Shaken, Not Stirred - February 24
People keep asking us: 'so, are you excited yet?'
Who has time to be excited? All I am is stressed. Three months to liquidate eight-tenths of all our personal possessions, ship one tenth, pack and store the remaining tenth, clean, stage, and sell a house, and prepare to emigrate to South Korea. Two nightmarish days of frantic final packing ... if you can call it that. More like triage in an emergency ward. Hold item up for a split second, scream 'Pick, Pass, or Play?' (sorry, in-joke. Usually it was 'Keep, pitch, or take?' or less printable alternatives) and hurl it into one of three piles. Box up each pile. One huge pile to thrift store. One medium pile to storage. Very very small pile to 'take with'. Oh, and don't forget the pile of just plain garbage which turned into a half-trailer load to take to the dump - even after three months of weekly dump runs to empty out the house... One day spent completely on the road, from Oshawa to Toronto and back to Oshawa...then another four hours back to St. Thomas...
WHERE DOES IT ALL COME FROM? The virtues of the simple life have never been more apparent - and tempting...
I am immensely exhausted, but also immensely grateful for the angelically patient and energetic assistance of D & L, good friends who endeared themselves even further by not only spending an entire day (WITH their two-month old baby along) 'packing' with us but actually helping by cleaning out the fridge, running stuff to the thrift store, and taking things they could use 'at the cabin'. D & L, you were bona fide blessings and answers to prayer. So were our long-term friends S & B, who among other generous gifts of time and energy, took our daughter for the day and made up a bed for us to fall into at midnight at the end of it all.
Which reminds me that I also should thank the many people who were doing that praying. Not only our respective parents, and concerned family, but also our church family and my mother's church, have been talking to God about us on a pretty regular basis. I don't think He would have been allowed to forget about us, even if He could... And from providentially perfect weather to paperwork coming in well ahead of schedule, from various functionaries' attitudes being consistently helpful and informative to times and appointments opening up and matching our needs, things have fallen into place far more neatly than we had any right to expect even with better planning and organization than we exhibited.
Excited? Nope. Just weary. But thankful.
Only one more day. We're here at Mom and Dad A's and will be doing the final 'repack' to get all the various pieces of luggage as efficiently loaded as possible tonight. Tomorrow will be, as it should, a day of rest - and then early Monday morning (and I do mean early. We'll be up at three in the morning to be at the airport by 4:30 am....) we'll be off on our long voyage overseas.
Expect the next post to the Alembyc to be the first official 'Leaf' from the Land of Morning Calm - in other words, the next time we write in will be from Korea!
Love,
Judy
Who has time to be excited? All I am is stressed. Three months to liquidate eight-tenths of all our personal possessions, ship one tenth, pack and store the remaining tenth, clean, stage, and sell a house, and prepare to emigrate to South Korea. Two nightmarish days of frantic final packing ... if you can call it that. More like triage in an emergency ward. Hold item up for a split second, scream 'Pick, Pass, or Play?' (sorry, in-joke. Usually it was 'Keep, pitch, or take?' or less printable alternatives) and hurl it into one of three piles. Box up each pile. One huge pile to thrift store. One medium pile to storage. Very very small pile to 'take with'. Oh, and don't forget the pile of just plain garbage which turned into a half-trailer load to take to the dump - even after three months of weekly dump runs to empty out the house... One day spent completely on the road, from Oshawa to Toronto and back to Oshawa...then another four hours back to St. Thomas...
WHERE DOES IT ALL COME FROM? The virtues of the simple life have never been more apparent - and tempting...
I am immensely exhausted, but also immensely grateful for the angelically patient and energetic assistance of D & L, good friends who endeared themselves even further by not only spending an entire day (WITH their two-month old baby along) 'packing' with us but actually helping by cleaning out the fridge, running stuff to the thrift store, and taking things they could use 'at the cabin'. D & L, you were bona fide blessings and answers to prayer. So were our long-term friends S & B, who among other generous gifts of time and energy, took our daughter for the day and made up a bed for us to fall into at midnight at the end of it all.
Which reminds me that I also should thank the many people who were doing that praying. Not only our respective parents, and concerned family, but also our church family and my mother's church, have been talking to God about us on a pretty regular basis. I don't think He would have been allowed to forget about us, even if He could... And from providentially perfect weather to paperwork coming in well ahead of schedule, from various functionaries' attitudes being consistently helpful and informative to times and appointments opening up and matching our needs, things have fallen into place far more neatly than we had any right to expect even with better planning and organization than we exhibited.
Excited? Nope. Just weary. But thankful.
Only one more day. We're here at Mom and Dad A's and will be doing the final 'repack' to get all the various pieces of luggage as efficiently loaded as possible tonight. Tomorrow will be, as it should, a day of rest - and then early Monday morning (and I do mean early. We'll be up at three in the morning to be at the airport by 4:30 am....) we'll be off on our long voyage overseas.
Expect the next post to the Alembyc to be the first official 'Leaf' from the Land of Morning Calm - in other words, the next time we write in will be from Korea!
Love,
Judy
posted by Alembyc at
4:33 p.m.
1 Comments:
Just catching up on your blog... Glad you made it mostly intact.
I'm glad we could help out with your move.
BTW, we took a few minutes to sort that trailer load, and most of that stuff went either into our apartment, to the thrift store, or to the curbside recycling. There was so little real "garbage" when we were done we could just put it out with our curbside garbage. So no need to feel bad about that.
DK
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