April 19, 2010

I am feeling productive.  I think we are making progress as we prepare to transition from winter to summer. 

Winter took another shot at us with a record snowfall last week, but most of that has already melted.  We still have one more week of weekday skiing.  Then we will be left with weekends in May to finish the season.  We haven’t been too obsessive about the last days of skiing.  We only skied three days last week since Kris is still concerned about her back.  The conditions have been good.  We even skied another near powder run on North Face last week.  I think we are ready for real spring skiing conditions, light jackets and soft slushy snow.  We need a few nights above freezing before that will happen.

Daylight has been making its rapid transition.  It was still a little light out at 10:30 last night when we went to bed.  Soon darkness will disappear from our lives for a few months.  I will miss the endless daylight when we leave Alaska.  I will even miss the humor of the short days of December.  Well, I still found humor in it this winter.

Our productivity has been directed at getting ready.  We are getting ready to put our condo on the market.  We are getting ready for summer.  We are getting ready to live in a trailer.  These things have seemed overwhelming, but progress comes a little at a time and we have been reasonably motivated.

We tore through the bedroom and created a small pile of things to give away, a large bag of clothes to donate, and 14 bags of trash.  We are slowly branching out from there, sorting things into trash, giveaways, and keepers.  My confidence that the keepers are a manageable size is increasing, but until we start packing, I will still have some doubts.

We have also been dealing with some of the administrative issues of relocation.  We investigated phone and internet.  Our options in Alaska are limited.  It looks like our only reasonable choice for nationwide service is AT&T, but they seem to meet our requirements. 

Kris changed our auto insurance and set up banking with USAA.  The insurance cost difference was significant and we needed to find banking that would work better across the country.  We will miss our local bank as they have provided good customer service.  Now we can slowly transition our money to our new accounts.  The abrupt transition in moving from Ohio caused us problems that we don’t want to repeat.

We have done some other shopping.  We bought a TV for the trailer.  This was not a critical purchase.  We really were looking at phones and just walked through the TV section to see what was available.  We found an open item that was marked down 30%.  Since we didn’t think we would find a better deal, we bought it. 

Yesterday I bought some hiking boots.  I have never owned a pair of hiking boots that didn’t give me blisters so I hate buying them.  Unfortunately they only seem to last us a couple of years.  Kris and I have somehow managed to get on an alternating schedule so this year was my year.  I forgot that this weekend was the end of the 20% sale at REI.  I had meant to go on a weekday when it isn’t busy, but I figured I better take advantage of the sale.  I don’t have any great hope that these boots will be any better than any other boots I have ever owned, but it is a brand I have never owned so maybe there is some hope.

We also shopped for a cat carrier.  We have an old cat carrier that is normal sized.  Since our cat is not normal sized, we need to get a bigger one.  Since we may also need to use this carrier to ship her overseas, we want to be sure to get one that fits her comfortably.  We picked one out, but we did not buy it.  We are hoping for a sale in the next couple of weeks.

All this shopping seems wrong, but we will save money on the insurance.  We will transition from our current communications solutions to the new ones without an increase in cost.  I need boots and got them for a good price.  We need a cat carrier.  We don’t need a TV, but it will probably be good to have one once we get to the lower 48.  And somehow in the last three months the value of our short term assets has actually increased.

My sense of productivity has also been served by finishing scanning my photo collection.  I have since found quite a few more to scan, including some in photo albums, but I still look at that pile of pictures that I don’t have move and feel a sense of accomplishment.  And the pictures are much more useful in electronic form.

We also cleaned out the trailer.  We need to figure out how to live in it.  We pulled out all of the stuff the previous owner left and sorted through it.  There were some useful items.  Now we can start moving stuff in.  We are only a couple weeks away from our first trip in it.