Bad-ah-bah-bah-baaaaaah, I’m blogin’ it.

Told you I’d start a blog!!!!

So, after some delay, we have arrived in California. With no Internet connection, starting an online blog has proven to be a challenge. Fear not, where there is determination, there will be success. Here I am, sitting at Starbucks writing what we’ll call a “rough draft” until I can get connected to the Internet to post this for others to read. I’ve forgotten the password I used to set up my two-hour limit account with ATT Wi-Fi at Starbucks. (Set it up for apartment searching.) I know it was only several days ago, but so much has happened before, after, and during then. Guess this is more like a journal until others read it, huh?

Let’s start at the beginning… Skip back with me to March 25th, 2010. A sunny and cool day in Houston, Christopher and I were ready to pick up our moving truck from a certain truck rental company. I’m not sure I should use their name since it was such an awful experience. Eh, what the heck. I’ll mention it once and then see if I can change it periodically throughout this blog. So, we arrive bright and early at Amazing Spaces to pick up our Penske rental truck. We were on the ball, we had booked it online plenty in advance, worked out that a diesel truck, though larger than what we would need, would save us money in the long run because of gas mileage, and showed up right on time to pick up our selected truck. We walk in, ready to prepare for this huge journey we were to take, only to have our bubble burst when we had only just filled it! The evil lady (really nice, actually, but for the purposes of our story, I’ll exaggerate for effect) behind the counter let us know that the truck we had reserved, though guaranteed by the truck rental company who-must-not-be-named, was not available.

Hmph.

Okay, so, what step do we take from here? Well, we would be upgraded to a ridiculously large truck usually reserved for high school woodshop students taking large handcrafted bookshelves, chairs, dining room tables, et cetera across the state for no extra charge! You don’t say: an even larger truck that we absolutely DON’T need for no extra charge at all? Really? One with two diesel gas tanks that is expected to get only 8 to 10 miles to the gallon and be tremendously difficult to maneuver?! Be still my heart!

At this point, I’m slightly miffed. We ask if we can be downgraded retaining our original discount for booking online in advance. The answer (after waiting too long for the lovely, err, I mean, troll behind the desk to stumble her way through a computer she obviously only uses to play solitaire) is given: no. We can get the smaller truck, one much more suited to the small amount of belongings we intended to take with us to California, but for a higher price than the large truck. Riiiiiight. Okay, so what choice do we have? I mean, she checked her magic eight ball computer. She even called the dark mistress customer service representative from Pen-suck. Unless we want to cough up more dough than originally intended, we had to go with the larger truck.

I’m leaving out a fun little tidbit for you. As I’m sure all of you have experienced, when you and your significant other are stressed and tired, fighting seems to come so easily. Being calm and rational takes a back seat to throwing the other in front of the blame train, so to speak. After the lady renting us the truck, we’ll call her Ursula, told us that the truck we had reserved was not available, but before she told us that the smaller truck would cost us more, she suggested we go take a look at the 16 foot truck (the smaller, more reasonable truck) and the 26 foot truck (the monster, won’t-this-really-suck-to-get-me truck) to decide which would work best. Christopher and I climbed inside to take a look. The 16 foot truck we thought would work for the drive. The 26 foot truck we thought would work to live in. Sometimes, because Christopher is such a doll, I can’t tell what he’s thinking. It appeared to me he wanted the larger truck. This, for some reason, upset me. He originally booked that size online stating it was the best bang for our buck. (And women are supposed to be the bargain shoppers. Ha!) He changed it after our first conversation about the different sizes and what we were taking with us. We booked the 20 foot truck only because it was diesel. That was too large, too, but I let that slide in the off chance that we might decide to take our couch or dining room table.

So, there we were, standing in the back of a moving truck with the door up, arguing. “You seem to want the biggest truck.” “Stop saying that! I just want to decide!” Yadda, yadda, yadda. At about that time, he gets a phone call and jumps out of the truck. I’m left there, looking out at the beautiful day, thinking we traded having nothing go right for some great weather. If that were the case, I wished for a storm cloud anywhere other than right over my head.

Okay, drama over! We wrapped up the argument, as we’re sometimes able to do, realizing that we were overreacting because we were stressed and tired. We returned to the office and the aforementioned happened. You know, we decided on the 16 foot truck only to be told we couldn’t have it. Funny, you would think this would have been mentioned before…

Three hours later, we were ready to head back to the house to load our giant truck. Yep, three hours. Once we told Ursula that we would go with the 26 foot truck, she had a bit—nay—a lot of trouble ringing it up. She had to call a dark mistress from rental-company-that-must-not-be-named yet again to ask what the problem was. “How do I do this? It won’t let me put in their triple A discount. Oh, you have to do that first? Wait, it erased all their information, do I have to type it in again?”::sigh:: By the time we finally got out of there, I was ready for a nap, not loading of our belongings. Oh, well… Fight through, fight through.

An even longer story shorter than it could be, the rest of that day and the next, we loaded the truck, decided to leave my wonderful ’99 Beetle behind so it wouldn’t break down once we arrived in California, and returned inside the house to finish packing our travel bags and store what we were leaving in my childhood bedroom. We went to sleep late the night of the 25th, got up early the next day, and still didn’t leave when we planned to. A traumatic attempt to load the cats into the ginormous truck and an emotional goodbye with my mom, and we were on our way to California via Austin for one last goodbye with Christopher’s parents.

Next time, on California Dreamin’: Ash and Christopher realize that they rented a truck with a bouncy jump in the cab, the first check engine light comes on in the truck they didn’t want, and Christopher refuses to believe the new GPS unit they purchased is telling the truth about which route to take.

…Same bat time, same bat channel…

*Take on "I'm Lovin' It" Jingle for McDonald's.