Orders!!!

Friday hubby finally got the email we've been waiting for . . . our orders! He had the afternoon off for doing some extra work on Thursday, so getting to spend some time together that afternoon just made it that much more special.

Ok, now what?

We took a printed copy to our apartment office to cancel our lease and that was about all we could do right away (I need to take it to the gym to cancel that, too). Now we're trying to figure out how to get a sponsor (an officer that will basically be hubby's guide to getting started out there, even helping us find a home), what kind of emissions testing our cars will have to undergo (we might have to make a few changes to our cars before that), who we call to let them know we're coming, and when we can get our "real" IDs. Actually, I don't have one at all, so I'm pretty excited about getting my dependent ID (hooray for military discounts!). Hubby will just get his fancy schmancy one with an embedded chip instead of his plain reservist ID he's been carrying around since his freshman year.

The actual orders themselves are just two pages that look like tax forms--boxes and boxes of stuff printed in them that don't really tell us anything. I'm not even on there. We're still not sure if I'm supposed to be. It does say that we are to leave on January 4 and be there by midnight January 8. 

Holy cow that's only a month away! 

We have so much to do, but it just doesn't quite seem real yet. We still haven't decided if we want the AF to just take care of moving all of our stuff, or if we want to do it ourselves (a PPM, or Personally Procured Move, as it's called). We already know for sure that we're going to have to go out of the way to avoid snow and ice, so we don't really want to be driving a U-haul or anything like that. The other problem is that we have belongings at two locations here in Knoxville (our apartment and my mother-in-law's garage), but the AF will only move from two locations once in your career, and we'd like to hang onto that free pass for a later time. Maybe a PODS? That way we could load everything up ourselves from both places but not have to drive it. Have any of you ever used one of those?

Anyway, I'll leave you with a picture of something I want to make when we get there, courtesy of Pinterest (oh how I love you, Pinterest).