head 'em up & move 'em out

according to googleapedia, the average american moves 11 times in their lifetime. here's how i measure up...

virginia
grandmother's
dewey the plex
lakehouse 1
lakehouse 2
grandmother's redux
in the woods
dorms - frosh/soph/jr
grandmother's III
th'apartment
this house

do you count each dorm? and, what about summercamp - where i literally moved to for 1/6th of the year from age 8 to 19? those are all a form of moving, ain't they?

grandmother's house makes a re-recurring appearance on that list, and you're probably wondering why. or maybe you're not. doesn't really matter bc i can't tell you anyway bc i don't really know. alls i can come up with is - it was a perfect storm... that struck three times. the first and third were a convenient location for a young family on a tight budget with a parent in the nearby college. i don't think we were there more than about a year either time. 

the middle time was both the longest and least sensible. the location was wildly inconvenient for everyone but me, and i was in jr high - not something to build your location around. everyone else drove literally dozens of miles per day south or east. 

the thing that really made it a bad idea, though, was we were not a small young family. we were 4 kids and 2 adults plus the actual resident (grandmother), making 7 people in a three bedroom house. the solution was to make the boys live in the attic. it was a semi-finished attic with a powder room -- seems reasonable enough to ask three brothers to live up there. right? yes, you'd reasonably think that, but it fact it was not a stellar choice. not because of any characteristic of the house itself, but more because, of the three available adults, not a one could actually be bothered to pay significant attention to us kids. 

anyhoo - if you count the three dorms, that makes 13. if you count summercamp, which was arguably more of a home than some of the others, that's another dozen. 

how many times have you moved?