We may stay here until June of next year but since that’s not official yet, I am preparing to leave at our projected rotation date of January, 2009.  That means we my be packing up our stuff in about 10 months, so I’ve started going through our house and purging clothes, books, papers, etc.

I have come to love this part of moving - it is so freeing.  I get rid of so much stuff!  Ill-fitting or dated clothes, household items we don’t use, stacks of papers from the kids…so much stuff piles up and I know if we settled down somewhere, that stuff would get out of control.

I’ve gone through the kitchen cupboards and drawers and our closets and have gotten rid of several garbage bags that are divided between the garbage and the thrift store, and in about 6 more months (provided we don’t get extended), we will start getting ready for a big garage sale - we’ll be getting rid of our dining room set, our bedroom set, our entertainment center, clothes, dishes, Isak’s bed…all to make room for when we move.

When we got married, we bought a $200 hand-me-down sofa and a $150 assemble-it-yourself entertainment center.  Everything else was given to us, from the rickety metal shelf, the formica table and mismatched chairs to the patched-up-with-wood-looking-tape headboard that attached to our lumpy, saggy mattress to the Navy re-utilized furniture everywhere else.  We’re finally starting to accumulate our own nice - albeit tiny - house of furniture.

2 years down, 1 to go - and looking forward to it.   I think this will be a very good year.