Sheep Guarding Llama

The Grices are exhausted today from all of the school stuff that they had going on yesterday so we are not going to really see them at all today.  That is actually good as there is just so much for us to do to be ready for this week.

Today was the big boxing and prep day for all of our travels.  Most everything that we have has gone into boxes and this afternoon Dominica and I went down and got our Public Storage account set up and got into our new storage unit.  Dominica had been convinced that we need a five by ten or larger.  I thought that she was crazy, as did the person at Public Storage who talked us down to a five by five which, as it turns out, is way bigger than we need too, but no one makes something smaller than a five by five!

This evening I took the Acadia out to a detailing place and had it cleaned up.  That took nearly an hour and I ended up getting a decent nap while I waited.  The detailing was not cheap but what an amazing job they did!  It really looked like a new car when I got it back.  I wish that we had done this long ago, it was totally worth it.  I will do this to other cars, if I ever own one again.  The Spark does not need it yet and we don’t plan on owning that past December anyway.  Figures that I would just be figuring this out now!

Last night I finally got Dominica to start watching M*A*S*H which she has not watched since she was way too little to understand it at all.  Even now when we started watching it she was surprised to learn that it was a movie about the Korean War, not Vietnam.  She had thought that it was Vietnam all of this time.  So we made it through tons of the show this weekend.  We had it all while she was doing packing.  I had watched all of this part of the show while I was in Texas before we had gone to Panama so it was all recent “reruns” to me.

This is our last free weekend, of any sort, in Texas until December. This is our window for all of the packing and all of the getting ready for travel because this coming week is SpiceWorld Austin and we will be pretty much tied up there for the entire week.  We are heading out there on Tuesday morning and will not be coming back to Houston until Saturday and then we leave for Granada, Nicaragua on Sunday.  What a crazy week!

Today was a mix of spending time with the Grice family as this is the only chance to really see them and getting things boxed because tomorrow we are getting a storage unit here in town and moving all of our stuff into that.  There is so much to do before we go to SpiceWorld.

We have been trying for months to figure out how Dominica is going to get to go to SpiceWorld or if she is just going to be staying here with the girls.  We have been searching and searching for someone to watch the girls for us while we are in Austin but we have had just zero luck finding anyone with the free time or schedule to be able to do it.  Bob found us one girl in Kansas City that was willing to do it but it was going to cost us thousands of dollars to orchestrate the whole thing which, even under the best conditions, just does not work and with the whole changing of job situations right now this would be the worst, rather than the best, time for that.

The current situation is that we are free this weekend and I have Monday and Tuesday completely off as a sort of mini-vacation.  So at least my schedule is free but there is just so much to do that it was pretty much necessary for them to be free anyway.

The kids did a lot of swimming together today at the Toccos’.  They will not be seeing each other again any amount for a few months.

This is the big day, my final day working for Change.  But that’s just a job.  In the bigger scope, this is my last day of doing normal work as most people see it.  I’m making a huge life change and we are not completely sure what that is even going to mean for us.  What all does this change, what is our day to day going to look like.  We have so much to figure out.  For the second time this year we are truly setting out on a new life adventure.

Work was pretty light, as it always is on a final day.  Because things moved so quickly we announced that I was leaving at the morning stand up meeting and it was news to a lot of people.  This all happened so quickly.

I had my exit interview and HR briefing around four and was all done by four thirty.  Done.  All over.  This is it.  No turning back now.

I told Dominica that we should take the kids to Rainforest Cafe in Galveston to celebrate.  She liked that idea and started getting them ready.

It ended up taking about two hours to get everyone ready and out the door.  So instead of being early for the dinner rush we were right in the middle of it.  Francesca decided to come along too and brought all of the kids, except for Garrett who was grounded and not allowed to come.  But Madeline and Emily both wanted to come along, apparently Rainforest Cafe is enough of a treat that it warranted the teenagers leaving the house.

Dinner was really nice, but took forever.  We probably arrived around seven and left after nine.  They were having a celebration of Brasil so I got the island special that they had with shrimp, scallops (that were truly spicy and delicious) and mango tilapia.

After dinner the whole family did the boat ride that they have there.  It is very similar to what they have in Disney World.  Really well done for a ride attached to a restaurant.  I was impressed.

It was nearly ten when we got back home and everyone is very tired.  We got the girls off to bed with their iPads.  Dominica and I went to bed pretty soon thereafter, long before eleven.  I have bad head cold that makes it hard to sleep and was so bad that I had several nose bleeds today, which is rare these days for me.  I probably haven’t had a single one in five years but had at least five of them today, one that must have lasted for twenty minutes in the middle of the afternoon.

Today was a bit of a momentous day.  Dominica and I have been trying to decide what we are going to do.  But today we decided for sure that we are going to go it without me having a normal job and I am going to focus on writing and we are going to continue our world travels as we have been doing.  We told Change this morning and started the process of figuring out the notice period and how that will work and I requested time off next week to make SpiceWorld easier to deal with.

We ended up managing to work out, due to my current project status, that I could wrap up with work tomorrow and get paid through Tuesday in lieu of notice and be all wrapped up by Wednesday, which is perfect.  So I will be free to work on things that we need to do next week on Monday and Tuesday and then can be out in Austin for SpiceWorld nice and early!  It is still going to be one hectic week.

We are quite excited.  Tomorrow I will be wrapping things up in the office and then we are all done.

We had lunch brought in from the Chinese place that the Toccos use.  General Tso’s shrimp and their amazing eggplant.

Last night I was up following the giant earthquake that happened in Chile, near Santiago.  It was the first earthquake of this magnitude in 450 years there, quite an event.  There were half a dozen earthquakes during the evening and a tsunami.  Nearly every location that our family is going to be living in for the foreseeable future was affected by the earthquake – either having quakes directly or in the path of the tsunami, even including Nicaragua.

I got my iPhone updated to iOS 9 this evening.

Dominica did a lot of packing tonight.  We are in full motion to be read for Nicaragua.

Tonight as we were going to bed we found out that AJ had broken down in Alabama, having “forgotten” to put oil in his car or to get oil changes.  The car ran out of oil and eventually gave up on him.  The engine seized and the car is totaled.  Now he is stranded in Alabama with everything that he owns in the car.

Wednesday of our big decision week.  We started the day feeling good but not having all of our ducks in a row yet we are still waiting.  We did very little today, we were home and I worked.  Dominica did a bit of packing, we need to be into a storage unit soon so trying to get that all ready.

By this evening we were pretty confident that we had our answer, but we are awaiting the confirmation in the morning that we have gotten everything figured out.  But, for all intents and purposes, we know tonight that I am going to be putting in my notice on Friday and will be done with my current job very soon.