Spent the last three days…

…starting to get ready for our move to India. Because Paul needs to get an employment visa, that I will then tag onto, as opposed to the work visa he’s been on he will be returning much sooner than expected (read: the 19th of this month). I probably won’t be leaving until October. Apparently there is quite a bit of red tape involved and because he is the first one in his company relocating to another country…we’re on our own to figure it out. Thus he’s going back to take care of business there while we figure things out here.

In case anyone is curious, we are not planning on selling our house. Upon mutual agreement, my daughter and son-in-law will sell their home and rent ours. It will hopefully be a win-win situation for everyone.

So back to the last three days. Because Fraughter and her family will be moving all of their stuff here, we need to go through everything we have. What is moved? What stays? What is stored? What do we get rid of?

We needed to start with Paul since he is going back to India so soon, and will be spending four days this week in Florida visiting his mother. The first step was his office. Over a decade of catalogs, literature and files was just the beginning. He also had all his photographs from his travels across the U.S., numerous rocks from the western states, geeky/scientific fun stuff he’s gotten from trade shows and let’s not overlook his hotel key collection…I think he’s accumulated enough to cover a wall. (Seriously Paul, you are a Geek; but it’s one of the things I love about you.)

I didn’t take a ‘before’ picture, but here’s what I left for him when he was done:


Knowing that I have a bit more time to pack up the rest of our things, I decided to concentrate on the music I wanted to bring to India. Since we’re not shipping our CD collection across the globe, let alone our stereo (or most of our electronic appliances because they run on 220 volts, not 110 like here), Fraughter got me into the 21st century and started an iTunes account for me.

I didn’t realize how many CDs we had until I started uploading (downloading?) them. Apparently there are more than four hundred I need to pack up, and though I don’t need every single one on my laptop, I’m up to 119 at this point. And apparently my daughter was familiar with every single one…and apparently I’m up (or is it down?) with music.