Last night, after a very busy few days, we collapsed exhausted. We succeeded in filling the first two containers and getting our house cleaned up and prepped for photos and showings. We even had our first showing a couple hours after the photos, and a second showing today. The house isn’t even listed in MLS yet – so this is a good sign. With any luck we’ll have an offer before we leave.

When I’m driving around running various errands, I am finding I’m feeling something I call nostalgia of place. It is like having emotional flashbacks when I am in various places – and they aren’t really significant places – places like the hotel we stayed at the first time I came to California or the highway I take to go to the South Bay cancer center. They are not flashbacks in the remembering sense rather they are more a memory of emotions – remembering what I felt at a time in the past while driving down a specific stretch of road.

It is hard to believe that soon we will be working on lasts … at least lasts until the world gets a little more sane and we decide to come back and visit and have a proper farewell with all my friends. It sucks to be leaving and not being able to give people hugs. A zoom goodbye just isn’t the same as giving someone a great big hug.

Tomorrow we will be one week to departure. The last couple of weeks have been intense. Now that the house is ready for showings, we are focusing more on getting the van ready for living in. We have a very limited amount of time left and the van definitely needs a few more things before we leave. We’ll be living in it for an undetermined amount of time – and that too is an interesting challenge. I’ll talk more about that in a future post.

For now, we are celebrating the fact that we got the house read for showing and cleared out two containers worth of stuff. We think we can get our remaining stuff into a single container, but we have two in the driveway just in case we need the second one.