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Anna's currently at work at Ridge Winery up in Healdsburg, and I'm here cleaning. I happened upon the cd of moving pictures Gary burned for us that I'd managed to misplace (I guess I should clean more often!).

So here we are back in Utah, at least for this photo-set. We're going back to the last weeks of April, 2004 as we prepared to move out of our little apartment in Aggie Village...

Well, I wouldn't call the kitched "clean" in this shot, but we're getting there!

Too much packing has Anna resorting to eating Shurik's catgrass.

Here, too, we're putting everything away. This was just before we got the U-Haul and started loading it.

That first day loading was great -- sunny, warm. I was in shorts. We didn't take any pictures of the weather because, well, it was an unremarkable April day in Utah.

Then came the next morning. Rain and snow had been predicted, but the weather the day before betrayed nothing of the coming storm.

Here Jordy cannot believe what's happening. No, the snow's not sticking yet, but it's early still.

Anna says goodbye to snow!

You can see the snow starting to stick. We didn't expect it to last more than a few hours. But it did.

Meanhwile, Momthra doesn't like Utah snow.

You can see our little fishtank out on the patio. We ended up giving it away. Some nice family in Utah now has a fishtank!

Cleaner, still! We're getting there. The doors are back on the cabinets, and we're packing the last bit of it.

We couldn't get Anna's desk out of the door, so we had to disassemble it. By "we," of course," I mean Jordy and Amaya. She fetches balls AND can disassemble furniture. This is a cat worth keeping around!

And while Amaya contemplates the next step of breaking down the desk, Shurik catches a catnap on Anna's chair.

This is it, the morning of our final day. The last things are being loaded into the boxes, and we're packing the rest of our clothes for our two days on the road.

And the snow is sticking.

And the truck is only half loaded. This is so not right.

Shorts have been traded for a snow hat as Jordy continues loading the last of the boxes.

Maybe it was the snow. Perhaps it was the cleaning fumes. Whatever it was we all ended up a bit loopy. Particularly Momthra, Cleaning Warrior.

These next few shots are tough for me to look at. Anna and Jordy take in one last Utah hug.

Our apartment was small, yes, and it was stuck in a small, rural town in northern Utah. But it was our first apartment. As this pictures suggests, we laughed a lot, we cried a lot, we lived a lot inside those cinder-block walls.

After 18 months, it was time to move. It was time to say goodbye.

Clean! The (incredibly anal) inspector had come and gone. The last box is ready to go. The cats are already in their crates and in the car. We couldn't have gotten everything cleaned and ready without Momthra's help, and we absolutely appreciate it. Thanks!

One final good-bye. Looking back through the archives, we have so many pictures of our door, the portal to our nest that we struggled to feather and grow in. Our home, 850 miles across the desert and mountains. Not two months after getting married, we moved into this little place and transformed it into our place, our refuge, our first home.

I'm sure new tenants are in there already, and I hope they make it their home, too. But for almost two years this was our place where we started.

The truck is locked and loaded, and we're ready to go. You can see the snow has finally stopped falling, and the roads are clear, but as we pulled out of Aggie Village, the snow offered us a final farewell.

Midpoint: Winnemucca, Nevada. Momthra and Jordy get our bags out for the night.

The last shot we took before putting the camera away. Blue skies over a cool Nevada desert morning, we're halfway between our homes, old and new, ready for new adventures, new lives, new pictures. Hell, about this time we're ready for breakfast.

But enough of this reminiscing. We've got new pictures on the way next week, including pictures of Anna's new workplace!