Stage 2- out of the house!

The Falks have gone nomadic!  We moved out of our home on 7/27, and in moved the Johnston family from Sydney, Australia.  Wonderful family with two adorable kids.  After six weeks of overlap while they lived 2 houses away prior to their moving in, we now leave our house with good friends rather than strangers.  Some learned Aussie lingo:  "fair dinkum!" (no sh*t!),  "cobber" (friend), "nappy" (diaper).  They do say "mate" a lot (as a noun, not verb) but don't really say "sheila" so much.  And no self-respecting Aussie actually drinks Fosters.  Tim-tams taste good.  Vegemite taste like aged feces from a diseased wallaby.  Fair dinkum cobber, that vegemite belongs in a nappy, mate.

 The Falk and Johnston kids meshed immediately.  The Johnstons feel that Avery has a very strong American accent.  I've always said that. 

It is very nice to be done with the house-packing stage.  It was kind of terrible.  Sorting, recycling, trashing, giving away, packing (and then re-packing because I did a lousy packing job the first time).  It was an arduous but long-overdue process.   We've determined that Lynn will be the "Feng Shui Packing Sensei" on board.  She is very good at organization and efficient stowage.  Now that we know how much we brought down to the boat, it will require geometric genius to fit even 40% of it aboard!  And good news- Isabelle has decided to bring her saxophone.  Because it's small and quiet.  The nonessential stuff will have to stay in Annapolis at Nanny and Poppy's house.  In the past they've really enjoyed when we leave stuff with them, so I'm pretty sure they'll be excited about it.

Isabelle with some vacuum packed cool weather clothing

Izzy with the boat-bound saxophone

In the midst of all this packing and organizing a really cool thing happened:  we had an absolute plumbing disaster.  It was really neat how the pipe managed to break in the subfloor of the girls 2nd floor bathroom and the water cascaded from the kitchen lights on its way to the basement.  Luckily Anna was with me and we got it under control before too much damage occurred.  Here are some super-fun pictures of the kitchen.  Initially worried that some major work was in order during our last week in the house, it ended up to be an easy fix without any significant damage.  All dried out and patched up.

Anna jumped into action and immediately found/placed buckets and towels-- the girl is good under pressure!

Ok, so you get the idea of what life was like leading up to move out day.  But then it's supposed to be easy, right?

Moving day

•  With incredible timing, Walter developed acute onset severe total body pain that kept him down.  We couldn't lift him without him yelping in pain.  With Rob "Dingo" Johnston assisting me, we carried Walter on his mat to the car.  He looked so heroic.  Racing him to the vet I heard (and felt) the characteristic "thump thump thump" of a flat tire.  Only it wasn't just a regular flat- it was a piece of wood with three large nails impaling the tire.  The very same piece that Lynn had told me to clean up a few weeks ago after I destroyed and burned some old risers.  At that very moment I wanted to join Opus Dei and self flagellate right there on the side of the road.  But I didn't.  Instead I spun the car around and raced back to the house before the tire exhaled completely

• Obstacles now overcome, I got Walter to our friend and wonderful veterinarian, Kathy Trow.  Turns out he simply strained his back.  I never really thought dogs got wimpy human stuff.  Rather, I assumed that this degree of canine misery could only result from some catastrophic process, and in fact I was already laying crepe with the kids while I worried that some tumor had just eroded into his spinal cord or something.  But no.  Apparently Walter had just overdone it a touch.  His delicate little body was simply pooped.  Fair dinkum.  Kathy started him on meds and he began a speedy recovery

• Back in business, we got everything loaded up, and we were finally out of the house by late afternoon.  Halfway to Annapolis,  Lynn pulled up next to me on the highway mouthing something while making wild and bizarre gesticulations.  I tried calling her but she wouldn't pick up.  At a stop she yelled, exacerbated:  "I forgot my cell phone back in Swarthmore."  Just another thing on the growing list of things that day

Silly and minor hurdles aside, we are getting very excited to leave soon!  My last shift is August 31, and then we'll be down at the boat packing and doing final preparation.  We plan to leave Annapolis sometime in late September.

So, we begin the next stage!  We have wonderfully generous friends letting us house-sit for them (thank you to the McCabe, Feinberg and Sananman/Le families!).  Though nomadic, we are still very grounded in our cherished community of solid friends and we will miss everyone!

Lynn, punchy from packing, finding a cache of her late grandmother's stylish if not undersized glasses.. 

Here Avery helps me clean and refurbish a small manual watermaker that will live in our ditch-bag.