Ch-ch-ch-ch-chaaanges!!

So much is happening so quickly, I hardly know where to start.

James and I spent most of the weekend gathering up everything we won't need for the next two weeks, loading it into boxes, and stashing the boxes in our parking space in the garage. We moved our car out to the street so that we could use the spot to get a good visual of how much stuff we have. It's a lot more than we thought!

We also tried to check things off our "To Do While in LA list," which included visiting the cookie place in Westwood Village, where they have delicious homemade cookies for 35 cents and yummy cookie ice cream sandwiches for $1.50. The lines are always huge there since it's right by UCLA. We also hiked up to the Hollywood sign, which was what we did for our second official date. We wanted to go back to where we had our first official date, which was at the Hollywood Forever Cemetary for their summer movie nights. They project old movies onto the side of a building and everyone brings blankets and picnics and sits out in the grass and it's lovely. Unfortunately, the next season of movie nights doesn't start until late May, so we can't do that. And Sunday night we went for a bike ride down at the beach and went to our favorite little Italian restaurant for dinner, then biked home. I won't miss an awful lot from LA, but biking with James to a restaurant, particularly Mama D's, at sunset by the beach... I'll be sad to see that tradition end.

Add to that the fact that we're still working on our wedding invitations, and I have to hand calligriphy every envelope and reply card envelope, and you get a pretty busy weekend.

On top of that, we weren't sure if we were actually moving yet!

We hadn't received our written offers from the Boston Raytheon, so we hadn't resigned at the El Segundo Raytheon yet. We weren't sure if we'd get the offers in time to give our bosses fair notice, so we emailed the Boston Raytheon on Sunday and told them that if we didn't get offers soon, we'd have to miss their April 27 start date, and start at the beginning of the next pay period (which is their policy), May 11. It was absolutely ridiculous that they wanted us to start at the end of April, and here we were on April 5 without anything concrete, when we had schedules to hand off, an apartment to pack up, movers and temporary housing to arrange, oh and a wedding to plan. And a honeymoon to set up. It was pretty aggravating.

I guess our email really lit a fire under their butts! On Monday James got a formal offer over the phone, and by Tuesday we both had written offers that we signed and faxed back. Monday night, we both sent in our formal resignations, which was a bit scary! It's so... final.

Also on Monday, we found out some exciting news about the house! The sellers accepted our offer, which we placed early last week when we were sure we were getting offers. (Although, it was still a bit nerve-wracking when by the end of the week we didn't have offers yet, and our bid on the house was in.) Now, our bid goes to the bank, which will decide whether it accepts our offer. The owners owe the bank quite a bit more than what they were selling the house for, and we under bid that number, so the bank might not be too keen on our bid. But, the house has been on the market for over 140 days, so they may be eager to just unload it. We'll see.

Now, James and I are trying to arrange our temporary housing and our moving company. The company that Raytheon recommended quoted me $4000 or so. Yikes. I found another company online that was closer to $1000, so James was interested in using that one. I googled their name and found lots of negative reviews. In fact, most of the reviews included the words "scam" and "theft" ...soooo we decided not to go with them. We found a more moderately-priced company with good reviews, and that's the one we chose. We'll have to rent a U-Haul to get our stuff to their station in Compton, then load our stuff ourselves into their semi. We're only paying for the space we use, which is nice, and the rest of the space will be used for commercial hauling. Then in Massachusetts, we'll have them deliver our stuff to a Public Storage, where we'll keep it until the house opens up.

As for temporary housing, I looked on Craigslist and couldn't find any sublets or month-t0-month rentals within a reasonable distance to work. At least, I couldn't find any that didn't involve renting a room in some creepy person's house. So we'll be going with an extended stay hotel. It will only be a studio (the suites were much more expensive), but it comes with a fully stocked kitchen, a full-sized refrigerator, a sitting area with a TV and DVD player. We're going to get it for the seven weeks that we'll be in Boston prior to the wedding. Hopefully, by the time we return from the honeymoon in mid-July, the house will be ours and we can move in.

And now that we're all set with the jobs, we're finally able to plan our honeymoon. We want to take a cross-country road-and-camping trip. We were either going to do it before the wedding, if they let us start in July, or after the wedding, if they'd let us take a month off. They chose option B, so we're looking at a June 22nd to July 11th trip across the country. Now that we have the dates nailed down, we can start reserving campgrounds. Except for one minor detail: Yosemite national park and Yellowstone national park are all booked up. Yellowstone lets people start reserving campgrounds a full year in advance, and for Yosemite it's six months. So trying to find a camping spot a mere two months ahead of time is not going well. We're going to try to find camping spots in state parks, but if we can't find anything other than KOA, we'll stay in hotels. If that happens, we may have to do our camping at different places in our trip. For instance, we're planning on going to Minneapolis and Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and I thought we'd stay in hotels or bed and breakfasts, but we may camp there, instead. We'll see. With all the other craziness that's going on right now, planning out the honeymoon is on the back burner for now.