Progress on housing

Right now, I'm Cincinnati. I decided to stay the weekend because I have a little cold and the weather was terrible on Friday night. In the last few days, we got some updates on the housing front.

After emailing back and forth all week with the real estate agent, we finally negotiated a price that's within our budget. The owner even agreed to install a new oven! We are planning to start renting on April 1. All we have to do now is get the contract signed. Hmm, not sure how we're going to get that done... But at least we have an address and a target moving date.

The next step is to set up a meeting with the moving company. I just found out we have a provision to have some of our things air-freighted while the rest is shipped. Shipping takes about 3 weeks, so the air freight option will be nice for clothing and other essentials. I'm sure the moving will be a logistical nightmare. We have stuff to ship, stuff to air-freight, and stuff that gets stored. Right now, all the stuff is mixed up in the house. I'm thinking about using post-it notes to indicate what we are moving.

I'm still not sure how all the logistics are going to work out. We have so much to do: sell the cars, return the I-Pass units, cancel the health club, get the household packed and moved, etc, etc. And once we get there, we have to buy a bed, a washer and dryer, and a car. That's easy when you can do your research on-line. Unfortunately, the websites are all in Dutch. It's very slow going even with Babel Fish to help translate. The cars are all different models than what we have in the US, too. I'm afraid these things are going to be a bit more difficult in a new country.

As usual, I'm getting ahead of myself. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! Right now I'm getting indigestion looking at this elephant.