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OMG! I didn’t mean to sell that! It happens. It happened to us today when we visited the just-posted estate-sale website of our stuff. It’s an exercise in folly. And fate. And, well, surrender.
Surrender
20 Wednesday Mar 2013
Posted in Travel
Venus and Mars
18 Monday Mar 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
With a sigh of relief, everything destined for our storage unit is now there – and there’s room left over. It’s kismet. However, two disparate storage strategies have emerged, vindicating the Venus-and-Mars interpretation of the gender binary.
The Half-Life of the Incipient Expat
17 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in Travel
We glance around to see what time it is, and the clocks are gone. We go out to sit on the balcony, and the chairs are gone. We look for clothes in the drawers, and the clothes are gone. We sit down to watch Jeopardy, and the television is Just. Not. There.
Like Living on Death Row
12 Tuesday Mar 2013
Posted in Travel
We’ve collected numerous bars of elegant soap over the years, all destined for future use. You know how it is: you spend a night in a chic hotel, you take home the soap. We’ve visited a few chic hotels in our days; we’ve snitched some pretty elegant soap.
Florencia the Frontier
08 Friday Mar 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
A red letter day! We put the first boxes in storage. This gave Tom a chance to rent his preferred method of transportation, a pickup truck. (Tom and truck pictured above.) It was a black Nissan Zipcar named Florencia the Frontier. (If you don’t have Zipcars in your ‘hood, it’s an hourly vehicle rental service with cars parked conveniently around the city, and they all have names that go with their species, such as Harry Hundai and Felicia Ford. It’s adorable.)
Box Town
05 Tuesday Mar 2013
“Shambles” is much too nice of a word to describe our apartment — or our lives, for that matter — as we remove our worldly goods from closets and shelves and box them up for sale and storage. In a two-minute video, Louise conducts a tour of our Portland apartment — or what’s left of it — 25 days before we begin the expat life.
Ten Thousand Days of Rain
27 Wednesday Feb 2013
Posted in Sentiments, Travel
“Won’t you get tired of good weather all the time?” That was my friend Doyle, an Oregon native like me – and like me, a man of webbed feet and hooded raincoats.
The Around-the-World Fund
22 Friday Feb 2013
Every evening Louise puts her loose change in the bank pictured above, a gift from her son Ted when they were going through a “Pinky and the Brain” phase in 1993. Along with my loose change (I use a classy a wicker basket), we had amassed what we called the “Round the World Fund.” Today, 36 days from departure and after a combined ten years of collecting pocket change, it was time to cash in. We anticipated thousands. What a great way to hit the road!
So Much Stuff; So Few Boxes
18 Monday Feb 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
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At last I have something in common with the great novelist Ann Beattie: an insatiable need for free boxes. She too is moving, and writes in the February 17th New York Times: “Boxes are much on the itinerant person’s mind. I brood about lost boxes, boxes I received via UPS — those Zappos boots! — that I stupidly took to the recycling center.”
Our Day Jobs
14 Thursday Feb 2013
Posted in Sidebar
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Louise and I do have day jobs. She’s a writer and I’m a publisher, and today — as if we have nothing else to do a month before we depart — we published our first collaborative book.
The Expat Almanac 