After spending half of Monday loading a moving van, then all of Tuesday moving out of the old apartment and into the new (which is the most awesome place I have ever actually lived), I got to spend twelve hours Wednesday en route to Denver.

No we didn’t drive, we flew. We left home at 3 p.m. CDT, and arrived at my friend’s house out here at 1 a.m. MDT. Apparently a giant thunderstorm sat directly on DIA and refused to move for the whole night.

The morning wasn’t much fun. The plan was to get the old place cleaned and put back together before dropping off the keys. There would be enough time to get back and take a shower before heading to the airport. Oh, how wonderful it would have been had it gone that way!

My son and I left about 10 to get started at the old place. My sister was there cleaning, I just needed to collect the last of our belongings and rehang the vertical blinds on our balcony door. Twelve minutes into the fifteen minute drive I realized that I forgot the tool set. This might not have been a big deal, except that our new place is on the 8th floor of a high-rise, which means any trip to or from the car requires a little more time than skipping down one flight of stairs to the parking lot.

At 10:30 a.m. the temperature must have been pushing 90, the sky was clear, and I had to carry my nearly-three-year-old to and from the car. We ran to the apartment, grabbed the tools, then straight back to the car. When we finally arrived to get started on our work it was even warmer, and the A/C was off inside. I was obviously sweating.

We finished at 12:30, and went to the apartment office to settle up. After a long conversation with the agent (in which she fed me a line of BS that bore almost no resemblance to what we were told when we gave our notice), we grabbed some lunch and headed home. It was 1:30, which meant we had enough time to finish packing and get our stuff to the car…in theory.

In actuality I realized at 2:40 that - because we’re only allowed one car in our parking lot - I had to move my Jeep (without A/C) to the lot across campus before we can leave. It is now 100 degrees, and as I load up my son and all of our luggage into a cart I find an overdue library book, which I badly need to return.

I grab the book, toss it on the pile and hurry to the parking lot. We get in the car, drive 300 yards to the street by the library, get out of the car, run inside, drop off the book, run out to the car, then drive the 300 more yards to the other parking lot where our ride to the airport was waiting. I’m still sweating.

TBC…