For once I thought I would sleep like a baby in the plane. But I guess three weeks of moving and fixing the house was not enough. We still can’t believe we emptied the house. But we did it after three trips to the dump on Saturday, at least five trips to the Goodwill throughout the whole process, many more trips to get storage plastic boxes at Walmart, Costco, Target, or Home Depot, and the help of family and friends. The last few days were particularly grueling as we had to leave the house empty by Sunday afternoon. We were up at 5.30 or 6 am and wouldn’t go to bed until 11 or midnight. The whole day we were putting heavy boxes up in the attic and recently made loft in the garage, moving and tightly packing the furniture in the middle of the garage (amazing that everything fits), finishing projects around the house (painting, hot tub cleaning and rewiring, switching washers,…). Unfortunately some of the projects were not finished and Chris Miller will thankfully help us in that area. And we will have to hire someone for the cleaning.
We left the house empty, except for cleaning supplies, and 4 jumbo bags of trash we graciously left for Vern to take care of.
We gave everything to finish in time: sweat, a few pounds (Editor’s note from Luke, I didn’t lose any weight), and for me tears during and right after we were done, probably some neurons, and a chunk of skin. The last couple days I had a constant headache, and felt nauseous from all the stuff.
Saturday night we had the visit from a raccoon we named Buster. That afternoon we took everything out of the fridge into one of the jumbo black plastic bag. An old mustard jar broke inside , and it really stunk. But Buster apparently liked the pungent smell and was attracted. We were working in and out of the garage, and he he was among us, trying to tear that bag up. I would chase him away but he would come back right away. He was so cute though. Eventually, I couldn’t resist but to open the cat food box we were trashing.
No raccoons in Paris. Pigeons instead, less cute.
Anyway. At 4.30 pm Sunday we were off to Menlo Park to Steve and Si’s for a last friends gathering and a night of sleep before the plane. We barely realized what we had just done that we had to go.