Sold! (well, almost. . . )

Our big news this week is that we have almost sold our house in NJ.

If all goes well, the buyers will have their mortgage soon and the house will join the list of "stuff" that we sold.  Cars, boats, and surfboards have already found new homes.  Now our home will be someone's new home, too.

Tom and I spent the weekend cleaning out the house.  It was pretty much four days of packing boxes followed by trips to storage, trips to goodwill, trips to the dump.  Deciding what we "needed" when we haven't really used it in a year and a half.  Most of the clothes that were left went to goodwill, some furniture we no longer wanted (remember the kid's dining table we bought at ikea when I moved to Philly to use as a coffee table, Mom?) to a neighbor, and the food to the first person who wanted it.  I left Tom to clean out the shed and the yard, and he will have to sleep on the floor until Friday.  It was a busy weekend but well worth the effort.

Selling the house gives us a degree of freedom that we haven't had since we moved here.  We still don't know where our next move will take us, or even when, but now we have the ability to actually make that decision, rather than going back to our house in NJ.

Don't get me wrong, if the deal falls through and we still have a house in NJ, I would be fine with moving back to it.  It would be easy in so many ways--with dozens of school districts, I could find work, we both have friends there, I would have the gym and Tom would have surfing again, and we know how to get to Target with our eyes closed.

The thing about selling the house is now, if we want to go back to NJ, we can make that a conscious decision.  And if we want to move somewhere, anywhere, else, we can make that decision too.  If we have a house in NJ, we simply wouldn't be able to afford to move somewhere else.  Without the house to tie us down, we really can make our next move when and where we are ready.

So we're hoping that the buyer gets a mortgage and we actually close the deal.  Ideally before we make too many more mortgage payments. . .

Chronicles. . .

This will be a bit rambly, but we have been busy lately and I want to share some of our adventures with some of you.  So feel free to skip around and read the parts that are interesting to you.  Here's hoping you find something. . .

Two weeks ago, Tom's sister, Maria, arrived to visit.  We went to Gorizia, a city on the border of Slovenia, the night she arrived for their international food festival.  Hoping to find some different types of food, we walked through blocks and blocks of food stands of Serbian food.  From what we could see through the (too many) drunk people waiting in lines and the smoke pouring from the boots, Serbian food is grilled meat on bread.  We kept walking.  Eventually we found the "Latin" food, which consisted of one booth of Spanish food (paella), one booth of Mexican food (tacos) and one booth of Brazilian food.  The main draw of the area seemed to be the Havana Club rum booth.  By then we were starving and cranky from being around so many people, so Tom and I picked the shortest line and had a delicious chicken sandwich from the Brazilian booth.

Maria had two friends from Colorado join her at our house and Tom played tour guide for part of the week.  In the seven days they were visiting, they went to Trieste, Padova (Padua), the Duino castle, Venice for two days, and Ljubljana, Slovenia.  They might have made it to Croatia but our car decided to break down in Ljubljana.

So, you may think, what does one do when you are in a foreign country and your car dies?  Your car, which is under warranty in Italy, but probably not in Slovenia, where you don't speak the language and don't know anyone.  After two long days, one rental car and one school van, an extra trip to Ljubljana, and countless push starts, we managed to get the car to the garage in Italy where it WAS under warranty.  There was a moment when I was ready to just leave it in Ljubljana and walk away, but now that a week has passed and the car is fixed, I'm glad we didn't do that.

A day after Tom's sister and her friends left, he left for NJ.  We have sold our house, and the closing is scheduled for later this month.  He is packing boxes and moving to a storage unit, and I'll fly back for a few days to help.

That's what we've been up to.  By the next time I check in, hopefully all the furniture will be out of the NJ house and my quick trip home to help with the packing will have been uneventful.  Fingers crossed.

Sardegna...under water

Coming soon...some pics from our summer trip to Sardegna!  

(This is just to wet your appetite)