Archives for April 2009

It’s that time. Time for the going away lunches and dinners and general well wishes from lots of folks. It’s amazing how popular you feel when you get close to leaving! 🙂 It is nice to spend time with your friends anytime, but it makes you feel special when it is in honor of you.

Friday night my friend Jenny hosted a small going away party for us at her house to have a chance to mix and mingle with our friends. It was a nice evening of yummy food and wine and chatting. There was also a “sock contest,” which was supposed to be a joke but enough people took it seriously that we had quite a collection of interesting stocking feet! Brandon was the judge and enjoyed the responsibility.

Me, Emmet, Roberta and Jenny

Becky, Me and Sarah. Becky already has tickets to come visit this summer (woohoo!) and Sarah came down from Seattle for the party. So much fun!

A big thanks to Jenny and Paul for the good time!

Moving to Italy is not all excitement around here. In fact, I don’t feel like I have time to be excited! We are all a bit on edge, and have become a little bit grumpy with each other. This evening Brandon had a major meltdown, and Patrick and I had a heated conversation that didn’t really need to happen. I think we are all feeling the stress of our house being in disarray, a thousand tiny details that need to be worked out, and major uncertainty that goes along with a big life change.

It’s hard. We are tired. But tonight we talked and all agreed that we would be trying to be more patient with each other because we’re not really upset about the things we are reacting to, we are just a bit more stressed.

I leave in FIVE DAYS!!!

Patrick and Brandon’s passports arrived back today with visas in them! Yay! The final documentation. They also have their flight booked for April 18 so they’ll be coming 4 days after me. Yay!

That is the exciting news today. Other than that I’m a big stress ball because there is just SO MUCH TO DO at work and with details on the assignment and I feel like things are falling out of my brain left and right. There isn’t so much to do at home, things are coming along fine with the move prep, but by the time I get home I’m wiped out and apparently a bit stressed because I was snappy tonight.

I just want to get through a couple of big things at work – one of which is cleaning out my desk. Today I realized I still have a ton of stuff to bring home – like a whole shelf full of textbooks. I also realized that I had all of my performance evaluations since I started at work in 1992 filed away. What in the world was I saving them for? Along with copies of every expense report I submitted for the last 10 years? Who knows the logic. I guess I’m just a pack rat. Which is fine normally but in times like this it makes more work!

OK, first off, the earthquake in Italy is not near where we are moving. It is 200 to 300 miles south, closer to Rome. As Patrick put it “We are closer to France than to the earthquake.” So don’t worry about us. We cannot imagine the loss and destruction that the communities affected by the earthquake are experiencing. Knowing a bit more about the population density and the age of the buildings since we have visited, it is not hard to see what a great affect something like this will have.

Tonight we dealt with something a little more happy and closer to home, Brandon’s school conference. He has had a wonderful second grade teacher that he is going to miss. It was a quick and easy conference. He’s doing well in most things and just needs to work on his addition and subtraction facts. (There is nothing new!)

We also got to look through the Adams Art Show. Their school has an art teacher that is paid through fundraising by the school, and they do wonderful art projects. Here is the one Brandon had on display:
It is so much fun to see the creativity that these kids just have inside them, and their enthusiasm for art. When do we start to lose that?

I can’t believe it, I have an 8 year old boy today! It doesn’t seem like yesterday that he was born, but could it really be 8 years? He is such a sweet and fun kid to be around. Today was no exception! He spent the night at a friends last night and when he came home today he was bursting with excitement, just talking up a storm. He couldn’t wait for his party!

This year he had a party at Papa’s Pizza, the place in town that has an indoor kids play area and caters to kids parties. For Brandon, it was both a birthday and a going away party. He had kids from school and cub scouts and other friends come. They played in the play area, ate pizza, played some more, ate cupcakes, and then opened presents. See all the pictures here. They all had a great time and Brandon really enjoyed the party.

It’s just hard to believe that he is 8 years old! Isn’t he getting big?

In order to have our storage and shipment insured, we have to create a detailed inventory of our house. We have to pretty much list every item, whether it is being shipped or stored, and the replacement value.

We’ve been going through room by room and sorting things into piles. This is one of our “shipping” piles. In another part of the room is the “storage” pile. Plus there is the stuff we are taking on the plane, we need to see what fits in our suitcases so that we include the right stuff in the inventory.

We have 3 rooms to go… Office/hobby room, spare room (which we’ve been piling “storage” stuff into) and kitchen. Also clothes once we’ve packed our suitcases and have decided what has to be shipped.

Oh, and we have to take ALL of our small electronics with us personally because our company won’t ship them – too high of an occurence of theft. We are trying to figure out how to pack everything so that we can actually maneuver that much stuff. Every hand will pull a rolling tote, every back will have a backpack and probably a couple of shoulder bags.

The inventory has to be done on Tuesday and emailed off to the moving company. Guess what we’ll be doing this weekend?