This weekend

What a weekend this was! More than anything, it served as the transition from our normal lives to all-out preparations for our upcoming move.

Let's begin with Friday. It was my birthday, and what a mixed bag it was. I spent two hours at the Italian consulate with more paperwork in hand for my visa. I left the file successfully with the visa officer, but we'll see how it turns out. I'm supposed to contact them a week from today if I haven't heard from them. Needless to say, this was the worst two hours of that day by far. It was frustrating, anxiety-inducing, hot, and annoying. Listening to everyone's drama surrounding getting their visa just proved that my situation is totally normal. Almost nobody goes in there without encountering some problems. Yuck.

After that, I headed home to help finish getting the house ready for our party! Somehow, we managed to leave the camera sad and alone on the kitchen counter all night, and thus we have NO pictures from this fun time. We had so much food, drink, and fun. We had choir friends, Nick's volleyball friends, Nick's coworkers, my grad school friends, and various other friends that we've made along the way. The reported highlight of the night was when we gave away our door prizes. We put together goody bags of all sorts of things that we would either be donating or throwing out, hoping that our uncluttering would prove to be someone else's treasure. It was such a fun party and I hated the fact that it was the last time we'd be seeing most of those people for two years. I was asking my Philly besties if they wanted to move in for the next two weeks :)

Saturday meant cleaning up from the party and the commencement of our intense packing. We managed to get almost the entire finished part of our basement packed. This is where all of our movies, video games, and board games are located, as well as three bookshelves of books. I think we spent about 8 hours that day packing.

Sunday = more packing. As soon as we woke up, we got to work. I worked on wall hangings and glassware. Nick went through his clothes and closets upstairs. Now our living room is scattered with bubble wrap and boxes, both packed and empty. You can imagine the delight of our kitties:

We stopped after many, many hours so that we could go out for my birthday dinner! We managed to snag a $25 gift certificate to FARMiCiA for only $2. We were in love with their menu, which focuses on local and organic foods. It dazzled foodies like us.

Unfortunately, the food wasn't as good as it could have been. We weren't unhappy with it, but for those prices and descriptions, we expected something better.

We still had an excellent time, of course! Something about all of the progress we made over the weekend and being out of the house let us think about how exciting our upcoming move is. It is so incredibly stressful, preparing to move for two years, that it's been easy to forget just how amazing an opportunity this is. We only have about two more weeks of stress before we leave. Pretty unbelievable.

And now, a week of packing, seeing as many friends as we can, various projects around the house, and wrapping up all sorts of loose ends. It's hard to believe this is happening so soon.