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.

Sorry I haven’t been writing much. Here’s a quick update on things:

1. We are having a major inspection at work next week. Everything in our offices will be scrutinized. This will be a lot of fun, considering the last 10 years of papers have not been shredded and no one knows what is going on in my office. I’ve been playing catch up since I got here. A week or two after the inspection, the deputy JAG from Washington, D.C. is going to be visiting our offices. And we have a trial coming up that is bringing additional stress to work. Once all that stuff is done, I’m sure things will slow down considerably and the stress level will go way down. But for now, that’s not the case.

2. We’re still getting our stuff settled in. We do not have a bookcase, but we have boxes and boxes and boxes of books - nowhere to put them. In our bedroom, we went from a walk in closet with tons of space to a very small closet. We don’t have anywhere to put our boxes and boxes and boxes of clothes. We no longer have a spare bedroom, so we have nowhere to put our boxes and boxes and boxes of craft and fishing and photography stuff. Well, we do have somewhere to put them (the shed), but we have nowhere to put them that is easily accessible and that we can work in.

3. B is taking a scuba diving class. It’s a very concentrated class, everything is done in one week and this weekend he’ll go scuba diving both days - one day in Tarifa, one day in Gibraltar. I’m green with envy. I’ll be going to the next class.

4. Our car is here and almost done being taken care of. You cannot believe how much is involved with getting a car here. Obviously, you have to ship it from the states and do all that associated paperwork, but once it gets here, you have to go to the security office, then to the gas station, then back to the security office, then off base to get the car, then back to the gas station, then back to security, then back to security a week later, then back to the gas station, then back to security. It’s quite ridiculous. We’re still not done, but we’re at the end of the process. We just need our license plates now.

On top of that is the everyday stuff like homework, grocery shopping, making dinner, and watching American Idol, so as you can imagine, life is pretty nuts right now. We haven’t gotten to do much sightseeing for the last couple of weeks, hopefully next weekend I’ll be able to go somewhere. Hopefully Sevilla.

After driving around in a piece of crap “mid sized” car the size of a child’s toy car for 2 months, all the while paying off our own car as well as insurance for our car that we’re not driving, our car finally arrived, 23 days late.  Of those 23 days, we can file a claim to be reimbursed for 7 of them.  Cause that makes sense. 

I cannot tell you how luxurious our cheap little Scion is in comparison to this Matiz.  And the Matiz is newer than our Scion! 

We went to return the rental car and get it off our hands, only to find out that it would be cheaper for us to keep the car for an extra week (if we turned it in yesterday it would’ve cost $540; if we turn it in next week it’ll be $485.)  So now we have two cars. 

If only we had a life and could get use out of having two cars.

As we’ve been unpacking, I’ve been excited to see a few things. Many things I could do without and didn’t miss (which makes me want to have a rummage sale), but there have been gems that we’ve found as we’ve unpacked:

My down blanket, of course!
My red shoes
Wine glasses (I love our wine glasses)
Crock pot!
Towels (we’ve had only 3 big towels for the last 3 months)
My red sheets for the bed…so soft and comfortable
The stereo - the iPod has saved us, but now I can take my iPod to work!
Kids’ scissors and glue
All my scrapbooking stuff
Pictures and paintings to hang on the walls
Our SWING! (we have an outdoor swing, one of those freestanding porch swings…I can’t wait to get it set up.)

Of course, there’s been a lot of stuff for the kids that I’m happy to have, like all of their toys and clothes and books and bikes, and we have all of our clothes again, but for the most part, we have just too much STUFF. I doubt we’ll have a rummage sale because we don’t have all that much big stuff, but I’ve heard they have a big rummage sale at the drive-in theater on base and it’d be great to be able to sell some stuff there.

I can’t wait to go home tonight and unpack some more!

The movers came yesterday at 8:00am and we went to sleep last night at 10:30 - the whole entire day was spent unpacking.  The kitchen is close to being done.  The living room is a disaster area.  Isak’s room is mostly done with the exception of going through his dresser for too-small clothes.  Anja’s room is mostly done, as well. 

