Purging

 While we're away we'll be (fingers crossed) renting out our house and in anticipation we've begun the paring down, extreme de-cluttering phase. Some of you may be surprised to know that I am not the ocd neat and organized type. This massive purge has been a long time coming. When we first moved here, it would've been nice if we had maybe gotten rid of some stuff beforehand. We literally threw our stuff in boxes and hauled it to our new house. I still have stuff in boxes from when we first moved in! So far we've sold our dining room table, a pie safe, a dresser, 2 desks, a sofa table, and a shelf. Still left to list are 2 china cabinets, various chairs, a sofa, 2 end tables, and a small side table. Everything else is either getting stored in my mom's basement or given away/donated/tossed. A couple months ago we purged a ton of books. We gathered up boxes and boxes and donated them in those big blue donation bins. It felt great to make a dent in the clutter! And then the next day, I realized Amazon has a trade in program where they will pay you to ship them the books and give you a trade in amount on an Amazon giftcard. With the remaining books and dvds in the house I've looked them up and it totals like $100 in trade in value! I have yet to mail them in though so that is my goal for this week.  And do our taxes.

So, the plan...

So mh (my husband) and I are like a third of the way through this whole visa process and we're nearing D-Day-the big departure. We'll head to his home country for his first visa interview at the US embassy and then we'll be setting up another appointment at the Spanish embassy to get his visa before we head off to Spain. I'll be a Language and Culture Assistant with this program through the Ministry of Education of Spain. The application process wouldn't be so bad if the online application wasn't such a labyrinth of indecipherable web pages but, thanks to this forum, we've made it through the various phases of inscrita, admitida, adjudicada, and POR FIN----aceptada! We're headed to Asturias in the north of Spain and we are over the moon excited. We've just recieved our regional placement in Asturias but it will be a bit before we find out the exact destination-city and school. Oviedo or Gijón would be equally amazing. I'm slightly less excited to be placed in some rural outpost of northern Spain but Asturias is pretty small so I figure I'll never be too far from IKEA. Priorities!


So. Who's coming to visit??

a life less ordinary

I came across this email I wrote to my friend awhile back.

date:Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 2:26 PM
subject:a life less ordinary
mailed-by:gmail.com

i'm doomed to a life of mediocrity.

took the gre this morning and it appears i've gotten dumber since high school.
in fact my scores on the verbal section can only reflect that i've become illiterate.

It's been five years since I took the GRE and I have yet to go to grad school. I still have those same feelings of uncertainty about the future and what happiness really is and will I ever be satisified with the road I'm traveling. This may seem like a somber first post but actually it's all about new beginnings and taking risks and seeing what's out there. A lot has happened in the last five years and I'm quitting my job and going abroad. Stay tuned.