Wheel-less

We gave Big Blue away to friends of ours last night, and for the first time in 15 years, I'm wheel-less.

This week marks my final training class (Meridian Mail) before leaving for post, and senioritis has completely set in. The upside is that the class is self-paced, so I should be dismissed early on Friday, which would leave me time to "check out" from the State Department and retrieve my absentee ballot for November's elections.

The travel agent issued our tickets last week, so we're about ready to go. Mom also e-mailed yesterday to say she had reserved flights for her and her S.O. in March - I'm glad they're going to take part in our adventure.

I've started letting my goatee grow again with the arrival of autumn. Patricia loves it.

Progress on several fronts

We had many reasons to open a bottle of champagne last night:

* We sold our 2005 Toyota Prius for our asking price to a former member of our babysitting co-op - we hand the car over on Saturday;
* We found a home for Big Blue, our 1986 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser with the 5 liters of V8 power, and the rear-facing third row that our girls will surely miss. A friend in the rug business could use a station wagon, even if it needs a new water pump;
* Patricia received a job offer to work part-time at the embassy when we arrive;
* I passed the Microsoft 70-290 exam, "Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment" - one step closer to the MCSA & MCSE;
* We now have our visas for Ethiopia - Patricia picked them up on Friday - and just need our airline tickets;
* We bought two new suitcases which arrived yesterday.

To quote a recent Volkswagen commercial, sometimes it all seems to come together.

Ethiopia Opens its Doors, Slowly

The New York Times has an article in the Travel section today on the Orthodox Churches of Lalibela and Gonder.

The article also mentions that Ethiopian Airlines offers direct flights (with a short stop in Rome) from Washington-Dulles to Addis Ababa.

Great Falls

Last Sunday we attended a picnic at Great Falls with some of our friends from the now-defunct Franco-American theatre group. We had lovely weather, great conversation, and by the end of the day, very tired girls.

T-23

Patricia keeps teasing me about having written a countdown to our departure on each day on the calendar. Today is T-23.

Friday was a good day all around. It was my birthday!

Friday maked the end of my class in Microsoft Exchange, and we capped the course off by taking the Microsoft certification test. I passed the test, and so can use it as part of the MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) certification I'm working on. State offers a Skills Incentive Program (SIP) that would pay me an extra 10% if I complete the MCSA and 15% for the MCSE. My SIP eligibility begins in March, and I'd like to complete the MCSE by then.

Patricia spent Friday morning applying for our visas for Ethiopia. We should have them next week if all goes well.

Speaking of Ethiopia, during a study break (I had holed up in Arlington Central Library to revew for my exam), I picked up several books on Ethiopia. One I borrowed, and just finished reading, is Nega Mezlekia's memoir Notes from the Hyena's Belly. The author describes his carefree childhood in the book's first part, but just as he grows up, Haile Selassie is swept from power by a military junta. The junta, known as the Derg, then imposes a socialist dictatorship, with (especially military) aid from the Soviet Union. The resulting revolution devastates the country and bleeds it population dry, as thousands of people suffer summary execution during the ensuing terror. The author spends the second and third parts of the book documenting his struggle for survival during this upheaval. Since I knew next to nothing about this period in Ethiopian history, I found the text enlightening. Mezlekia writes in an entertaining style as well.

Friday evening some friends invited us over for dinner and we provided the dessert. Clara baked one of her famous butterfly cakes, a pound cake cut and rearranged in the form of a butterfly and decorated with strawberries and kiwi fruit slices. We also provided some fireworks, which Patricia and I had purchased from a fireworks stand during the post-Independence Day sales. Some other friends showed up for dessert with their daughters, and the four girls especially enjoyed the fireworks.

Yesterday Clara and Gwendolyne were overjoyed to discover that our building has an outdoor roof pool on the 21st floor. We spent part of the afternoon splashing around up there.

The girls started school again last Tuesday and are enjoying it fine so far. We decided they may as well return to their school and school friends, even for a month, given all the other disruption in their young lives this year.

We still have some matters to take care of before we leave, such as selling our cars. I plan to get the ads up today.

Patricia also managed to make it out to the warehouse to pull some of our effects out of the overseas shipment and place them into storage instead, thus reducing or eliminating our weight overage. Unfortunately, the items she pulled out included all my records (I have a pretty good LP collection on vinyl), but then she didn't have the time to find the turntable, so that's getting shipped. We're just happy to be within a few pounds of the weight limit, and will work to cut our possessions down another notch with the next move.

Moved out, moved in, moving on?

We managed to maintain some semblance of sanity during our packouts on Monday & Tuesday. To give you an idea what it was like, imagine eight people, only some of whom are literate in English, showing up on Monday and wrapping up for transport overseas everything that isn't pinned down, even the articles you marked or labeled "Stays here" or "For storage". It's pretty unmanageable.

I attended training all day, so Patricia had to handle it herself, with welcome help from two of our friends.

Tuesday was more of the same. I had three boxes of training materials and manuals I wanted to send to Addis by diplomatic pouch, and labeled them, but sure enough they were carted off to storage. On the other hand, many things I wanted stored weren't.

We're really not upset about that sort of thing - we're grateful to have the move (mostly) behind us (see below). I suppose that having lived in the same place for eight years, we accumulated much more stuff than we thought, and we didn't take the time to manage it all as well as we could. For example, I probably should have had all my LPs recorded to a digital format, and thrown or given away the many old cassettes I no longer listen to or have in another format.

Of course, we also did a lot of the fix-it and painting work around the house ourselves.

The carpet-layers came Wednesday and did a great job installing carpet (thereby protecting our hardwood floors), but none of the interior doors fit anymore. I spent Wednesday and yesterday after work cutting the bottoms off about 15 various and sundry doors around the house.

Everything seemed fine until I received an e-mail yesterday that our shipment to Addis Ababa is 615 lbs. overweight. At $2.66/lb, we have no intention of paying for the overage. This implies a trip to the warehouse in Sterling, VA to pull items out of our shipment to get to our weight limit. I think I spent much of my sleeping hours last night figuring out what we'll pull out.

Mom and her gentleman-friend arrive this evening for a Labor Day visit. The apartment's a mess, so we'll have some motivation to tidy up. I look forward to seeing them again, probably for the last time before we jet off to Ethiopia.