Holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas

Thanksgiving came and went for us, obliterated by work. We did get a turkey and the fixin’s, but the turkey was still frozen on Thanksgiving so we ended up cooking our T-Day meal a full week later. Then of course Christmas slid right in on the heels of more work, work, work.

Chelsea and Alex’s dad Ralph came out this year, for the first time in many years, bringing along Oyunaa, his delightful wife of a just over a year (she’s Mongolian).

Since it had been forever that Ralph was here, he wanted to see as much as possible, and they managed a respectable itinerary over their ten days here.
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Birthdays

Though it’s going on six months ago I can’t fail to mention my birthday in early September. We started the day with a great bike ride and stopped by Old School on the way home. Check out “Green Flashes and more riding stories” to hear about our Old School adventure.

We spent the late morning swimming, then had dinner with Alex and Amanda at their new apartment. Alex, who’s an incredible cook, tried out a few new recipes; they were a total hit.

It was such fun to just sit and relax and have great conversation! What a difference from our regular days of work, work, work. We wandered out for frozen yogurt later in the evening, even having a chance to see Amanda’s dad’s new boat, before calling it a day.

A day later Amanda followed up on my birthday by sending a wonderful fruit arrangement, set up like a floral arrangement. I’d raved about the one she’d sent the year before, so I was thrilled to have it again. I was secretly hoping she really would send another one. The fruit didn’t last long with both of us devouring it. Thank you, Amanda!
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We’ve gotten so caught up in our downsizing projects that it’s been difficult to remember how far we’ve come, and we’ve been so busy for so long that it’s been easy to lose perspective.

Though it frequently seems as though our non-stop downsizing is sucking the life out of us (yes, it’s been brutal lately), we are always pleasantly surprised when we do take a break, look back over the months and realize we’ve actually done something other than pack, sort, write ads, and deal with Craigslist.

In the late fall we took up swimming again in our pool and loved it. We are so going to miss our pool. We’re already missing our hot tub now that the weather is cooler.

For entertainment we spend an evening or two a week looking through Hulu for our favorite shows – we rediscovered Remington Steele from the 1980s – and of course we have our Castle episodes to watch.
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Views offshore

After so many years of riding the coastline we’re pretty used to the great views, but that’s not to say we ever tire of them. The colors are always changing, the air is always different, and each day is a guessing game as to what we’ll see.

One early morning we saw a huge ship close to shore, headed north, breathtaking in its size and nearness to shore. The ocean was a striking sapphire blue while the pale blue sky was backlit by the pinks and golds of the approaching sunrise, turning the huge ship into a black silhouette against the sky.

Ranging from Gulfstream up to West Palm Beach, we’ve had a record number of dolphin sightings this year, from large pods of dolphins swimming and fishing close to shore, to small groups of three or four a bit farther out.

One incredible morning at Gulfstream we watched a small pod cavorting happily just offshore, showing off some spectacular twists and turns and leaps and jumps and double back-flips. We couldn’t bring ourselves to leave until they’d finally moved on up north.
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In the midst of the chaos and emotion of downsizing, our riding keeps us on an even keel, giving us time out of the house, providing beautiful sights and scenes, and imparting a wonderful sense of well-being from all the exercise.

For most of the year we’d been riding every other day, doing thirty-five miles, four days a week. In late August however, we decided to change up our system and increase to five days a week, in a row. We figured it would give us great practice for riding five days a week on the trip. To make up for getting up so early five days running, we shortened the length of each ride to twenty-five miles, allowing us time to get used to a new system.

We’ve also used the rides to do errands on route – bank deposits (our favorite errands), grocery shopping, trips to the post office, and everything else that needs doing.

The rides themselves are unfailingly gorgeous. We ride so often that we’ve seen many full moons come and go, and we’ve had mornings so dark, especially before the time change, that we’ve been star-gazing with our Google Sky app at six-thirty in the morning, overlooking the ocean in Manalapan.
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We’ve kept up steadily with finishing all our digitizing projects, and have been reluctantly sucked into a few technology update projects during the last few months as well.

Our massive photo-scanning project is finally finished with thousands of pictures now in digital format and carefully filed in directories. The only remaining desire we have is to persuade Chelsea’s dad to send the slides he’s got from the early 1980s so she can scan them and finally complete the family history in photos. That will be so satisfying!

