Month: June 2018

We leave in a few hours for a 24+ hour trek to California. So why am I only at day 10 instead of day 1 in my countdown? Because the new beginning starts when Josh ends this job and flies to the US on July 1st. That’s when we meet up, he “checks in” to his temporary unit at Camp Pendleton and then goes and takes care of all of his retirement paperwork, VA appointments and also getting everything processed for our return to the UAE. There’s a lot of paperwork in our future.

I was looking forward to next summer when we won’t have a big event to take care of — two summers ago we moved here, last summer we moved Calvin to California to start college, this summer we are retiring and moving, and next summer . . . we have to tackle our storage shipment. We have one year after retirement for the government to hold our household goods that have been in storage since 2010. I’m not even sure where to start with that mess of things. How much of it do we want (not much) and what do we do with what we want to keep? I joke that we should have the crates delivered to the parking lot behind Goodwill since that’s where most of it will end up. Anyway, that’s my big project for summer 2019, then 2020 is when Carter heads to college. Hmm, maybe there’s hope for Summer of 2021.

At least this summer half of my work is behind me and the other half lies ahead of me starting in mid August when I return to Abu Dhabi. Josh will have very little vacation this summer as all of the transition work is stuff that only he can do. I’m hoping he has enough time to recharge before starting his next job (in a little over a month!). Oh, and that is now confirmed since he got the revised offer with relocation and housing paid up front (so we can sign a lease), just as we were hoping for. He’s going to sign the contract and we will finally be official.

That’s all from Abu Dhabi. See you in California!

Josh got paid a few days ago and I turned it around and sent it all back out again. Airline tickets for our travel between Orange County and Santa Cruz, rental cars, and the fee to board the pets for the summer. The PCS (permanent change of station in military-speak) money drain has begun. Thankfully we have money set aside to cover all the extra expenses associated with this transition period, but I keep thinking of more things we will have to cover before we are settled (like the 5% fee to the realtor who will help us find a place to live — approximately $2500) and hope it all works out.

The pets went to the kennel today. Right now they are scheduled to stay through the end of August: 72 days. That is a long and expensive stay, but easier and cheaper than the alternative of exporting/importing. And less stressful than worrying about burdening someone else with caring for them.

Home sweet home for the next 72 days, cat!  He’ll be mad he can’t go outside, but at least he has a sunny window to lie in front of and plenty of perches. The dog is going to weight loss camp, hopefully. He has been on long term steroid treatment for a skin issue and has ballooned to 30 kg (I think he used to be 22). They are going to watch his food intake and see if they can slim him down a bit. Sorry dog, but it has to be done!

Not much else is happening here. A lot of World Cup soccer, Fortnight, and card games. We fly tomorrow night so all that’s left is finalizing what comes to CA and what stays here in the car, some last minute cleaning of the house, and the endless challenge of feeding hungry kids with no food in the house. I’m tired of eating. And having to go places to eat. And deciding what to eat.

But Josh found this fun place where they do 3D foam art on their drinks. 

It’s right by our house, but we hadn’t discovered it until now. A missed opportunity. We also finally found a Thai place with great Tom Yum soup — we could have been having it this entire time.

With 24 hours left it’s hard to imagine what coming back will be like because we’ve never gone back to a duty station before. We were in Quantico and Fort Sill twice, but those were both school related and for short periods of time. We’re leaving this life and starting a new one, but in the same city. Camille said, “I’m happy to move, but I’m also sad to move because I like my house and my friends here and it’s going to be different.” Yes it is, girlie. A new daily normal — we won’t see the same people at the grocery store or at Starbucks and will we still go to lunch at the same place on Friday or will we find somewhere new? Same, same, but different.

This move is almost behind us. I did everything I could do yesterday so today’s task is staying out of the way as they number and move boxes, while I try to figure out how to order Prozac for my dog from a Mexican pharmacy. No, I’m not kidding. Our very sweet and smart rescue dog has a tendency toward separation anxiety and adding 40mg of Prozac to his daily routine has helped a lot. However, in the UAE these drugs are difficult enough to get for a human and therefore impossible for a dog.

