May day, May day

The title could be taken many ways. One, that it IS May 1st....another, that it is just 11 days until we leave for Germany. I think the most appropriate right now though is the state of affairs around here. Specifically the STUFF.

Since Steve's dad went into the nursing home, we've been working on getting his house ready for major updating - carpets, paint, fix basement walls, etc. That has taken up a lot of our time, and now the stuff is taking up a lot of our house. Some is very nice stuff, for sure. But other stuff is just meaningless. But Steve wants to save it all (or so it seems sometime.) I'm trying to help him understand that if he doesn't remember the story behind it or it doesn't have meaning to him, why do we need to hang on to it? It's working - a little - but we still hauled home a lot of stuff to go through yesterday. To top it off, we went over Friday night and found that the basement walls were leaking....and we had water on the floor. Yep, lots of boxes on the floor.... now the contents have been salvaged and the empty, wet boxes are out on the back deck waiting for next Saturday's Ada clean up day. Too many to go in our regular trash.

With all this, we decided it would be good to put our own funeral plans in place. So last Monday night, we met our "new neighbors" - picked out our plots in a nice little rural cemetery in the township. That's more than a little creepy in some respects, but to flip it up, guess it means we're doing ok together to be dealing with stuff like that.

Haven't done much with the trip with everything else going on. Driving me crazy to be this close and not feel so ready. I'm more ready than I think, I know, but still. And we don't know if Scott will be there or not. We have plan A and plan B in place, so we're ok either way, but would really like him back in Germany. Working on packing (mentally anyway) and all that stuff. Will have to take time to just sit down and get it all organized, plus the stuff like calling credit card companies, etc.

Have a new toy to help in the travel....finally bought an ipod touch. It has been wonderful so far. Much easier to check email and facebook. Just can't figure out how to do this blog on it. Think I'll still be taking this netbook because of the blog issues and downloading pictures.

Take a deep breath -- 11 days to go!