Baseball and Soccer and Gymnastics, Oh My!

One thing I have learned about the Chula Vista Montoyas: they are BUSY! It seems like days have passed since their return on Friday night because we've done so much!! On Saturday both boys had games... we dropped Josh off at baseball and watched Matt's soccer game. Then we picked up Josh from baseball and took him to his soccer game... then we went home to change and get a quick bite to eat and took Josh to another baseball game... and after church on Sunday he had another soccer game as well! Both my aunt and uncle work, too... and Matt has all his own sports as well (he would have gone to gymnastics practice today but he's feeling sick). As if shuttling kids around to sporting events all day wasn't enough, Uncle Ben went to a concert and was on the worship team at church the next day (and led the Bible study for middle school).

Speaking of church, the Chula Vista Montoyas go to a downtown Presbyterian church that meets in a gorgeous building... my gosh I wish more churches made their buildings nice to look at (it's a sin to build ugly things). Jamie and I enjoyed the more liturgical style of the service and I had a great time hanging out with the youth group during second service. I met a girl who is obsessed with anime who also plays drums for the youth group worship, which is pretty bad ass. And so begins our church-tasting adventure. Jamie and I are in a lucky position to be able to "window shop" obligation-free, given our current nomadic state...

Yesterday Jamie and I made a big feast for Sunday dinner. =) It was so much fun cooking all day, and cooking for 6 people (I'm not a big fan of leftovers, which are inevitable when cooking for two). Jamie made a scrumptious Butternut Squash braid (a fall favorite), and I made roast chicken, mashed potatoes, grilled asparagus, and for dessert: grilled peaches with vanilla gelato and brown sugar and ginger snap crumbled over the top. Delicious! The Chula Vista Montoyas liked it a lot, too. =)

Tomorrow I'll post about today's trip to the San Diego Zoo with Matt & Josh!

Just What the Doctor Ordered...

We've been recovering slowly but steadily since we came down with this lovely cold/flu a week ago, so we decided to splurge a bit and spend the day in Disneyland. With Dayquil and Kleenex close at hand we made the trip to Anaheim and arrived at the Happiest Place on Earth around 11 a.m. yesterday... look at all the fun we had!

At the Matterhorn! First rollercoaster of the day.

It was Halloween at Disneyland, so Space Mountain got a theme other than "space" for the occasion. Space Mountain is my favorite.

Jamie LOVES the Fantasy Land rides...

Jamie's favorite, Splash Mountain. You can tell he's having a wonderful time. =P I can't get that boy to smile...

As you can see I still haven't gotten over my deep-rooted childhood traumas from this ride.

We enjoyed gumbo & ribs for dinner at the Blue Bayou! So yummy! This was my first time at the famed restaurant.

O the ambiance.

Blur = camera malfunction. Here is the Haunted Mansion made even more haunted for Halloween! They completely  changed the entire ride to a "Nightmare Before Christmas" theme... clever. Now they get to leave it up the rest of the year instead of just the Christmas season.

Halloween in Disneyland! It wasn't as elaborately decorated as I hoped, but there was this Halloween Tree. To be fair, the decorations that were there were elaborate, but it wasn't like Halloween had barfed everywhere, which is what I was expecting.

We have to give a shout out to the friends who have literally just handed us money for our trip; these fun little side-excursions wouldn't be possible without it! You guys are awesome!

Yay Disneyland! =)

Sick as Dogs in Chula Vista

After just under 12 hours of travel including stops, we dragged ourselves into Chula Vista on Sunday night with nasty colds. After properly greeting my aunt and cousins who were asleep upon our arrival, our first order of business was to get me to a clinic to see about my lungs. I have crappy lungs, so I try to jump on any hint of infection before it starts... So now I'm on steroids, antibiotics, and I have a nice bottle of robitussin with codeine to see me through the night. ;) Boy does that help!! I only woke up once last night!

Yesterday evening we saw my family off on their vacation up the coast and began our few days of R&R by watching Netflix ("Smoke Signals" I give two thumbs up! "Wilfred" I'm still deciding on... I heard there was a twist later in the show, and I am curious about that but not sure if I'm curious enough to put up with that disgusting dog). Even if all we get to do is recover from last week (packing like mad and Jamie being in a wedding on Saturday, which feels like days ago) by lounging around the house and hanging out with Sunny the black lab, that will be great.

My family will be back this weekend and we'll get to spend a few days together before Jamie and I head up to Sacramento. We are taking Josh and Matt to the San Diego Zoo on Monday! In the meantime, we're just laying around and trying to get better. =P I was looking forward to catching up on creative pursuits, but our current health status is getting in the way of that. Ah well. There's always something.

