Courtesy of Flickr User Tigresblanco

It’s Monday morning. For the past five years of my life, that has meant getting up at 6am and getting ready for work. Skirt and high heels, meetings and cubicles, 8 to 5, rinse and repeat.

Today, Monday morning means the start of my two weeks journey packing up my life and everything I’ve known in my 27 years of it – to move to Chicago. If you’ve never done a cross-country move, I’ll let you in on a little secret – it’s terrifying and insanely expensive. One-hundred percent of my thoughts most days are consumed with things like, “Holy shit, I hope Jeff and I find an apartment quickly,” OI hope all of these dates that we’ve planned in our heads work out as expected,” and “I can’t believe I’m doing this, I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

It’s not easy. I keep a perma-grin on in front of friends and family, tell them I’m super excited and that I can’t wait until the 18th. The truth is, I could wait an entire lifetime for the 18th. Because on the 18th, I’m putting a couple suitcases in Jeff’s car and we’re making the can’t-turn-back-now ten hour drive to the windy city, which kicks off a horrendously hectic couple of weeks. As soon as we hit city limits, we’ve got appointments with leasing agents to find (and sign) for an apartment. On the 21st, I start school (from my temporary home in my friend Hillary’s apartment). Sometime around the 1st, I’ll fly back to Rochester, load all of my belongings into a moving truck and move into our new place.

That chaos is still too far away for me to even comprehend, so today, on this rainy Monday morning, we’ll focus on laundry and packing up the bookcases. One day at a time..