The Five Stages of Moving

We arrived in St.Louis one week ago today. Moving is like a full time job, only more stressful, and you end up losing a lot of money. It's helpful to familiarize oneself with the Five Stages of Moving:

The Five Stages of Moving

1. Denial. For a long time, my mind refused to accept the fact that we were moving. Then we got into the mindset of "we don't have that much stuff" and "it won't take us long to pack," and so when we had friends over for goodbye drinks etc, everyone would look around the room and say cautiously, "I thought you guys would be more packed?" or "When are you moving again?" or "Oh wow, I expected more boxes." And we'd laugh and nod and not really believe it. And then the moving trailer came.
2. Anger. Huge amounts of anger. I spent a lot of the move really angry. I was angry about how much work it was, angry at myself for not starting sooner, angry at all the crap that I've accumulated. The last time I moved, I got everything into a few car loads! I wanted to burn everything. I was angry at Saori's stuff for being there. I was angry at Suki for being a cat and needing to be pilled and sedated. I was angry at myself for being so angry. Finally we got everything sold, loaded, donated, given away, or simply tossed wholesale, and we were on our way to St.Louis.
3. Bargaining. Once we got to St.Louis, unloading our stuff from the trailer loomed like an impending tidal wave that I could no longer pretend to avoid. I was really stressing out about our 28' long trailer fitting into our narrow residential street where its hard enough to find regular curbside parking, let alone enough space for a freight truck to parallel park. We bargained with the shipping company on the drop and pick up time, we bargained with our downstairs neighbor for the ability to block the driveway. We bargained with the city and the police for permission to park the trailer there. In this case our bargaining paid off, the trailer arrived.
4. Depression. Unloading the truck took three hours, and was a comedown from the rush of bargaining. Stuff was gouged, scratched, or broken. Each box marked "Misc. Crap" was another depressing failure of ours to eliminate crap from our lives. When we were done, we had essentially filled the living space of the apartment with boxes and we had to creep around the edges of the room. All of it needed to be assembled or a home. It was the end of the move, and the beginning of The Thousand Little Things that need to be done when you move. Our friend Sal went back to Phoenix, and we stayed behind, strangers in a strange land. 
5. Acceptance. But after some really killer bbq and the best hot links I've ever had, I thought, hey maybe we can make this work. They've got some killer breweries in town as well. We put stuff away, and every box we emptied and crushed left me more at peace. Our apartment is almost presentable now, and I think I might be able to live here.