Bust a Move

The theme this weekend is "move". It's a short word that starts to look a little funny the more you say it and look at it's spelling. It seems to me that the word should be much longer and difficult to spell. Everyone has moved sometime so you know what I mean. If you're anything like me, then you know the "move" all too well. It almost seems like a way of life.

For me, the nomadic life has been an adventure. Not a very good one, but an adventure nonetheless. I have never lived further than 12 miles from the hospital in which I was born, so obviously all my moving stories have a similar and familiar backdrop. However, although I've never left my nest of a hometown, I have moved twelve times since I've been out on my own. Twelve moves doesn't seem like that much, and maybe it isn't, but these twelve moves represent 10 U-Haul truck rentals, 3 self-storage unit rentals, backaches, headaches, friends lost, none gained, big things broken, small things lost, 37 deposits paid (rented residence, U-Haul, self-storage, city utilities), hundreds of gallons of gas burned, a lot of service changes (CU, phone, cable, etc.), and hundreds of new neighbors.

I always thought that I moved a lot as a kid. But, I only count 6 different places of residence now that I think about it. Jacob has lived in 5 different places and come tomorrow that number will increase to 6. So, I wonder how he feels about how much he's moved. I have asked him if he remembers living in the places we've lived and the only two places he remembers living is our apartment and the house that we are moving out of. So, I'm not doing too bad if you take away the ones that he was too young to remember.

My best moving story happened in 1997. I was 18 and rented a house from the Christian County Prosecuter's wife. She was really nice, but she told me right up front that she wouldn't tolerate any big problems. She told me that if the cops were ever called to the residence, then she would evict us. Dustin and Jason were my two roommates. We had only been living there for three weeks when the Christian County Special Investigator woke me up in my bedroom. It was 9:00 am and he just says, "you need to come into the living room." I say, "ok". In the living room I find my roommates and several friends who had spent the night sitting down. Standing up all around the room were cops from departments including but not limiting to Christian County Sherrif's Department, Missouri State Highway Patrol, Ozark Police, Christian County Special Investigations, and even the K-9 unit to add a cherry to the top. To quickly fast-forward to the moving part I will leave out the details and say that two of my friends were arrested for breaking into cars, the house was completely raided, many items were found that had been stolen (all in Jason's room, and Jason's car, not that I'm finger pointing or anything), and just as the last of the cops leave my landlord shows up to say, "I want you out by the end of the day and if you have a problem with that, then I don't think I need to remind you of who my husband is. The cleaning crew will be here tomorrow and anything left here will be hauled off to the dump."

I had had a bad morning. I slammed the door in her face and turned around and enlisted the first face I saw to drive me and drop me off at U-haul. I was back at the house two hours later with a storage unit having been rented and a U-Haul truck in the driveway. I pulled an all nighter and got it done by 7:00 the next morning. The good thing was that we were too lazy to dispose of the boxes we used to move in with, so I had just enough to move out with. It was a "speed-move". I delivered pizza at the time and made a point to drive by the house just to see and sure enough the landlady had bluffed me. There was no cleaning crew. As far as I could tell, the property didn't change from the way I left it for over two weeks. So, I suppose I could've caled her bluff, but I figured that I had enough enemies in Christian County law and didn't need any more.

Do you have any good moving stories? How many time have you moved? How far?

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