Dial-up is a cruel trick for people who have been living with a wireless cable modem. One computer in my parents room was just not enough. There were fewer reasons to have my computer out if I could not use the internet. After I made the other post, I remembered that had written the following post at the airport and just never posted it. So here it is.
At the airport
Jason and I are sitting at the airport waiting for our flight. With all of the issues with security lately, we decided to arrive early—really early. By 10:00 AM we were sitting at the gate waiting for our noon flight. It is going to be a long day.
The past few days have been a whirlwind of activity. After a relaxing weekend of house tenting (which in retrospect may not have been the best scheduling plan) we launched into the final phase of packing. The POD arrived on Tuesday. Jason and Craig moved some of the larger and heavier items out of the house. Suddenly with a few couches in the container, it looked so small. There was a panicked call to PODS— could we get another container and how soon? The answer was not soon enough. We made a reservation for a second POD anyway hoping that we would not need it.
We woke up early Wednesday to drop my car off to the person who had agreed to buy it the previous day and drove back to the house in our rental car. We were now carless in San Diego. We were really leaving. The moving crew arrived and we went to the storage unit to pull everything out of there. The move out went quickly. When we returned to the house, the packing into the POD went less quickly. Jason, Jochen, and Shaun carefully packed the POD. Lisa and I repacked boxes, moved clothing, bedding, and other soft items from boxes to bags. The dishwasher and a few other items would be left behind for the new owner, given to neighbors, or donated to a local charitable organization. By the time the packing finished for the day, around 3:30, I knew that there were many items that I would not see again until we bought a new house and completely unpacked the POD. Later on Wednesday, I sent the first batch of boxes to Chris’s house. Surprisingly, there were only four, including two boxes of clothing, one for me and one for Jason, as we would be wanting them before March. We ended up spending the night at the Balboa Park Inn where we had spent our wedding night. Being so exhausted, I am certain that we would both have slept just fine on the floor, but there was still much work to be done the next day.
Thursday morning was spent packing every free inch of space in the POD. I would look in the POD, see what size and shape object would fit, and try to find something in the house that would fit. I did this for about four hours until there was absolutely no space left. Late in the afternoon I talked to the escrow officer who told me that the loan had closed and the deal was finished and a check would be wired to my account the following day. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The best looking deal is not closed until it is closed. We ended up with seven more boxes to be mailed which is not bad considering that we thought that we would need a second container. Unfortunately Jason had to work a full day, so it was after 10:00 PM by the time that we finally got out of the house. We dragged our filthy bodies over to Jochen’s house where we would spend our last few nights in San Diego.
Friday morning we sat around Jochen’s table and had breakfast. The past weeks had been busy with many meals with many friends, as had been the years in San Diego. Such relaxing interactions are the luxury of living some place. I am sure that there will be many wonderful meals when we return to visit, but they will be scheduled into an available block of time between other meetings and activities. The Sunday afternoon phone calls at any time of the year with the invitation to come over and bring something to throw on the grill (i.e., we do not feel like cooking but feel like being social) are going to be gone. There is much that I am looking forward to in Boston, but I will miss my friends. To all of you that have fed and housed and helped us so much in the past months, and especially the past two weeks, thank you. We hope that you find some of the “not worth moving” items that we have handed off to you to be useful.
Friday was errand day—banks, package shipping, picking up the wedding cake that we had forgotten in the freezer at the house and a box to ship it in from Sue (what do people who do not have friends in labs do for all of their unusual item needs?). The late afternoon was spent at Café Chloe, one of our favorite food places in San Diego. The wine list is amazing, and very little of it can be found for purchase anywhere. The food is always good and interesting. For once we decided to forgo the frites with three dipping sauces and opted for the corn chowder and the open faced sandwiches of steak and carmelized onions (Jason’s, of course) and the roasted butternut squash and fennel with boucherondin cheese. I could have wasted the rest of the day sipping the lemon-lavender mimosas, but there was a pizza party to attend a Geoff’s and a ride to go on in the morning. No one throws a pizza party like Geoff. He is the pizza machine. All of the other goodies that people bring provide an interesting supplement to the staple of the evening. Notables were David’s cookies and Chris and Beth’s smoked salmon. There were more good-byes and admonitions to all of the academics to establish collaborations with people in Boston so that we could see them more.
Saturday was the final San Diego bicycle ride which included a trip up Mt Soledad (all eating and no riding make Colleen a slow girl). The clouds were blowing in from the coast along the I-5 corridor below the summit of Mt. Soledad. Sue and I were wearing our matching EMF (Eat More Food) jerseys (another story for another time as this is already long winded enough). Sue commented that she was surprised that I wanted to ride that day, but that it was my chance to say good-bye to San Diego. The summit of Soledad was a good place to say that goodbye.
Sue and the rest of the crew headed north back home. I headed back down south to Jochen’s place. I noticed many of the beautiful and interesting houses in Pacific Beach, one of the older neighborhoods in the city. Being on a bicycle provides one with a much better view than a car. Somehow, there were more errands to run that afternoon. (It is unclear to me how there can be errands when one no longer owns a house or a car and nothing else is to be shipped, but there were errands nonetheless.) Saturday finished with yet more food. Jason had been given some gift certificates to a local seafood place as a going away gift. As it was more money than the two of us could eat through, so we invited Beth and Chris to join us. The food was surprisingly good for a chain seafood place, but the desserts left something to be desired, so we decided that we needed to hit Chloe one last time for the crème fraiche gelato and the amarone recioto. Jason had a 2003 Chateu Grand Piquey Sauternes that was out of this world. It was sweet, but not cloying—apples, pineapple, melon, all kinds of yummy. The waitress was nice enough to write down the name for us and bring out the bottle so we could see what it looks like, but said that she did not know any place that carried it. Most of their wines were from dealers that interacted mostly with restaurants, not retail. The wine did not go as well with the fig and rosemary tart, but the late harvest Grenache that I was drinking was lovely with it, although it paled in comparison to the amarone recioto that they had sold out of.
We finished off our San Diego eating at the Broken Yolk, an old breakfast place in PB that neither Jason nor I had ever been to. The waitress must have thought that we were a bit strange when we ordered. Jason got a side of avocado to go with his beef stroganoff omelet. I got tortillas and beans with my fruit plate. They are the foods that one will miss when one leaves.
Exhaustion, relief, and a feeling that the move is not really real yet are most of what I am feeling right now. I am looking forward to a few weeks of relaxation and few obligations before starting work. I am going to need it.
