Times, they are a-changin'

The past few weeks have just been complete madness; hence the lack of blogging. :-) Where do I begin? Well, I guess it makes sense to start on Friday, almost two weeks ago. This was the night that we began packing... actually packing isn't really the right word... it was more like sorting through all the crap that we've accumulated over the past 5 years. We had boxes of things that hadn't even made it out of the box since we moved up from London over two years ago! Anyway, the sorting wasn't even the most difficult part. Think about it... I'm a woman, right? Well women need their clothes, yes? So how on earth am I supposed to be expected to decide what clothes I can live without for the next 6 weeks?!? It's madness really... expecting a woman to make such decisions! Well, remarkably it was a little bit easier than I'd anticipated. Actually the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was really the clothes that I had available to wear on the other end, in CA, that I was most concerned about. I decided this must be because in CA I'll be likely to run into people who I haven't seen for probably years and therefore would like to look good when I run into them. Makes sense really... so I packed all the summer type clothing that I felt would look really cute when I wore it in CA this summer. That made the clothes packing much smoother. Saying this, it was only once all of our belongings had been packed up and taken away by the moving compay that Jeff decided to inform me that we wouldn't be receiving any of the things we shipped home until mid to late August! Well that ruined the whole plan! Now I won't only look the opposite of cute when I run into all these friends of long ago, but I will be roasting in Scotland attire! Out of control! Jeff calmed me down a bit by explaining that the reason it would take so long is because, for customs reasons, they can't actually bring any of our items into the US until we ourselves are in the US, so our belongings will arrive on the east coast shortly after we fly home and then we will have to wait while they are all trecked across the country to CA... good times.

Ok enough complaining about clothing. So after all of our things left us that Monday, we continued to live in our very empty flat until Thursday when our lease was up and moved into our neighbors spare room. I am quite proud to say though that I literally only have the one suitcase to live out of which is making our currently transient-like life here, and not to mention the trip down to London and back to CA in July, much easier.

This whole time of transition has been an interesting one so far, I have to say. I'm very much focused on preparing a life for us when we return to CA. I am daily checking and applying for jobs. Yet there is still the part of me that can't believe our life here in the UK is coming to an end. I feel I've been forced to think about it a bit earlier than I would have liked with all of the packing and moving. I'm pretty sure that had we been able to continue living in our flat and waited to ship off all of our belongings until just before we left, I probably would have lived in a bit of denial for a while. Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely ecstatic to be moving back home near family and friends, but at the same time it all seems soo strange. We even had our last Bible study on Tuesday and it felt soooo weird to realize that never again would I have those group of women to look forward to seeing every Tuesday. I guess we just get soo used to our daily routines and comforts that it's only once we no longer have them that we can truly appreciate just how much they really mean.