Well, we just arrived in Las Vegas. It was a pretty good flight. Sadie did well. I got her some sedatives at the vet yesterday and was a bit hesitant about giving them to her. I wanted to just give her some Benadryl, but after doing some research online about the safety and effectiveness, I decided to talk to my vet. He’s a really nice guy. He told me the guidelines for giving Benadryl to cats and the whole pros and cons talk. Benadryl isn’t entirely effective in cats and can mess with their respiratory systems. The stuff he wanted to give me is about the same price as Benadryl and he said there weren’t really any side effects. There is another sedative type, but it has some bad side effects and where we’re going to a foreign country and I don’t have a vet or even know where one is there, I decided to just go ahead and go with the one he recommended. She did fairly well with it. The vet said to give her half a pill about half an hour before we got to the airport. I gave her a quarter of a pill instead of a half. It was about 45 minutes before we got to the airport, but it was good we gave it to her early. She ended up throwing up on the way to the airport, about a half an hour after I gave her the pill. Poor baby. As soon as we get to my parent’s house, I need to give her a bath. That might stress her out more. Oh well.
Other than that one event, she did really well. Only cried a few times and didn’t freak out at all. She didn’t try to get out of her carrier other than when I opened the top to check on her and she’d pop her head out. So, I’m really happy with how it went. Troy carried her around the airport and talked to her whenever she cried. It was cute. During our layover, he got down on the floor and talked to her and played with her a little. For all his talk about how much he doesn’t like her, he really is sweet to her. At the hotel this morning when I woke up, she was cuddled up over with him. She was supposed to sleep with me last night, but apparently she likes him better. The traitor.
Goodness. I’m so glad this week is over. It was so insane. We had to coordinate getting both apartments packed and loaded, our cars shipped and our apartments cleaned. Oh, and Troy worked two days while I worked every day. I was kinda kicking myself for not sticking with having Thursday be my last day of work, but I wanted to get my job as caught up and finished as possible. For the most part, I did. I went in at 5:00-5:30 every day all week so that I could do all my work and get notes written on every aspect of my job. I actually feel really well about what I did. I wrote notes for about 99% of what I do. Some things, like the intricacies with appraisals, weren’t really feasible because of how many tiny little things there are and how hard some things are to explain. So, I put those things at the end of my list and stuck with the more important things. I wrote detailed step-by-step notes for appraisals, updates, HUD letters, BPOs, my LPS workload tasks, LPS reprojections, and all the other little things I do. I included every click of the mouse and screenshots of every step. I’m really happy with how things turned out. I put it all in a big binder with tabs and tables of contents for each section. Yeah, maybe it was a little overkill, but I like my job. Sure, I’ve told people a brain-dead monkey could probably do my job, but I still like it for the most part. I wish I could use my brain more, but nothing is perfect. Appraisals were my favorite thing about my job. They aren’t way complex, but they require more intellect than the rest of my job. I like all the little intricacies and how no appraisal is ever the same. Different banks, different information, different requirements. Some have contact info for the borrowers, some don’t, some you have to hunt it down somewhere. Some need lock box codes or keys or third-party access and each bank has a different way of requesting it. Each appraiser has their little quirks about what information they want and they are all different in whether or not they respond to emails and some you have to careful with how you word things and some you can be super friendly with. So, there are just so many different LITTLE things with the appraisals that I enjoy doing them. And now I sound like a nerd. haha
So, right now we’re driving home from Vegas. Troy’s dad came to pick us up. While we were waiting at the airport, I let Sadie out of her carrier. She wandered around on her leash for a bit, but didn’t try to go too far. Troy had fun messing with all the bags. They’re all about 50lbs, so I was pretty much useless with them. I really messed up my neck and back this past week with all the lifting and carrying and moving things. I was in so much pain yesterday I couldn’t move my arms and I ended up taking one of the pain pills from my car accident. Well, half of one. Troy was not thrilled. lol. He was super nice about it and all, but he made the comment, “Why did you have to take a pain pill that makes you move so slowly when we need to be moving fast?” I don’t ever take pain pills; I rarely take Advil or ibuprofen. So this one hit me hard. We were running around trying to get stuff finished after I got off work and I don’t really know what happened, but it all just hit me at once. I had told Troy earlier in the week that I figured all the physical exhaustion and hurts would hit us on Friday, but I was thinking more of Friday night. I guess my adrenaline pump just quit working and I got hit first. So, yeah, that was fun. Troy went and got us some food after I got back from the USDA office (that was fun, haha) and I took my pill. It hit fast. We ran to his office after eating and I just felt like I was in la-la land. But I still hurt. It was weird. While we were at his office and he was scanning copies of our passports, I was talking with one of his coworkers and she said I looked really tired. I really wanted to tell her that I was more high than tired, but I didn’t think that was a good idea. lol. After we left his office, we ran back to his apartment so he could get his computer to take to a shipping office and I just started crashing out. I didn’t really sleep, but I just wasn’t functioning. I just wanted to lay there and not do anything. So he let me. He ran up and down the stairs a few times getting things and then we went to the UPS store. I went in with him for a little while, but it got to where it was hard to stay standing, so I went and lay back down in his car. It was nice to just stop. I don’t think I’ve really stopped all week. It’s just been so crazy with so many things to do and so little time that there wasn’t really time to stop. But that pill sure did make me stop. For a little while. I think, overall, about two hours after I took it, it stopped knocking me out. Which was nice because then I was able to start being productive and help Troy get stuff taken care of. We got the rest of his apartment cleaned up and organized by the time the car guy showed up. Only took a few minutes to get both of our cars turned over to him so he could ship them to Utah and then we went back to get the suitcases loaded in the car. Well, Troy did that. Lol. Poor guy. He had to take 6 suitcases and 3 carry-ons down two flights of stairs. I took one carry-on, but then he told me to just get the suitcases to the door and he would worry about getting them downstairs and loaded in the car. I felt a little useless, just rolling the suitcases to the top of the stairs, but it is what it is. I would have either dropped the suitcases down the stairs because they were so heavy or I would have injured myself worse. So, I did the practical thing and just rolled the suitcases out the door and to the top of the stairs. Then I rounded up all the misc stuff the cleaning lady hadn’t thrown away and got that all ready to go to the trash.
