It's Friday, October 1, 2004 and this is being written on Lane's corporate laptop in a hotel suite on Douglas St. just off of Rosecrans Ave in El Segundo. Wednesday was our last night in the condo. We got *almost* everything out of the house yesterday, had the carpet cleaners in, checked in to this hotel, and went back this morning to clean up the remaining nits and dits. The new tenants are moving in right now.

This has been an exhausting process. It probably doesn't look like it from the outside, because things continue to go swimmingly, mostly due to Lynn's organization and perseverance. Lane's been trying to take it easy on his back while schlepping stuff, but with the help of the girls, he has survived without injury. It has been MUCH easier than it might have been, due to the willingness of one of our condo co-owners, Marilyn Drescher, to rent us one side of her double garage for our storage, thus saving us renting a truck and all the driving loading, unloading, etc. This probably reduced the effort by 5x or more.

Lynn is doing a two-day seminar tomorrow and Sunday. Lane and the girls will go sell our Nissan Quest minivan tomorrow to some used car dealer, and the Checker goes into storage Sunday evening. We'll take the hotel shuttle to LAX early Monday morning for a 10 am flight to Tampa.

Just a few pix to document the happenings:

(Above) Lynn packs up her cosmetic case while Tania (above right) peels stickum off the ceiling that had been used to paste pictures and other stuff there.

 
Meantime, Roxanne (above left) has fagged out completely in her nearly empty room. Next afternoon, Lynn's and Lane's bedroom is marked by little more than the carpet cleaner's swaths.

 
And where did everything go? Into half of a double garage, with room to spare. We've been living our lives since 1995 in anticipation of this moment, knowing that the time would come when we'd want to go sailing again and we'd have to schlepp and store all our stuff, so *not* having a lot of stuff would make it less daunting. We made beds that could be disassembled and collapsed. We bought furniture that could be either stacked (see above), disassembled, or discarded, and nothing that could not be carried by two adults in their 50's. Low-end Ikea figured prominently. And right now, we're glad we did it this way. It was daunting enough as it was.

Moving back in should be a cinch. We'll be glad then too.