It's here!!!! You've all been waiting for it, I'm sure. :P

So. Our final visit. Or really... "visit," because the moment that he arrived was the moment we would no longer be separated.

Planning for the move:

Pretty much all of August and September were spent preparing for the big move. I renewed my passport in May; requested necessary and backup documents in July following our Canada Day visit; did a ton of research on exporting and importing my car through all of August. I notified my landlord that I would be leaving in July when they emailed me about renewing my lease.

I kept things very quiet at work and held off on giving notice until after I'd returned from a conference in late August. It was a very important conference for me and I didn't want to jeopardize anything by giving notice too soon. I have a lot of mixed feelings about leaving my job; it was a pretty good job, and they actually gave me a substantial raise right before I left for my trip to the conference, which just made it even harder for me to put in my notice when I returned, knowing that I was not going to get anywhere near the same pay where I was going.


God bless him, Brendan was a saint through the whole thing, helping me pack and clean out my apartment. It is absolutely incredible how much STUFF people accumulate, and add to that the fact that we were essentially combining two households, there was so much STUFF that I ended up packing into boxes and bringing to my mom's house when we brought all my furniture home. I gave my bed set and desk to my sister, left my folding bike at the house, and gave my mom free reign over all the "stuff" I didn't want or couldn't use any more. We packed everything I wouldn't be bringing to Canada into a UHaul and drove it over to my mom's place, unloaded it all into the basement, and spent a little bit of time with my mom before driving the truck back and returning it.

What was left was just all the other... things. Brendan wanted to keep almost all of my kitchen stuff, and I had to convince him to part with a few items because we just did not have the space and it was not worth bringing some of the things he wanted to hang on to.