onceafatgirl

A short post about planning ahead and letting go

Today’s post is going to be short and bare bones. In fact, I totally forgot about this blog until I got out of the shower and a weekly alarm was going off on my phone asking “Did you post a blog yet?” Crap!

On Monday afternoon, my husband told me we were moving to Corpus Christi, Texas. The rest of the day, I made apartment arrangements and started preparing meals for the next several days. A breakfast, lunch, and dinner each for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. On Tuesday we packed up from morning until evening with breaks to FedEx our deposit for the apartment, email various paperwork, and return our DVR and modem to the cable company. On Wednesday, we spent the morning completing our packing and cleaning, and got on the road a little after 10 in the morning. My husband in the moving truck, towing his car behind him. Me following behind in my own car. We drove until evening through a dust storm, the makings of a tornado, and then a heavily raining thunderstorm.

On Thursday, we got an early start and drove all day. We attempted to stop at about 5 so I could attend a weekly video conference meeting with some fellows who keep boundaries around their food, but that didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. We were in the middle of nowhere Texas and the motel we stopped at didn’t have fast enough WiFi for a video conference, and I didn’t have good enough service to turn my phone into a hotspot. Alas. So we just kept driving straight on through to Corpus Christi.

Here’s the deal. I never once worried about food. I had my meals prepared and in a cooler. When it was time to eat, we stopped off at a rest area and I filled up my tank and my car’s. Every evening, I put my future meals in the hotel fridge and refroze my ice packs. My days were jam-packed, and sometimes stressful, but my food was taken care of. I made a plan, prepared, and took care of my food ahead of time. And that meant that everything else was just life. A dust storm in Arkansas was life. Traffic in Houston was life. The nasty lady at the front desk of the crappy Texas motel was life. I was able to play it as it lays (laid?) because I had my food taken care of. There was no need to worry.

We pulled into our new apartment complex at 9 AM on Friday, signed the lease, and had the truck unpacked by 1. Now we have been spending our time getting used to our new surroundings, finding the grocery stores, slowly unpacking our boxes, and getting used to driving here.

All in all, the whole thing went smoothly. But it turns out I still had to write a blog. So here it is. If you want to keep your commitments, plan ahead, prepare ahead, and then just let life be life. It’s going to be life anyway.