moving tasks and moving memories

We met with the realtor today, a.k.a our friend She-Hulk. It’s very convenient to have a very good friend who’s also a very good realtor; not only can we trust her to do her best for us in sellin our house (of course, self-interest and professional ethics play into that as well) but she’s also got reliable contacts for everything house-related: carpet people and lansdcape people and appraiser people and decorating people to help stage the house for sale and so on. The only slight conflict is that, as a friend and even more as Rudder’s rowing partner, she doesn’t actually want us to move. She’s resigned to the inevitable, however.

Some people are coming in town to see my car tomorrow, so hopefully they’ll decide to buy it. They have to go get a loan first, though, so it won’t be immediate. They run a B&B in a town southeast of here and I was able to find its info online, so at least I think I can trust them to be reliable and easily findable.

Rudder has yeasterday, today and tomorrow off, so he’s busily clearing out the sheds, the garage, and some of the rooms we use least. Of course this means the rest of the house is a disaster as he makes his piles,  but those should be gone too soon. I shredded my old planners from my pre-PDA days this morning before and during our meeting (fortunately She-Hulk is tolerant of my multi-tasking) or rather shredded any potentially stealable info and recycled the rest. It was kind of interesting going through the times when we were planning our wedding and buying our first house, and then again planning our move here, but I ruthlessly ditched them anyway.

I was less ruthless last week, going through all the stuff in my old desk. I had every wedding card we’d gotten, plus every postcard and letter I’ve ever gotten since leaving college. I had forgotten how many letters I’d gotten in those days when very few people had email – one notable letter included the line: “The server where I’m a sysop, AOL, has just gone on the Internet so now I have an email address. It’s [xxxx]@aol.com.”  Also, some of my friends were in the Peace Corps or the military, or traveled abroad to study, so that also contributed to the letters. I threw out all the wedding cards that only had signatures, saving only a few with notes included – we do have a guestbook, anyway – but kept all the postcards and almost all the letters. I threw out just a handful of unhappy ones, deciding there was no point in saving sad memories that long ago. I also saved the box with mementoes from our wedding – a few flowers and place cards, that sort of thing.

 There are a couple of people from those old letters I haven’t seen or talked to in years – if they’re listed in our alumni directory, I may include them when I send out my general “Hello, we’re moving” email. I’m only waiting to do that until Rudder gets confirmation that we have the apartment he liked, so I can include a physical address. That will be a wide distribution: I plan to include everyone I can think of who I think will care that we’re leaving the country for a few years.