 Well hello there my friends! Long time no see, I know. But I did warn you that with moving things would be a tad slow for me… I'm happy to say that things are back on track now and I have some updates, well, stories really, for you. And, as I keep you updated throughout the year on my life, my work, and my rambling thoughts in general, I’ll also have goodies like blog tours, interviews, reviews, and giveaways. So thanks for sticking with me and let me just say I’m so glad to be back and done with moving/unpacking! Moving sucks. To anyone who has moved, that’s no surprise. Moving and starting a new job are, apparently, some of the most stressful times in a person’s life. I’m sure that goes up exponentially if you happen to travel with cats like I do. You can read the guest blog I wrote a while back on my first experience traveling with my fuzzy friends. I'm happy to report that they were much better this time! Aside from my boy cat wanting to walk across my face while I slept, the cats were angels. The dog not so much this time, but that wasn’t his fault. Dobby was attacked by mosquitoes just before we left New Orleans. He was itching and chewing himself so much he had giant wounds all around his tail. Nothing we did worked and the poor pup just howled in pain if we tried to touch him (he sounds like a dinosaur when he cries). It broke my heart and my only consolation was knowing he had a vet appointment as soon as we arrived in California. The crying wouldn’t have been so bad, except me and my husband were idiots about the drive. The place we were moving into wasn't ready for us by the time my husband had to be back in California and at his new job. In the interim, we were to stay with my parents which was fine! My dog loves it, he has lots of friends to play with at their house and my mom absolutely spoils that little dog. The problem was my parents’ dogs. They don’t like cats. At all. So the cat’s needed to be boarded at the vet. The vet could only take them on Friday because otherwise they wouldn’t have the right person there to take our kittens. Again, not a big deal because we could time our driving to be there in time for that. Except our moving company screwed us over. The moving company showed up late on Wednesday and then had too few people to pack. They were at our house packing up until 11 pm at night! My husband was freaking out by 5 pm that day because we needed to be on the road in order to get to the vet in time for both the cats and the dog. Come 8 pm, we say “fuck it” and get a friend to sign off on the moving van so we can leave and try and make up some of that time on the road. Well, we couldn’t make up the time lost so once more we said, “Fuck it, we’ll drive straight from New Orleans to Phoenix, Arizona so that we can make it to California in time for the pets.” Some of you are probably groaning/cringing by this point. Those of you who aren’t, let me fix that for you: New Orleans is a good 20+ hours from Phoenix. Yup, we decided to drive 20 hours straight starting at 8 pm, and that’s after getting up early (like 6 am) to be ready for the moving company who showed up late. It wasn’t a smart move on our part and resulted in stopping for 3 hours at 3 am to “sleep” at a turn off with a bunch of truckers, 2 panic attacks where my husband legitimately thought he was dying, and 3 pets who we couldn’t feed properly without risking them getting out and fleeing the hell hole that was the car. We were bad humans.  Anyway we lived, the pets are fine, and eventually we moved into our new place and our stuff arrived. Except a bunch was missing or broken, so I got to argue with an insurance claims adjuster on getting the items replaced or getting reimbursed if they couldn’t be fixed, so that was fun. All this to say I have no intention of moving again for a very, very long time (I did say that when I first moved to New Orleans, but this time I mean it). But it wasn’t all awful. Moving back to California meant being much closer to my family. It made our father’s day weekend in Big Bear all the more satisfying to know that moments like that, making memories with my family and being involved in their lives, is something that will happen with much more frequency. So be sure to enjoy your family at every opportunity, my friends. You never know when life might take you, or them, away and you’ll miss them when they're gone. You’ll feel left out and forgotten, even though you aren’t. That little extra bit of distance changes things and I wasn’t prepared for that the first time around. I know better now, but still have no intention of getting that far away again.  Oh, Big Bear was fun by the way. We didn’t catch much on the lake and I have an epic sun burn on my thighs, but it was great because I got to spend it with my family and didn’t have to worry about catching a flight immediately after. Sun burns on flights are just the worst….
Anyway, the next few blogs will be highlights of my favorite bloggers and updates on my books, so get excited, my friends! And tell me about some of your horror stories about moving so we can all have a laugh about it together!
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