did i tell you about the time we almost killed each other?

in the summer of 2011, after an extensive (in my standards) run of long-distant relationship-ing, joey and i took the domesticity plunge and moved in together. above is a photo of us after we made up, which took about 2-1/2 weeks to finally be good and finished. but first, the back story:


joey and i met on a blind date in june of 2010. here are two separate pictures of that first date; one of us had to be the photographer, you understand.

rest assured this baggy number is not the outfit i thought would capture my hunky date's

 eye. there was a chill in the air that night, this nice boy loaned me his sweatshirt. 

isn't he dreamy? if you're curious, we went to a home-town baseball game and that
furry fellow in both photos is the mascot - ringer - because in south dakota we cheer
for the fighting pheasants, of course.

a month after we met, joey moved to saint paul to start an internship for the city's heritage preservation commission and i stayed back home to start my third year teaching south dakota. in august of that year joey started graduate school and about half way through his first semester i told him i was moving in with him. his calculated response, after he'd observed my deadpan face, was, "okay." two months later i turned in my resignation  and ramped up my search for the perfect little starter rental in which the love of my life and i would begin our life together.

fast forward four gruelingly slow months to joey and me crammed between too many picture frames, clothes baskets, and falling boxes, hauling a flat bed trailer, stacked to the heaping brim with my most precious household items, down the rain-soaked interstate.

of course we didn't get any pictures of our silly adventure, but imagine this
little baby filled to its overflow with all things necessary for which to fill your 
living space "speeding" down the highway, tattered blue tarps flapping
 in the wind like surrender flags

it was a disaster in its most natural state, and i was pissed. pissed because joey loaded the trailer wrong and all of my lovely furniture was silently being whittled to pieces as they rocked against each other and the filthy yellow moving straps keeping them together, to the rhythm of the not so smooth interestate. and oh, that interstate highway can be beautiful when it's 90 degrees and humid and the misty july heat soaks straight through your pillow-top mattress while you try desperately to subside the beginning stages of stinging tears before they morph into big ol' monster sobs, the kind that no amount of patients or blind love can make pretty. so now joey was pissed, because instead of feeling helpless and heartbroken at the sight of me crying, as he usually does, he remembered he was at no fault here and that after all it wasn't his idea to move in together, and of course had we taken our time in planning for this move and the damn U-haul hadn't been double booked we would have been fine! so we had a mutual feeling of sugary love for one another during that particular drive, which on a good day takes 3-1/2 hours from point a to b, but on this particular day - at joey's grandfatherly careful driving speed - would surely take 6.

what made matters drastically worse was that we were using only borrowed equipment to move my happy tush to minnesota, and at exactly the moment we turned off the interstate we hit a pot hole that flung the trailer off its hitch and we were forced to drag that sad trailer a block and a half until we could pull over and observe the damage. now we had a damaged trailer to add to the laundry list of offenses, and we were still blocks from home. joey managed to rig the trailer on to the pick-up, in that way that men can just magically fix mechanical problems, only long enough to limp our way home.

once home, the unpacking went relatively smoothly thanks to some wonderful friends who were excited to help. i can't say enough about how incredible our little circle is up here, and at that moment of sweaty misery those friends are quite possibly responsible for bringing us back to earth and assuring us we really wouldn't hate each other forever!

the next two weeks played out like this:
joey: let's take our time and enjoy putting all of our things together in one house.
jamie: no! i need to clean everything first! wait, don't put that there, i haven't cleaned it yet! i want to do it this way, now!
joey: (fuming) what about that pile there, that's your pile. can you stop running, i don't think it has to be done right now!
jamie: yes it does!
joey & jamie: (tension. silence)

i'll assure you that, as most things do, everything really did sort itself out and now we live in a gorgeous little two story - did you see that photograph of our pretty little house? - on the friendliest of streets, and we're just the happiest.