TGIF, people!

This is how Orca helps me pack.

What? I can't hear you!

Guess who we saw last night?

Coldplay!

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And OMG it was...loud.  I mean, LOUD.  I could feel it in my bones.  I could feel it resonating in my body.  Which means I am - we are - officially too old for this.

One of us was ecstatic and one of us simply endured.  Both of us are completely and totally dragging this morning.  Again with the being too old for this.

One of the opening acts was Robyn:

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Let me tell you - she rocked it.

One thing I can say about Coldplay and Robyn is that they truly performed.  I get it that they do this for a living, but as a member of the audience, I felt like they were having as good a time as I was, and that they were enjoying their music as much as I was, and that there was no place they would rather be than on that stage. 

Time for another cup of coffee.

A New Life

My Papa is third from the left.

I want to say that we are starting a new life, but we are not.  We are uprooting our current life and moving it halfway across the country.  It is not even the first time we have done this; it is just the first time that we ourselves have been the impetus of the whole process.  We are not moving because we have to.  Not because the military is making us.  We are moving because we want to.  Because we have this opportunity and it shall not pass our way again.

After Papa died I spent hours poring over old family photos.  My grandparents moved back and forth across the country several times in the span of their lives; as children, they endured travel during the Great Depression.  I have taken for granted my entire life that people - my people - are able to just get up and move.  It is possible.  We can go somewhere new and do something new.  We don't have to stay here and do the same thing.

From one of Gama and Papa's road trips

Yesterday we walked through the house, room by room, with our realtor and talked about when to rent the house, how much to expect in rent each month, and the fact that we will not be able to break even, etc.  It was a real eye-opener because it turns out, in order to drastically increase the number of potential renters, we need to list the house during the summer instead of the fall.  This means instead of having three relatively packed months ahead of us, we now have less than one.  We now have 21 days.

21 days:

To pack up 70% of our things
To clean the house as it has never been cleaned before
To list it and be prepared to live out of our offices (even more than we currently do, which is saying something)
And then to hopefully rent it and get all of our stuff out before our Africa trip
And then to move to Denver when we get back

Once our realtor left, we collapsed on the floor in silence.  We all but had to breathe out of paper bags.  We had a few serious moments of, do we really want to do this?  Yes.  Then how in the world are we going to make it happen?  This is how... 

We do not know what is on the other side, but we know that we are not happy on this side.  The place we live is awesome in its own way and it has slowly become what it becomes for most people:  very comfortable golden handcuffs.  Eventually you can settle and you can do well for yourself and you can get used to living at a certain standard.  And in order to maintain this, you excuse the traffic, and you dismiss the draining effect, day after day, of a life lived at 100MPH.  And the handcuffs gradually tighten until you simply don't feel them anymore.  Don't see them anymore.  And then you forget that there is another way to live.

From our time in Frisco

It is time for us to move.  It is time for us to breathe mountain air and meet new people and spend our weekends exploring the West.  It is time for Jamba Juice!  It is time for walking to work instead of driving.  It is time to get rid of half (or more) of what we own and to stop accumulating things simply because we have space to fill.  

In order to soften the blow of all the manual labor of the past few days (hello, packing!), we have had the Harry Potter movies on TV tonight as we putter around the house (thank you abc family!).  We just watched the end of the Goblet of Fire, in which He Who Shall Not Be Named becomes a reality in the lives of our beloved characters.  At the end of the movie, Hermoine laments to Harry, "Everything is going to change now.  Isn't it?" He nods gravely and says, "Yes, it is."

Not everything is going to change for us.  Just a few very important things. 

Week 2 on the surface of the sun

Not to sound like an 85-yr-old but it is hot.  Like, withering.  Like, draining to the core.

We got up this morning and every window in the house was fogged over. There's a heat index of something like 118 here - with humidity.  I will so not miss humidity.

Week Two of moving preparations has been every bit as chaotic as Week One.  I know that we're making progress, but to look around, it sure doesn't seem like it.

This week has included:

**The third and fourth trips to goodwill.

**G's job is trying hard to transfer his position (with him in it!) to CO.

**B's formal promotion (to management!) at work.
**A walk-thru of our house, room by room, with our realtor to prep it for staging.

**We bought a camera for the Africa trip.

**We said goodbye to a good friend, and loved on our niece and nephew.

**We celebrated the 4th of July.

**B's work threw a picnic that was hotter than blazes.

**And we bought tickets for a house-hunting trip to CO.

It's all happening!  If we can only survive this heat!

TGIF - pau hana time

Where I come from

Papa died two years ago this week.

And I forgot.

I mean, I didn't forget forget, but I have been so busy planning for the future that I forgot to wallow in the past.  When July rolled around I had about two minutes of complete and total guilt, then it vanished into thin air.  When Papa died a lot of things happened that caused the bottom to fall out of my world.  And I spent the first year after his death wondering if I would ever be OK again.

And now I am.

This is where I come from:

Half of me was formed by Gama:  my laugh--extending the benefit of the doubt to others--my faith in God--and my underlying anxiety that the world just might not be a safe place.

The other half of me was formed by Papa:  my sense of humor--my love of animals--my fear of God--and my overwhelming desire to forge ahead, at full-speed, into that world that is probably not safe, but is probably way, way fun.

I declare

First of all, Happy 4th of July!

Out of patriotic love and devotion, I made sangria and it was totally delish.

Secondly, I've decided that I should be off work every Wednesday - I could so get used to that.  Working two days, off a day, working two days, off for the weekend.  Am I the only one who thinks that is a grand plan?

As I write this, it sounds like a war zone outside.  All the fireworks - not my fave.  I get it, they're pretty, blah blah.  But I hate the noise and the loud bursts.

To celebrate the day, I whipped up some tasty foods this morning for a dinner we attended tonight, then went to the gym for a couple of hours (because I'm hardcore) then took a nap (because I'm hardcore) and then stuffed my face tonight (again with the hardcore).  G read the Declaration of Independence and is currently watching the TV coverage of the fireworks in D.C.  I'm contemplating finishing off the dessert.

Hope you had a great holiday, peeps!