SANDStorm

I thought I’d be able to sleep tonight since I’m so tired from our non-stop preparations. But I woke up at 2:30am, tossed and turned until 3:15am and finally gave up to my insomnia and came out to the computer. I’d really like to do more packing or cleaning up, but I wouldn’t want to wake up D. I imagine I’ll putz around on the computer for a few hours, being completely unproductive, and then crash again around 7am – that’s what I did last Sunday morning when I couldn’t sleep.

We’ve been getting rain of biblical proportions for the last two days and the news reported that flash flood warnings would continue until Wednesday morning. So far, it hasn’t hampered our leaving preparations too much, but it certainly has made me think that I need to get out of here! It is a tad bit apocolyptic and I don’t want to be here when the plagues start coming.

-s

As many of you know, part of the appeal of our trip has been the notion that we’ll be getting rid of all our personal belongings, save one box for each of us. The size of the box was undetermined and the only “rule” was that if it could fit in the box it could be kept. Well, I finished packing my one box on Friday night.

After going through most of our possessions, I’ve gotten pretty good at sorting into piles of box-worthy and trash/Goodwill/yard sale-worthy items. At first it was difficult to determine whether my old Mineralogy exam was box-worthy or trash-worthy, but as the box filled up my attitude changed. Items that seemed pretty important, such as my vast rock collection (they are so pretty! and they are from Alaska!), are no longer difficult to part with (although I’d rather give them to a deserving soul than to leave them in my landlord’s garden, so if you’d like some rocks, speak up now!).

So, what did I determine to be box-worthy? Well, pretty much what you’d probably save as mementos of your own life. My box includes:

::Summer kimono, obi, and geta – a going-away present from friends in Japan.

::”Appetite for Life,” the biography of Julia Child. You think you know who Julia Child was? Did you know that she didn’t start cooking until her late thirties, after she had traveled in Asia during World War II? She’s amazing…

::A tattered, disintegrating copy of my Dad’s leather-bound college geography textbook.

::Childhood Christmas ornaments – how can you get rid of this stuff?

::Wedding program and sign-in book

::2002 – 2003 daily planner from Japan – I love looking back at my schedule filled with days of yoga, jogging, and having long lunches with friends…teehee. Life sure was good then!

::Love letters from D, 1990 – 1997

::Korean traditional dress my friend Sung Youn’s mother made for me

::Hand-embroidered cloth for a bread bowl my mother made for us

::Wooden shoe-polishing box which belonged to my dad (and belonged to my grandfather?)

So, that’s pretty much everything in my box. Pretty good, eh?

Oh, and did I neglect to mention the four boxes full of photos, yearbooks, newspaper clippings, and Buffy DVDs which I packed up and left with my in-laws? Technically, I don’t think those boxes don’t count in “my box,” since there is no way I could have ever parted with that stuff.

– s

So, we’ve notified our jobs that we are leaving, we’ve bought our plane tickets, we’ve posted our apartment for sublet, I’ve set up a new bank account to ease overseas access, we’ve got our immunizations, we’ve got a blog, and we’ve begun to sort through the boxes which were thrown into the closets when we first moved in, having never been opened during the first move. I guess that means we’re going.

We leave DC on June 29th. It doesn’t sound so far away anymore and although I tell myself that we’ve got time to see all the museums that we’ve missed so far, that we’ve got time to sell our things on craigslist, that we’ve got time until we have to say our goodbyes…our time is slipping by quickly. Just thinking about the things which need to get done before we leave puts me in a panic. I’m hoping I’ll start relaxing when I board that plane at Dulles, bound for Edinburgh.

First stop – Edinburgh, Scotland

Friends of ours who we met in Japan are getting married on July 8th in Edinburgh and we will be there to cheer them on. It will be a reunion of friends and acquaintances from our years in Japan – everyone coming to Edinburgh to have another big party together. I’m looking forward to staying at our friend’s third-floor walk up (is it the fourth floor in the UK?) in an old section of Edinburgh. I remember from our last visit there that she has some rockin’ Indian take-away down the street and a really picturesque hike up the mountain out her front door. We’ll be relaxing there for a week before the wedding, so hopefully we’ll have enough time after helping prep for the wedding to go enjoy the city. I read that there is an IMAX-style movie on the geology of Scotland playing while we are there. You know I won’t be missing that!

-s

It’s time for us to start planning our trip. It’s coming up in only three and a half months and all I’ve really done is made lists of things which need to get done. And then I lost those lists.

-s