Arrival in South Dakota

So last week we packed up and moved from Colorado to South Dakota. That sentence sounds a lot simpler than the actual process, so let's back up a bit. The house in which we had been living in Walden had been for sale since a year before we moved into it. Our intention had always been to move into a rental that wasn't for sale as soon as we found one, but we didn't find anything suitable until this past April, more than a year and a half after we had moved to Walden. Kevin had applied for the South Dakota job but had been informed that he was ranked 18th on the list of applicants, so we were pretty sure he had no chance. We then made the decision to move to a new rental in Walden, fearing that our old house would sell this winter. We informed our landlords we were moving, they said they were going to work on the house and weren't going to rent it out this summer, and then Kevin got offered the job at Wind Cave. We took a trip up here to check it out and couldn't find ANYTHING available to rent that would accept a dog. So we called our old landlords and asked if we could stay in our house for another month, but lo and behold, they had rented the place out starting May 1. So we packed up and moved all of our stuff 3 blocks within Walden, then found a rental up in Custer and made plans to move here last week. Kevin and I loaded most of our stuff into the moving truck last Wednesday, skillfully arranging our boxes and furniture in the most perfect places in the moving truck because, as you may guess, we are now moving experts. Thursday morning we awoke to a drizzle, which turned to a steady rain, which turned to snow, and snowed heavily all morning while we carefully loaded the last of our possessions. For your information, when snow collects on the metal floor of a moving truck, it's really hard to stand steadily, let alone walk with various heavy items and boxes. Almost as soon as we crossed the state line into Wyoming the snow stopped, and we had dry roads all the way to Custer.

Now, if I didn't make this clear earlier, we had rented this house sight unseen. We had to rely on the description from the landlord, who made the place sound quite grand: carport, washer dryer hookups, fenced in yard, located at the end of a dead end road that backed up to the National Forest. Well, all this stuff was true but kind of in the worst way possible. The carport looks hand made, the washer hookup is in the kitchen, the dryer hookup is on the porch that smells of cat pee and has the only 3-prong plug for our microwave (which now resides on top of the dryer), the fenced in yard is basically just a fence around the septic tank, the living room is so narrow that sitting on the couch looking at our large TV screen makes you feel like you are sitting in the front row at a movie theatre, the hall closet reeks of the worst cigarette smoke ever, and the girls' room has carpet that looks like it's from 1981, complete with pictures of girls riding horses. The part about it backing up the National Forest is definitely the coolest part of the deal. Plus the road is nice and quiet since we're on a dead end. But we do have a cat problem, with at least 5 cats residing next door with our unsocial neighbors, and Taffy is terrified of all of them. If one of them comes and sits on our doorstep after she's gone out, she will not come near the door to come back in and will wait patiently far away in the front yard. Also, it has been so darn cold since we got here, snowing off and on ALL DAY the day we were unloading the truck, raining all day Monday and Tuesday, and snowing all day today.

On the plus side, Kevin is excited about his job. This is his 3rd day and he has great feelings about what he's doing. He gets to go to Badlands National Park next week for herbicide training.

The girls are really happy, except that they always ask to walk places and we are a few miles out of town, which is just too far to walk anywhere. Once the weather clears up we'll attempt to bike into town. The really great news is that we immediately found a Mommy & Me group and went yesterday. A lot of the moms have husbands who work for Wind Cave or the Forest Service. They meet every Tuesday, which gives us something to look forward to. I am already pretty bored without my day care job, but once the weather gets better we plan on doing lots of outdoor things.

I will post some pictures later, after we find the cable that connects the camera to the computer, whichever box it is in.