Well, it is now 11 hours after I wrote the last bit. I will now return to writing about the mundanity of my day yesterday. Lol. To the luggage loading!
I’m actually really impressed with how Troy was able to get all 10 pieces of luggage in the back of the rental car. He did a really good job. It didn’t take him long at all and we were all loaded and ready to go. When we got to the hotel, we just unloaded the suitcases from the back seat. That was fun. Troy loaded them on a luggage trolley and then told me to take it inside the hotel while he parked the car, but I could barely push the thing, so I got it about 3 feet and gave up. It was a flagstone walkway and the trolley had small wheels, so it was rather difficult to push 200lbs worth of luggage. Plus I was wearing a 40lb backpack. Thankfully, there was a nice little bench nearby, so I pushed the trolley as close to the bench as I could get it and waited for Troy there. It took both of us to get the trolley to our hotel room safely. He provided the muscle to move it and I provided the oversight and guidance. Haha. He almost ran into a guy and hit the elevator door and our room door. It was pretty funny.
We were going out to dinner with his coworkers, so we were at the hotel long enough for each of us to take showers and then we were off again. I swear, it totally felt like we were never going to stop moving. Dinner was nice. We went to PF Chang’s. My food wasn’t that great (gluten-free Moo Goo Gai Pan), but it came with brown rice and that was good, so I ate a lot of rice. Lol. I have a hard time trying new food because I’m a little bit of a picky eater. Not that I’m super picky and selective, but there are just certain flavors and textures that I don’t like. The sauce was good on the shrimp, but the chicken and the sauce was kinda gross. Oh well. Because I didn’t really eat much other than the rice, the guy didn’t charge us for it, which was nice.
Oh, goodness. After dinner, we got out to the car and found out someone had hit it! We can’t agree on when it happened, though. Troy thinks it happened at his house and I think it happened at the restaurant. At the hotel, I noticed a long scrape and dent along the passenger-side back door. But at the restaurant, I noticed a lot more. Someone hit the passenger-side mirror and took it halfway off the car. Left tons of paint transfer across the back of the mirror and a dent. There was also a door ding on the passenger door. And they didn’t leave a note. Seriously? Good grief, people. Whatever happened to common courtesy? With that kind of damage, there’s no way they didn’t notice that they took off a freakin mirror. Sometimes it really upsets me about the lack of decency and respect that some people in this world have. If you damage someone else’s property, you pay to fix it. That is the decent thing to do. Well, the decent thing is to try not to do it in the first place. Most door dings are preventable if you are courteous. Granted, sometimes something happens that you have no control over, but that’s when the whole leaving a note’ thing comes into play. I had someone at church door ding my car once, but they left a note explaining that the wind caught the door and smacked it into my car. They left their phone number to repair the damage. It would have been better to have their insurance information so I could have gotten the dent taken out of the side of my car, but oh well. At least they did SOMETHING to acknowledge what had happened. The people who hit Troy’s rental car? They didn’t do anything like that. They just left. Troy was not very happy about that. He’s really big on respecting other people’s property.
Anyways, after dinner we went back to my apartment so I could turn in my apartment keys (after I took a video of my apartment so I can rebut any repair claims that aren’t accurate) and then we went to pick up Sadie from Troy’s apartment and turn in his keys before we went back to the hotel. It was such a long day. My little 20-minute drug-induced nap really helped, but I was still tired. We both were. I think we were awake long enough to brush our teeth and change into pajamas before climbing into our beds. They were pretty comfy beds, too. Well, mine was. I don’t know about Troy’s. I crawled into mine and crashed out while he was still sitting on top of his blankets. Lol.
Well, I think I’m going to go to bed now. This blog has taken me all day to write. I wrote some on the drive home and then I fell asleep in the car. I ended up on the floor of the van, wedged between the front seats and the first row of seats in the back. They were all pushed so close together that I got stuck. Lol. Troy had to pull his seat as far forward as he could and I still had a hard time getting out of there. But I did. And I’m alive. Lol. Tomorrow I will post more about the USDA office and that whole fun thing and about surprising my family. But for now, I’m going back to bed. Lol. Good night!
