologies ahead of time, several of these photos are cell phone pictures and a little washed out).
We carried some buckets and tried to clean out the yard a little.
We split up Falkor and Gigi to finally get Falkor weaned (she was getting enormous and Gigi was wasting away with this whole nursing-way-past-goats-are-supposed-to thing), and then drove them to Moses Lake for the year, a couple of hours away from our place (although we have since learned that our goat foster care lady never actually okayed the foster care arrangement with her husband, who turns out to be unhappy about it, so she'll only keep them until we can find another spot for them... complicated from across the country.)
We used a U-pack moving truck, where you pack and unload but don't have to drive it cross country yourself. It worked okay except that the trailer came a day late and it took us a day longer than we thought it would to load it, so we ended up missing good friends who were passing through Seattle (from England) that we had hoped to get to see.
But our house is pretty much emptied out (although not sold or rented yet), so I guess at the end of the day what needed to get done got done.
Our flight out of Wenatchee got delayed 5 hours and we missed all our connections, so we ended up on a red-eye from Seattle to D.C. and then a morning flight to Pittsburgh, with Eytan and Timber (the cat) both in tow. And arrived to find that the apartment we had rented was not quite yet finished being renovated. So we spent an extra week and a half trying to stay out of the place as much as possible so the crew could finish... which made getting Eytan naps a little tricky (Timber did okay for naps). Partway through that time, the moving truck arrived and so we took to unpacking.
We're still unpacking, but the kitchen is unburied, and the smell of polyurethane (which made all of us stuffy and hard to breathe overnight for a couple of weeks) is almost dissipated, just in time to close all the windows and turn off all the ceiling fans in preparation for the snow forecasted this week (until now it's been mostly quite warm).
Meanwhile, I've started my job, which seems good so far, except for being a lot of work. Part of the problem is coming in halfway through the semester and having to catch up for the classes I'm teaching or co-teaching (although I still can't see having been able to get here in August). Part of it is just being in a new place where you don't know how anything works yet. And part of it is probably just the nature of the beast. Mike is trying to finish unpacking and manage the house and Eytan and keep writing his applications to schools. So we're stretched pretty thin, but hoping that improves sooner or later (preferably sooner).
Meanwhile, how's Pittsburgh itself, you ask? Well, I don't really know yet. Urban, I guess. There's a lot of noise and light at night. Convenient in some ways, not to have to drive everywhere or go long distances to the supermarket or playgrounds or restaurants... although turns out we may just not be such eaty-outy type people anyway. And you have to put shoes on to go outside.
I find the weather (i.e. the lack of dryness) confusing, although I shouldn't, having spent most of my life in the east. But somehow I can't figure out how the temperature corresponds to what clothes I should put on, and so I seem to keep getting it wrong. Timber is stir crazy and attacking all our feet for lack of mice. We live on a pretty busy street and haven't wanted to let him out the front door, but once the back porch is rebuilt (soon?) we'll probably try and hope he figures out to avoid cars.
The campus where I work is pretty, though, and I have to say that in contrast to when I got to Washington and visited the main campus of Washington State University and was incredibly thankful that my job was *not* located on a university campus, I am finding a campus to be pretty convenient this time -- it even has its own post office, and a gym (with a pool), and it's walkable... Interestingly, I see more high heeled shoes here than I did in Wenatchee (which probably says more about Wenatchee than anything else, but still).
Overall assessment so far? Well, I don't think we're going to remain urban dwellers for terribly long. But I guess it's a good experiment. Meanwhile, I'll try to get you a photo of the outside of our building too one of these days just so you get a visual... But until then you'll have to make do with a video of Eytan and one of his current favorite words.