Since the photos were so current in our minds, I decided to do a slideshow retrospective of Paul’s life, and since his birthday was in late August it was perfect timing. We didn’t have as many photos available as we did for Alex, but we co-opted Denise into the project, getting her to secretly email us photos from Paul’s recent ten years.

Having already done the process with Alex’s slideshow, we were much better prepared this time. Finding the songs for Paul was much easier, and we already knew how to put the system together. Chelsea was delighted though, as she got to learn the software to piece the songs together into one seamless song file. Naturally she did an awesome job.

Our lives have been so busy though, as has Paul’s life, that he still hasn’t seen the slideshow, nor does he even know we’ve done it. Since his birthday is now three months past, maybe a surprise Christmas present is better…
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If we thought making the decision to sell our Czech Republic furniture was emotional, it didn’t hold a candle to the grief in finding new homes for our beloved cats. We’ve loved those cats ever since we carefully and thoughtfully picked them from a litter of kittens at our neighbor’s house back in May 2002. That’s a long time. That’s well over nine years. Though I’ve had animals since I was a very young child, I’ve never had a pet this long.

Our options were severely limited in finding new homes for them. Alex’s girlfriend Amanda is very allergic to cats so they couldn’t take Cassie and Sasha. Paul’s family already has a dog and a cat. We talked to neighbors, but ours is a very cat-heavy neighborhood, and no one had room.

Shelters are full to capacity these days with all the animals being left behind from foreclosures. Most shelters never even returned my calls. So we got our information together, chose some wonderful photos of each cat, and posted on Craigslist, amidst dozens of other postings.

Amazingly enough we got a response on each cat the very next morning. We wrote back, got the information, and looked up the addresses on Google street view. We cried. We just couldn’t see our cats going to a physical situation like that, especially since they have such a perfect situation here.
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One thing we can say unequivocally, dismantling our lives has been a process, and not a quick and easy one. At the beginning, some things were painful to sell or give away, but we quickly realized the necessity or wisdom of doing it. Some things we just didn’t care so much about. Some things we loved but we realized they were commodities, and could be easily replaced.

As time goes by though, the decisions get tougher and tougher, and certainly more emotional. We’ve left all our favorite things to the last, so now each decision is more acute, and often more painful.

What about that favorite coffee table we brought back from the castle when we lived in the Czech Republic? It faithfully held our television and DVD player for years, and it’s connected to one of the most wonderful times in our lives.

What about some of our favorite lamps? What about those gorgeous Mountain Hard Wear sweaters? The antique nightstands from the castle? The expensive juicer that made such a difference in our health? The huge desk I’ve had for seven years, the one that’s so efficient and useful? The kitchen table that’s so low profile and easy to clean, with its cheery pine top?

The memories are wonderful.
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One of the most emotional decisions of our entire downsizing project has been putting our Czech Republic furniture up for sale. Back in 1998 we bought eight or nine very old pieces of furniture when we lived in our castle down near the Austrian border.

We’d gone from five years of living in eight-hundred-square-foot apartments to suddenly living in a three-thousand-square-foot section of a thousand-year-old castle. We had plenty of room to spare. We happily visited the Brno antique/vintage shops, and over a few visits, picked out some favorite pieces.

Each piece filled a special need, and each piece was much appreciated and much used in our daily lives, from the mirror stand in the bathroom that held our towels and spare toilet paper, the oversized wood hutch that held all our collections, the dressing table and nightstands in Chelsea’s room, the hutch in the living room that held our newly acquired collection of very old Bohemia crystal, the beautiful European oak writing table in my room, to the capacious sideboard in our kitchen that held all our dishes, silverware, glassware, and pots and pans.

We loved them so much that we made arrangements to bring them back to the US when we relocated to Florida. Exporting furniture was not allowed – the only reason we were able to bring them over here to the US was because we had lived in the Czech Republic so long that the pieces of furniture were considered household goods.
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Once we’ve successfully sold our items and done our little high-five-happy-dance, there’s still the shipping with our eBay and CrazyGuy postings. We have to find the right box and packing materials. It’s got to be sturdy, but it has to be as light and small as possible, so we spend a fair amount of time in our “packing room”, searching through boxes.

We’ve learned that Priority Mail is the best bet, so Chelsea bicycled up one day and brought a collection of boxes home, to save aggravation and time.

Once we’ve packed the box we need to weigh it, then go online to the post office website and estimate the postage. Normally we’ve done all this before we ever post the ad so we can tell the buyer right away what postage costs will be. When the buyer has paid we still have to print out a shipping label and get to the post office.
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