The sadness of parting

Despite only bringing about half of what was in our Bellevue house with us to England we are having to do some more paring down to get settled in the cottage. Steve had to go through his t-shirt drawer and make some hard choices. He decided to finally part with his “World’s Biggest Disk Golf Weekend” T-shirt. May 17 & 18 1997. I was still in high school. It was sad for him, but I can’t say it was as sad for me. That was one worn out, nasty T-shirt. Steve cleaned the windows of the cottage with it before throwing it out. Somehow that made him feel better.

So sorry folks…

Sorry for the loooong gap in posting.  We went away for Steve’s birthday weekend, and then I came down with a stomach bug over Christmas.  That combined with a lack of broadband at the cottage means for little blogging.  I decided I’ll just back date a few entries so you can see what we did over Steve’s birthday and Christmas and then resume as normal.

Boxing Day Walk

I managed to work up the strength for a short walk on Boxing Day. We walked east down our lane, on paved road that turned to sort of paved road, that turned to what was once many years ago a paved road, that turned to a gravel road, that turned to a dirt road, that turned into some muddy tracks. Over the gate and up this hill through a cow pasture.

Steve took this picture as we started heading back. You can see the lane go up the other side of the glen, our cottage is just at the edge of the field in the distance.

A few more picures are up at Flickr.

Boxing Day Dinner

Steve made our Christmas dinner (meatloaf) on Boxing Day as I still couldn’t handle the smell of food. It was probably his most ambitious solo cooking endeavor to date. He spent a good two hours making it. It was great. We used a recipe from Martha Stewart, which calls for quite a few ingredients and is a real undertaking without a food processor, but it is one of Steve’s favorites and worth it for Christmas.

It was tough to find minced pork (which I think adds so much to the regular ground beef). While I was in line at the butcher shop on Christmas Eve picking some up I was chatting with the woman behind me in the queue. It dawned on me that meatloaf was a very “American” dish to have on our first Christmas in England.

Wow! Dysons really do suck!

I bought a Dyson vacuum as the cottage carpets were full of dust and dog hair and Steve’s allergies were really feeling it.  I vacuumed just the front bedroom and got a huge ammount of dust up out of the carpet.  Icky, icky, icky!

Steve was a bit concerned that a canister style vac would not be as powerful as an upright, but this puppy was pulling the carpet up off of the floorboards!  Yay!

Lowell goes aboard

My little brother, Lowell, boarded the SR Kodiak today for two months of sailing. He starts from Anacortes, WA USA and will head north to Valdez, Alaska USA. He hears to expect 20 – 40 foot seas and 20 degrees of tilt. Let’s pray this Illinois boy finds his sea legs quickly! (photo for illustration purposes only)

Unpacking

The house is literally filled to the gills with boxes.  I’m going to have to purge a lot more kitchen stuff – probably reduced my kitchen space Bellevue:Reading about 3:1.  I’m going to have to purge a lot of stuff period. 

Besides, without a diswasher who needs 14 place settings of dishes?  :-)

Christmas starts late AND comes early

Our moving boxes got delivered yesterday.  Since we were in our temporary apartment until now we didn’t do any decorating for Christmas.  The first boxes I tried to find are the ones with our Christmas decorations so we could hang our stockings by the fireplace and wrap some of the presents we’ve bought for one another.  I am pretty sure I forgot to pack the little christmas tree.

It has been three months since we’ve seen our stuff.  They packed us on Sept 19, we got our boxes delivered Dec 17^th.  I can’t even remember what is in them!!!  It is a bit like Christmas unpacking boxes of surprises, even if you already owned them:-)

Sarah’s team Christmas party

A small glimpse into Sarah’s office life.  A re-creation of the office Christmas party, made by a colleague.

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1385307853

Home

We’re moving into our rental house tomorrow.  I’m ready to get settled into our own place.  We moved out of our house in Bellevue September 25th, then into the comfortable guestroom of our incredibly generous friends then to our temporary apartment has that been very sufficient.  I’m ready to feel like I have a personal, physical home again. 

One of the things I’ve learned through this whole process is that “home” is really just being with your family (in our case just the two of us) and that the ’stuff’  and ’stuff container’ matters very little.  That said, after 3 months living out of suitcases I can appreciate the physical trappings of “home” as a blessing that God gives us to be comfortable here on Earth.