Bittersweet

Boy, am I glad that part is over. Our last day in Houston was a mishmash of saying goodbye to my colleagues (who are not included in the directive in #2 of the last post), meeting with Dev's teacher to go over her progress (excellant), getting the car detailed and sold, picking up dustbunnies the size of Boo's head so the house cleaners don't run screaming when they arrive, and basically saying good bye to the place I realize now I've lived longer then anywhere else since I moved away from home.

We moved to Houston at the very end of 2002, and swore up and down that we would be there for three years before moving on to cooler pastures. Six years later, we're leaving with much regret. We managed to make a wonderful life for ourselves, very different from what came before, but full of some wonderful friends and places that we will miss very much. We tell everyone we're coming back, but that's a hard thing to promise; our families are all back in the Northeast, and with the only grandchildren (for the next few months that is) on either side, there's a big draw to head back to New England when we're done overseas.

This is going to be a very grand adventure, there is no doubt. But I'm very glad that the leaving part of leaving home is now over with. We're in Maine, having attended a very special event today, and we'll be here for a few days before we head to Vermont to see the other set of grandparents. Then it's back to the Houston airport for four hours before we fly out to London. I think I'm ready.

The State of Our Nation

1. House is 95% packed, shipping container (holy crap big!) arrived on a truck this morning to be loaded with our sea freight, we are finding things we'd forgotten we had and everything is moving along.

2. My leave/grant/work status remains unresolved. I fully expect this condition to persist until, oh let's say, July.

3. We may have someone who will rent our house. This only partially makes up for the heartburn I am experiencing from #2 (is it career suicide to tell my institution to take a flying fuck leap? I suspect so...)

4. The girls have adjusted remarkably to our "new house" (a hotel), and are looking forward to seeing their grandparents. I can't take them to daycare anymore because it makes me cry.

5. Houston is gifting us with some remarkably fabulous weather for our last few days here. I'm holding tight to the knowledge that in mere days it will be 95 degrees with 90% humidity in order to make this more bearable.

6. I'm going to deck the next person who asks me if I'm excited about the move. Yes, I am theoretically excited, but the metric crapton of stuff to be done before we actually get on the plane to London (not to mention the Lurking Black Cloud of Doom that we might not actually make it there hovering over my head) is blocking out the excitement. Go away.

7. I like moving, I like moving, I like moving - this is my new mantra, but unfortunately it's not working so well.

Of the three posts on this blog, 2 are complaining. I can promise that this will not be the permanent tone. Really!

Oh for fuck's sake

Why am I still awake? It's almost 1 am here in Texas, and we have just completed our household inventory. I'm still unclear on what exactly is going with us and what is staying in storage. But so be it. Come Monday the movers will be here and it will be (mostly) all over.

I look around our house and realize we have a ton more stuff then we did when we moved here from our grad student digs in Tucson six years ago. But it probably isn't all that much stuff in reality - we can take as much as we care to, since we haven't filled up our shipping container allotment yet. And the house we're moving to is bigger then our current adobe. It's amazing how putting it all down in black and white (or pixels in our digital case) makes you realize exactly how much stuff you have. Yikes. No more back of the truck moves for us my friends. No more...

Some backstory

OK, so you may be wondering what this little corner of the Internet is all about. Allow me to introduce you to the main players:

Me: one 36-year-old, currently surviving as a Boston Yankee living in Space City (that would be Houston y'all), but on the cusp of fulfilling my every childhood WASP fantasy by moving to London in a mere two and a half weeks. I'm moving because 

My husband: has a job that requires him to relocate across the pond. While we enjoy Texas waaaaay more then we ever thought we would, we are not sorry for the opportunity to go overseas. My other half was raised in Vermont, and likes to pretend he's a real Vermonter, but alas, he was actually birthed in Massachusetts, so he's SOL on that score.

We are taking with us our two young daughters: Devil, who just turned 4, and Boo, who is 25 months old. Boo has no clue as to what is going on, and it's just as well. Devil is alternately not at all interested in moving and ecstatic with the thought that we're moving to a country with A. Real. Queen. And. Real. Princesses. Walt's minions have a lot to answer for on the Princess obsession in my household, let me tell you.

As for the blog title: I had a friend in college who was totally enthralled with the fact that some number of my ancestors came over to the New England area early on in the English occupation of the country, and did cool things like hang out with Cotton Mather and get kicked out of the Boston Meeting for marrying someone from the Worcester Meeting (or something like that). My father and my grandfather and my umpteenth-great grandfather all went to Milton Academy and to Harvard at some point, and several of them only went to Harvard (Dad was a great rebel and branched out to (gasp!) Yale for grad school). My grandmother at one point seriously asked me if I wanted to "come out". And that didn't mean the same thing in the 80s as it does today, believe me! So I see this adventure we are about to embark on as a return to my Ancestral Homeland as it were. The husband thinks I'm a bit nutty, the kids are Texans, and it's all going to be very interesting.

However, I am in the midst of making an inventory of every single thing we own, so if you'll excuse me, I've got some crap to list.