Bitter Sweet

This is our last full week here in the Bay Area. As we are slowly and surely cleaning up our house, finishing up our jobs, saying goodbye to friends and coworkers and removing our names from so many mailing lists, days go by with a bitter sweet taste to them. We are VERY excited to go but these final days here as we close this chapter of our lives, are much work!

Today, Monday, it will be my last day at the office. I will be there for a couple hours and then head to do some errands as I am preparing for a volunteer event on Tuesday. 

Tuesday, this will be my last day with so many of the wonderful EVs I have worked on the past four years. Wednesday, will be my final day of work and we will be moving boxes from an storage place to a new office (like I do not have enough boxes with stuff to deal with!), after that we will have lunch and say goodbye to coworkers. Then in the evening, we need to finish packing our boxes. Most of them are finish and sealed but we have few that need stuff we use everyday, like kitchen stuff. Cooking will be fun without all the utensils. Thursday, we will take our 27 boxes of stuff to the airport and send them ahead of us. Hope everything goes very smoothly. Friday, house clean and yard clean up and any other errands left. Saturday, party at our house! Many friends will be coming to wish us farewell (far and well?). Sunday, give away few pieces of furniture and last goodwill trips. Monday and Tuesday rest and last minute things.

Hope to keep it together...

Packing

First we though we will take with us only our suitcases. Since we each could check two 50 lb bags and a carry on, we though that should be enough. As time went by and as we discovered that we could send boxes by plane on reasonably price, we have been packing and packing! Now we have 25 boxes of all sizes. Well, it makes sense to take what we have instead of buying everything new in Ecuador. Also, since they want Ecuadorian immigrants to come back they have pretty nice benefits for us now. For example, I won't pay taxes on the stuff we bring as long as they are household items. I like this.

But still we need to do some paperwork before we ship the boxes. We need a detail list of what the boxes contain, then this list needs to be notarized and then it needs to be signed at the ecuadorian consulate in SFO. We are working on that these days - among other things...

Some of the boxes