Our bedroom is probably the worst room in the house.  We had a huge walk-in closet AND a bathroom in our old master bedroom.  Now we have one tiny bathroom (with no drawers! or cupboards!) and our master bedroom that doesn’t have a very large closet.  Our plan is to assemble a bunch of wire boxes and line the top and bottom of the closet and use it as additional drawer space. 

I was delighted when I saw them bring out our bed and mattresses.  I’ve missed them.  We’ve been sleeping on a very low mattress that wasn’t all that comfortable.  I’ve been looking forward to getting our mattresses.  Even more than our mattresses, I couldn’t wait to get our down blanket. 

We went through every box in the bedroom.  I was so excited when I got to the last box and felt it on the bottom!  Except, when I pulled it out, it turned out to be one of the kids’ downy baby blankets and two pillows.  No blanket.  Every box in the bedroom had been scoured, and when we couldn’t find it, B went out to the storage shed and looked through all the boxes in there even though we were pretty sure it wouldn’t be there.  And we were right.

While B was out in the shed, I’d made the bed.  Exhausted, I climbed onto the top and sprawled out.  But my blanket wasn’t there, and we finally gave up, convinced it’d been lost.  I was close to tears - over a damn down blanket! 

And then B asked if I’d looked in his father’s old sea chest.  Of course I hadn’t, because it’s rather small and our blanket is quite big and wouldn’t fit.  But he took all the stuff off the chest and opened it and rays of golden light poured out and the gods sang down upon us, and there was the blanket of all blankets, the love of my life, my down blanket.

And then I went to sleep.

We are having a hard time finding our down blanket - which was probably the one thing I missed more than anything else! I’m sure we’ll find it, but we’ve only got about 2 boxes left that haven’t at least been opened to check.

The kitchen boxes are all unpacked, as are the living room. Isak’s room is mostly done. The house looks like a tornado just ripped through it, but it’s been a delight to open boxes and find things.

In the last box we went through, we found the scale. I haven’t weighed myself since I started SBD and when I did, I weighed myself on a scale at the gym so I can’t really be sure of what my current weight is, BUT…when I stepped on the scale, it showed me 10 POUNDS lighter than where I was last week when I started! Let’s just hope the scale at the gym shows the same fantastic results!

I am so proud - one of our boxes today contained a box of chocolate Pocky sticks - one of my favorite favorite favorite treats that I discovered at a 7-11 in Hong Kong. A whole box. Just waiting to be eaten. And I did not eat even one, not even a crumb of one, only a long and indulgent sniff of the box.

Our stuff is here! Our stuff is here!! We were the first stop for the movers. B thinks someone read my blog and alerted the household goods office to send the nicest, friendliest movers to convince us they’re not all bad.

We got all our stuff in and we’re now starting to unpack, starting with the kitchen. It looks like a bomb landed right in the middle of it. I only took a picture of one counter since I didn’t have my wide-angle lense on:

Our dishes! Glasses! Up until now, all we had was four of our old Corelle ivy dishes that I do not like very much. We also had three bowls. And two teacups. And four forks, 2 knives, and 4 spoons. THAT WAS IT. We bought a set of glasses when we got here since our collection had dwindled down to 4 glasses from 3 different sets. NOW –

And possibly my most favoritest cupboard of all, the spices. We were dying. We had chili seasoning and caved and bought a little thing of garlic powder last week (even though we knew our stuff would be here soon…we NEEDED GARLIC!). We also had some cinnamon and vanilla that I bought here. And some sugar and flour that I bought while we were here. We have been pulling package after package of spices out and it’s like CHRISTMAS, only better cause we can EAT THEM.

As we’re unpacking, I am having a hard time figuring out how we fit everything in our old kitchen. For example, we had four drawers - utensils, cutlery, aluminum foil and the like, and plastic grocery bags for garbage. We now have 4 drawers for just our utensils! It’s so nice to have it all organized - a drawer for knives, a drawer for spoons and spatulas, a drawer for baking items , a drawer for seldom used utensils. It’s wonderful.

We have a ton of unpacking to do but it’s going to be great. Isak’s room is probably going to be the coolest room in the whole house. And the orange in the hallway? When I saw the paintings, I knew I picked the right color. Now we just have to figure out what to do with the red and white rug and the red chair, since nothing in our house is red anymore…