I was able to get them this past year from a US mail order pharmacy because I found a licensed American vet who said she would write the prescription if I had a way to get the medicine. Unfortunately she has left the practice and we are running out of dog meds, so I need to get some over the summer. Since I won’t have the dog with me I can’t get a prescription, so that leaves me with, “Hola, Mexican pharmacy! Necesito prozac mucho!”

I found myself deep in the underworld of Viagra and Cialis (is that really all people use these online pharmacies for?) and finally found what I needed: generic prozac for under $100 for a year’s supply. Olé! Except when I went to check out, the pharmacy only takes bitcoin as payment. Good grief. What sort of shady operation is this? Did I stumble into the DarkWeb somehow? Now I have to decide if I want to learn how to use bitcoin to buy my dog’s brain meds or if I’m going to learn to put up with a crazy dog instead.

I’m going to run into my own pharmaceutical problem shortly since to get any of the SSRIs here you need a prescription (of course), but the doctor will only write one for 30 days at a time so I would have to go back every month to get a refill. I can’t even. That many appointments is enough to create a crazy person, rather than solve my problem. I’ll get what I can while I’m home and hope to figure out a solution that won’t break me. I draw the line at the Mexican pharmacy though — I have enough trouble staying calm when they switch my generic pills to a different color. I’m not risking my sanity on “muy bien Zolofto.”

You know when I compared the move to childbirth? If this were one of my kids, we’d call today Carter. Tons of lead time, lots of waiting, and then, BAM! Doctors scrambling, nurses flying down the hall, and no one prepared for how fast everything is happening. That was my day. It’s the best kind of move (as long as the packers are doing a good job), but it’s a full day’s work keeping ahead of them.

They showed up 45 minutes early (yay) while I was at church and by the time I got home at 10am so Josh could head to second service, our downstairs was wall to wall cardboard and taped up boxes. I was just in time to keep them from packing the dishes that belong to the embassy that I had set aside, but hadn’t labeled yet.

From there the day was a blur. We went through the house and tagged everything that wasn’t supposed to be packed with neon tape, cleared out all the junk drawers, tossed odds and ends that had previously escaped my notice, and consolidated like items all afternoon (books with books, musical instruments together, all toys in Camille’s room, etc).

Oops, someone forgot to take their shoes off the shoe rack before the packers arrived and by the time we noticed, there were only taped up boxes in their place. She had a few worried tears until Daddy went on a recovery mission and found them for her.

Watching World Cup in the safe room with the pets.

They packed up the entire house today except for my bedroom. Everything. Including the dog food that I was going to feed Micah over the next 2 days. Oh well. He’s getting leftovers from the freezer and Josh and the boys grabbed a few cans of dog food to get him through until Monday.

Tonight after they left, we moved all of our suitcases and summer storage items (that we’ll keep in my car) into a different safe room and they will finish up tomorrow. The movers are scheduled through Sunday, but won’t need it unless it switches to a Calvin type of move and everything stops and stretches out over several days where we sit around waiting for something to happen without any food (love you, Calvin! #worthit).

I should know this by now: No matter how much of a head start I get, when it comes down to the night before the movers arrive, there are still a million things left to do. We could stay up all night and I would find more ways to prepare. Josh made us stop and go to bed, but I still need to pull things off the walls, move our luggage into the “safe room” (labeled with a DO NOT PACK sign), and catch the cat and put him in his crate in the safe room — ever since our very first PCS when the moving class instructors told us a horror story of a family’s cat getting taped up inside a box and shipped to Japan, that’s always on my Must Do list . . .

There are more things I could throw away, garden tools to corral, and did I pack the right clothes for 3-4 months? Did the dog’s medicine get set aside so we can deliver it to the kennel when we drop him off on Monday? Where are the passports and my car keys? There’s an endless list of things that I could do, but just like having a baby, it’s happening, whether I’m ready or not. At the end of the day it will all end up on the truck, for better or worse.

No matter how much I purge, I’m still going to end up on the other side with all these boxes thinking, “Why do I still have 2 strainers? And how do I have 46 pens that don’t write anymore? Who needs this many shoes?!” and “Why do I not own a single lamp? Time to go to IKEA.” And the work will continue, just as it did the 12 times before.

But for the first time, there’s no end of tour date posted in the future. I have no idea if we’re moving in for 1 year or 8. I guess we’ll see how the first year goes and figure it out from there.