The Morning After, And After That

So what purpose does this blog serve now?

It may not be kept as a blow-by-blow account of things, but there is much preparation - and transformation, I think - left to be experienced. So I will keep it for myself, and for whatever other wise purposes there may be, and you can read it or not as you will...

Preparations to date: We have written our acceptance letters and will have them endorsed by our bishop today. This is not quite as straightforward as it might sound: first we have to have our records transferred to this ward, and then we can have our bishop endorse our letters.

Bishop B Anderson from Tucson had the foresight to list Anacortes as our home ward, so even though he did all the hard parts as we filled out the papers, and offered us great counsel and encouragement and used his time for interviews and so on, he is not the bishop of the so recently called missionaries. That is Bishop J Rutter of Anacortes, who met us last week.

So first we switch our membership, and then our bishop signs, and then we send the acceptance letters to church headquarters.

The next step of preparation that we have begun is to figure out about our stuff. We are limited in what we need to take with us, what we can take with us, and the rest has to be stored here.

That's because we are putting this house on the market this week. And unless it and another major property of ours sells, we won't have a house at all - just two storage units, one filled to the door with our belongings from Tucson, and the other awaiting our furnishings from here.

But what goes where? We now have three lists: Storage unit, Salt Lake, or Tucson.

We thought there might be things that should go back to Tucson, for someone's use there, and that can be accomplished when we trade cars with Katie and Tyler.

So that's the next item for planning: when to trade cars - we have the big one, and they have our beloved Prius, which now barely accommodates the 5 of them. So we need to switch, and with a distance of nearly2000 miles between us, doing that is not trivial.

We have also considered what to do if this house sells before we're ready to leave. We have some contingencies, but it all depends - primarily on when this house needs to be vacated. (The market in Anacortes is not nearly as bleak as the one in Tucson, and our house, a one-storey rambler, is of a popular type.)

So: membership, stuff, houses, and cars.

And just a side note: the general presidential election is held 3 days before we report. We've got to figure out how to vote in that also. Probably absentee from AZ, because we won't really be residents of WA at all by then...(and we have plenty of properties left in AZ to use for addresses!).

So these are the infinitely fascinating things we'll be talking about - these and I hope some elements of spiritual preparation. Stay tuned ... ????