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.