From the vault

This is our last weekend in Kentucky, and we continue to work hard preparing for the packers, who will be here on Monday and Tuesday. For the past few weeks, we have been systematically going through our belongings and paring down the stuff that we just don't need. Today we said goodbye to an old sofa and 2 old chairs. They were in such sad shape that I had a moment of panic that perhaps Goodwill would refuse to let them in the door.

Even though we'll have movers to do the physical part of the move, it takes a lot of planning and coordination to get things ready. Tomorrow we will take a car load of items that we will move ourselves out to Phil and Amy's new house: things like the bassoon, the guitars, and my photo negatives. We figure that if they are already out of the house, we don't have to worry about them accidentally getting packed up with everything else.

I spent the better part of today working in my office. There were so many projects I had hoped to have finished by now, but the time has come to stop working on them and to just get them ready for the move. For example, I packed up the photo album I'm working on of all of our professional portraits and set it with the other stuff we're moving ourselves. I also have given up (for now!) on getting my computer files into a more tidy arrangement and am focusing on just getting a backup copy on my external hard drive so that I can turn the desktop off tomorrow and get it ready to be packed.

As I've been going through my office, I have come across some cool stuff that I never got around to sharing before. Back in February, both Mike and Annabelle were chosen to represent their grade-levels as "Eagles of Excellence." Basically this got them a certificate and a couple of dress-down days, but the coolest part was being included on the bulletin board with the other excellent Eagles. Each kid had a photo posted along with a page of quotes from teachers. Such nice comments (click to see the images larger):