Humor

Between packing and cleaning I've been spending an awful lot of time on the internet... and I have some funny things to share.

New Phrase of the Year [It's gonna get popular, you'll see]

Basically the Story of My Life [I adore this webcomic... hit the "random" button and be entertained for hours]

You Shall be the Broship of the Ring [Hipster LOTR... biggest time waster ever]

Today we clean the whole apartment and [hopefully] tie up the rest of the loose ends... some items have still managed to escape being boxed up and carted off to the thrift store or my parent's basement. Hopefully all will be completed today except the removal of our bed and of course packing the car with the things we're bringing and getting out of Dodge!!

We have this mondo list of cleaning to do... but it shouldn't be too bad. I hope.

Wake Me When It's Over...

I wish I would remember to take "before" pictures. Our house was absolute complete chaos. I do have this picture that Jamie took of me. I was beginning to lose my mind and found a happy place with lots of blankets, pillows, and wine.

That was yesterday. Today our house became nothing but stacks of boxes as far as the eye could see. HOW in the WORLD did we accumulate so much STUFF I ask you. HOW?? It's mortifying.

But it is all much more manageable. We sold a few more things, removed a lot of furniture, and even got some of the boxes of stuff out of the house and into the car ready to drive over to the hospice thrift shop in the morning after a jog. We have most of the rest of the big furniture leaving tomorrow as well! All that's left to do is pack up the rest of the kitchen and my art/craft stuff. We do have a few more boxes of things we've decided to store after all (we kept another box of sentimental stuff --my wine gadgets and Bowie wall clock were saved!-- and some kitchen stuff). So I fail at being a minimalist/following specific commands given by God (what else is new...) but at least when we move we will only need one of those little Uhaul trailers and not a whole truck! So that's something.

Today I received a package from my pen-friend The Snail Mailer. She sent me an awesome journal (it's mail-themed, woo!) and some notecards! Which is good because I'm out of notecards. Also I didn't have a journal-journal yet. I have a sketchbook, a commonplace book (and one to replace my current one since I only have a few pages left), a prayer journal, a travel log, this blog thing, and now a diary! Oh, I also keep mini-journals for my Peace Corps friend, Cate. So much for packing light. Hey, it all fits in my one designated crate! So what if that crate weighs more than my suitcase? It still takes up less space! ;) I am a serious papyrophiliac (everything sounds better in latin). I gave away all of my craft stuff without blinking an eye but I couldn't bring myself to toss my paper scraps... I'm actually storing them... apparently no one appreciates a good paper scrap like I do!

Still to-do:

• Get rid of stuff
• Get prescription refilled (need more inhalers for asthma)
• Get Verizon plan switched (we will be sharing a cell phone)
• Finish painting promised canvasses for the bookkeeping office at my old job
• Finish storing stuff
• Make that coloring book page for my mom's classes (may or may not get around to this)
• Visit everyone we know like it's the last time we'll ever see them again
• Clean the whole apartment/turn in the keys
• Figure out how to eat with no appliances or kitchen stuff (our friends are taking good care of us so far)
• See if we can fit everything in the car or not
• Practice driving that stupid manual transmission vehicle we're taking
• Try not to freak out about every little thing

It's really not that bad. We have 2 working days left. Then on Friday Jamie gives a talk, we have a wedding rehearsal, then a wedding the next day, then we leave on Sunday. Holy crap this is happening waaaaay too fast. Maybe it IS that bad... Well, we shall see. If I have to pack those canvasses with me and mail the finished work to the bookkeepers so be it. I hate leaving things unfinished.

Super Mega Ultra Blowout Liquidation Sale!!

We have a lot of stuff. Like, a disturbing amount of stuff. One of our friends was like "Where the heck did you put all this?" and I honestly couldn't tell her. Here I was thinking I was a high and mighty anti-consumerist and then all of my junk comes crawling out of hiding to taunt me.

So, we decided to sell it all and donate the proceeds rather than keep it to move across the country in a year. We did keep a few "extra" things (our rule for "extra" is this: if we aren't going to use it during this year of {vaga}bonding, it goes), which are tucked away in my parent's basement, happily being borrowed by friends and family, or in boxes designated for re-gifting. Despite this, we still didn't manage to keep enough stuff to win the approval of either of our mothers.

After sorting out what we wanted to keep, we piled everything in the living room & around the house, set up a donation jar, and opened it up to our friends and family for a free-for-all. Take a gander at our garbage:

Today people kept asking if this was hard for us. Jamie seems unfazed by all of it. I, on the other hand, am much more sentimental, and yesterday was difficult for me. I actually came to tears more than once over some things; mostly gifts, knick-knacks, items with a history but no real practical purpose (some of the stuff I hang on to I don't even like that much). It was like an episode of hoarders, except that I don't have a big enough problem to make it on TV. Jamie kept telling me this was all my idea and then I would sob some more. But I got it out of my system, and I woke up this morning mentally and emotionally prepared to see 90% of my belongings march out the door. I have been vastly disappointed. We sold a lot of stuff, but there's still a lot of stuff left, and our sale is only open another hour (it's been slow... as evidenced by my having plenty of time to blog).


