My Love & Hate Relationship - PCSing
I will be writing several postings this year about our upcoming PCS move. The good, bad and ugly!
While chronicling our 'ride' - some of it may end up being garbage and random rambling! I might also whine a little bit. Don't chastise me for that - we all have our moments.
A few months out. Initial thoughts.........
On one hand I love to move. The rest of my appendages have come to hate moving. We are PCSing this year - whether I want to or not. I will get on board at some point. If for no other reason than, cough, I have no other choice.
Love: I love moving to new places, meeting new people, expanding my geographic knowledge and experiences. I love being forced to purge things from my current home and considering new things for our future home - smaller or larger. I love leaving a place that I never learned to love, but simply learned to like (or not) and still thrived in. In the past (for the most part) I have enjoyed our many moves and have not minded PCSing.
Hate: I hate leaving a place that I have grown to love, that I wish I could linger in forever. I hate having to relearn the PCS process and figure out what new things I must now to do please the military and remain able to get a portion of our moving costs back. I hate purging from our current home. I hate leaving friends. I hate the thoughts of having to do taxes next year while dealing with and waiting on a PCS W-2! Yes, it is a love, hate relationship.
I love our current location. I have never truly loved a location before. In all honesty, I am not looking forward to our new location, for many reasons. This move will be a short one and I am having issues keeping my mind focused on the move at hand and not looking months down the road to when we have to do it again. I need to focus!
Our current location is where I feel that I have plateaued. We have made many friends here. Not that we haven't made friends at previous locations, but this time is different. Our neighbors are the greatest and we love them! We have also made civilian friends - lots of them. We have been involved in our local community. We have branched out beyond the confines of the military and we have loved our experience.
At this point in my husband's career, after so many moves - I am semi over the PCS thing. We have done it so many times that I am ready to stop and be settled. Will those thoughts keep me from driving on with what must be done - no - of course not! Will it suck any less - no! Will I embrace the suck - sort of!
We have already been schooled a bit on move.mil. We applied for an account. While waiting for that information we went through everything that we could access on the site to ready ourselves for utilizing it. I also learned that we can't do crap on the site until we contact our local office, because we will be doing a partial DITY, now called PPM. We went back to the website and were finally able to login. The website got stuck when we wanted to add another person to be able to accept our household goods, me. The website got stuck and then logged us out. We tried to log back in and it would not accept our password. We got a new one and the same thing happened over and over again. We gave up for the time being. I wanted to throw my computer out the window last night while trying to simply use the site. My husband was slightly frustrated too, but found my frustration and reaction to the frustration rather entertaining. Hopefully the website gets easier to utilize over time, but time is not really something you have the luxury of when it is time to PCS, nor is any learning curve for the move.mil site.
As I said, apparently we must speak with someone at our local transpo office (due to partial PPM) before we can move forward on anything. We have been unable to talk to anyone at transpo here. They rarely answer their phones in the morning - we were able to leave a message once, but no one has returned our call. They seem to take long lunches. It seems they leave the office or simply stop answering phones at 1530. I say they, but I have no idea, it might be one single person. A friend of my recently moved and she said that only two people were working in her transpo office at any given time - apparently move.mil is supposed to be the catch all for everything now and the local people were rather unwilling to help her with anything. I hope that does not turn out to be our experience here. We are at a standstill on the transpo topic.
We applied for housing at our new location. The lady we have been communicating with at the housing office there has been uber nice and helpful. I hope that translates to our entire housing experience at our new location. Our other locations with privatized housing have been a pain in the arse to deal with. I am also exploring off post housing options and we are trying to decide if it would be worth the hassle for such a short term move.
I have noted to myself again that we must now pay 'rent' up front (upon arrival) to our new on post housing office. We experienced this for the first time when we arrived at our current location due to privatization. It took a huge portion of our DLA, because the last location housing office took it's sweet time to reimburse us and stop taking our BAH.
We are currently inquiring about our DLA because each installation has the right to do it differently. Our previous locations have given us 100% up front - that is great because moving across the country or OCONUS gets expensive, quickly. Especially when you look at not only moving cost, but temporary lodging (sometimes extended lodging) - housing costs and the (often times) delay in BAH switch. We do not yet know for sure, but rumor is that our current location only gives a certain % on this side of our move. I understand (for the newbies) why they do this, but this isn't our first rodeo folks. We are fully capable of budgeting our money for this move and would like to have it all up front. We also don't want to have to deal with the time it will take to beg for the rest of it on the other side of this move. We shall see.
I have my entire list of 'To Dos' organized, categorized and time-lines set.
I am researching and talking to friends at our 'move to' location, begging them for various information. I will soon drive them totally insane I am sure, but thus far they have be super helpful and nice about sharing information.
We are leaving our horses at their current location for this short move. That is one less thing to deal with. Super happy about that - but I will miss them terribly. They are my refuge and where I find peace.
With the privatization of temporary lodging at our new location, we will be allowed to have our pets with us while we wait for housing. (If we can ever get transpo dates that is - because if it isn't soon the temp lodging might just be booked up!) This takes a tremendous load off of my back. It will be pricey, but I will take it. It will also save us from having to lodge 30+ miles outside of the post (bc no hotels close by allows pets, per usual) until housing becomes available. Now I just have to map out our driving route based upon where we can find hotels that will allow our pets. Right now it looks as if we will have to go about 1 to 2 hours out of our way on the route to have this luxury - it won't be the first time.
If there are emotional cycles of PCSing - I think that I am in the denial & frustrated phases!
More to follow. What a fun ride. Cough!!!!
Labels: PCS
posted by LoveMyTanker @ 6:25 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home