Our Crazy Last Week(s) in Oregon

Now that we've officially moved to Virginia, I'm trying to catch up on what happened in the weeks leading up to our leaving. I quit my job on July 1st. It wasn't a bad job in the sense that I got paid money for it. I considered the alternative, and decided I prefer the jobs that pay money. Actually, the people I worked for were nice, if a little bit disorganized, and I worked a fairly regular schedule. Though being a low-level accounting clerk at a growing repo company was not the career I had envisioned for my future life, I was grateful to be employed. 'Nuff said. Brittany quit her job on June 30th, to her great relief. I think she liked her co-workers, but working as the weekend discharge coordinator at the Salem Hospital was about as fun as taking a bath in a tub full of snakes. And almost as stressful. We are glad to be done working.
On the Wednesday after we quit our jobs, my mom, Britt, Juliette, my sister Annie, and I piled into my mom's Camry at 6:00 AM and headed to Utah. It took us 20 hours to get there, but all in all it could have been worse. Juliette slept pretty much the whole time. It was, all in all, a whirlwind trip. Brittany's Aunt Mary, who we saw for a grand total of about 30 minutes, called it a whistle-stop tour. I think that sums it up pretty well. To our friends in Provo: it was wonderful to see those of you we saw, and to those of you we didn't see, we're sorry. We would have loved to have seen everyone, but it was a very quick trip.
The highlight, I think, was getting all three of the new babies together. We have some awesome pics of Juliette and Nathan together, and the pictures of Juliette, Nathan, and Maggie together are awesome. We'll probably think they're more awesome in about 20 years. It was also a lot of fun playing with James and Daphne and Matthew, although we didn't get to see as much of Matthew as we might have wanted.
On Sunday we piled back in the car at 11:00 PM and drove all night. We were very tired but, it paid off, since the return trip only took us 14 hours. It was fun to visit Provo again. It still feels like coming home for us. After we got back to Oregon we spent the rest of the week trying to pack up all our earthly possessions and loading them on a rental truck so we could drive them from Salem to Portland and load them on another truck so they could be shipped to Virginia. We tried to have a relaxing last couple of days with my family, but it wasn't easy with so many things to do. On Saturday (July 12th) we flew to Virginia.
We'll really miss living in Oregon. We enjoyed being so close to my family, and we hung out with them a lot. We already miss the dinners and the movies and the just plain hanging out we did. We miss you guys! We also miss playing Rock Band with Matt. On that note, we are accepting donations for the "Buy Mark and Brittany a Wii with Rock Band" Fund. We are also accepting donations for the "Fly Matt to Virginia so He Can Play It with Us" Fund. We accept cash, checks and money orders. And check out Facebook for more pictures.