I must interject with this clip. I love this movie, mostly because it has David Bowie in it, but also because of scenes like this:

"I HAVE TO SAVE TOBY!!" Classic. For those of you sad people unfamiliar with the film, Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is on a mission to save her little brother from the Goblin King, Jareth (David Bowie). Jareth sets up traps along the way, and her comfortable little room in her home with all of her things is one of those traps to distract her from her goal to save Toby. Luckily she escapes this trap like all of the others and goes on to take over the Goblin City, meet the greatest challenge of all of turning down David Bowie (I mean, defeating Jareth), and have a happily ever after with her brother safely at home and all of her friends around her in a big muppet party. It's great.

I never want to have this many objects to worry about again in my life. I don't want to feel like I'm literally uprooting myself in order to relocate. I don't want to have to hem and haw about what is important enough to pack in a box, cart down the road or across the country, and unpack again. My roots should be based solely on the people around me, not because I don't want to have to pack up all my crap. And really it's not so much the inconvenience of moving that motivates me to remove all of this stuff from my life (although that is a strong factor), but the weight of it. Why do I feel a need to accumulate all of this stuff in the first place? All it does is keep me distracted and bogged down, like my computer when I was 10 and didn't know better, when I downloaded every little thing with hidden trojans and viruses entwining themselves in the poor machine's memory. I should mention that gifts are another animal entirely, and I need to continue to flesh out my thoughts on their place in all of this as well, but that is for another post.

This "Great Schlep" has been a long time coming. We still have enough stuff stored to fill Jamie's car three times over, but it's a start, and I intend to continue down this path if I can. I will save my rough history with minimalism for another post as well.

Anyway, even though we still have over half of our things to deal with (and I still don't feel that sense of freedom that those crazy minimalists are always talking about), we found homes for a lot of our things and our friends and family generously donated over $1200 for the homeless and poor in Paradise and Chico, and that is something. =)

My First 5K and the Great Schlep Part Deux!

So, I ran 3.1 miles last night without stopping to walk. WOO! And I did it in 36 minutes and 56 seconds. See? I'm number 18 out of 22... which means I wasn't last, which is another victory, haha. I'm done running 3.1 miles at a time... gonna stick to 2.5 then maybe move up again, because I thought I was going to die, and I was starting to think the race coordinators were playing a sick, sick joke when that damned finish line just would NOT show up on the horizon. Needless to say, I have some work to do. =P

In {Vaga}Bonding News, we have begun the serious work of schlepping our stuff. I spent the morning unpacking what we had stored in my parent's basement to make room for the stuff I actually want to keep (books mostly, some wedding stuff, and lots of letters & memorabilia from childhood and dating years), then Jamie & I spent a few hours gutting our bookshelves and some dark corners of the closet for things to stash away and things to sell off.

Here is what we're keeping (you can tell which ones I had qualms about keeping by the comments in parentheses):

• a suitcase each of clothing (we are packing shoes, coats and toiletries in a separate bag)
• DVDs, books, music (collector LPs, some CDs)
• my sewing machine
• my scrapbooking stuff (that stuff is expensive and I use it all the time, I'm not replacing it)
• our computers (because we need that much computing power to watch netflix and surf the web)
• some things from the wedding/memorabilia/scrapbooks/letters
• Christmas/holiday decorations (Those ornaments have a lot of meaning to me... yes, even the dinosaur ones we got on a whim two years ago)
• my rat cage (it's a beaut, and I want it full of fuzzy ratties again next year!!)
• a box of art stuff
• a bag of math stuff
• a laptop/drawing tablet
• an Asus tablet
• some camping stuff
• a car

Everything else must go!! It's a little nerve-wracking (I'm not looking forward to re-collecting my spices and wine gadgets) and sometimes like tearing off an enormous band-aid (no, not my David Bowie wall clock!! It is precious to me!) but I think it will be a relief once we have it all GONE.

I can't believe we will be outta here in like a week and a half! Not even! =D CRAZY! I'm super excited... also anxious that our pile of things to take care of is not ever going to get taken care of, but all we can do is try.

This weekend we are having a big sale to get rid of our extra stuff! We will be donating the proceeds. I'm also selling off a bunch of art, but we're keeping those proceeds. And we always accept donations in the form of gas cards, meals at restaurants, and other fun things that cost money. ;)