Happy Holidays!
Flying from Philly to Rhode Island for Christmas
Greetings from Newport, RI. We are having a wonderful but exhausting time running the loving gauntlet of my myriad relatives. You name it, I’ve got it - siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, step-siblings, half-siblings (who are not related to each other…), even ex-steps. What it all boils down to is this: lots of love and presents for Kai and Eidan. We’ve been here for 5 days so far, and we’ll spend the day tomorrow in Boston with even more relatives. Then we’re off to San Francisco, where we have a packed 48-hour schedule before we fly to Tokyo.
The two weeks leading up to our departure from Philly was a marathon. It turns out that preparing to leave the country for six months isn’t all that different from plain old moving, with the added complications of having to pack very judiciously, and dealing with bureaucratic overhead (for visas, international drivers’ licenses, etc). Maria and I kept a running to-do list, but every time we went to check something off, we ended up thinking of new things to add, so the list never seemed to get any shorter. To make the final week even more lively, we decided to sell our car. We were planning to get a new one when we returned from Japan, and we finally realized it made more sense to sell it before leaving than to let it sit and depreciate for six months in the driveway. We did the title transfer last Thursday night and left town on Friday.
I’ve set up a Skype account with a local Philly number (calling that number is a domestic US call, but I’ll receive it on my computer in Tokyo). Send me an email if you’d like the number or my Skype username (which you can use to call me from your own Skype account - no phone necessary!).
