A Thanksgiving Birthday

Last night was my early birthday dinner with my family.  My birthday isn't until next weekend, but I'll be gone from the desert at that time.  Since I will be missing Thanksgiving and Christmas this year in addition to my birthday, I requested that my birthday dinner be a holiday feast!  I love holiday food and always think it's a shame that it's all lumped up on one side of the year. I think we should have at least one holiday a month that necessitates a whole turkey.

We had turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, and Mom's famous pumpkin cheesecake (only she couldn't find pumpkin in September after visiting three separate stores, so it became sweet potato cheesecake, which was surprisingly completely awesome).

Sweet potato casserole, I will miss you

Can you make green bean casserole in Spain?

Jellied cranberry sauce with the can lines still in it - an ironic Thanksgiving classic at our house.  We always have the fancy kind of cranberries on standby, but everyone just eats this instead

The dog thinks it's HER birthday feast

Turning in the keys

Today is official move-out day!  From here we will spend a few days at my parents, a few days out east with family, and then - España one week from today!

All said and done,  we got our whole life down to three big suitcases, two small ones, and a few boxes.  That may sound like fun, but I assure you it was not. (Kidding. It doesn't even sound fun, does it?)

But - almost there!

Yard Sale

This weekend our friends Fred and Andrea were having a yard sale.  We had heaps of things intended for the donation pile, so the timing worked out perfectly for us to stop by for a few hours and try one last time to see if anyone else actually wanted to give us money for any of our stuff.

As always with yard sales, it somehow worked!

Favorite item that someone actually bought: A five-gallon bottle of Windex (thanks Costco) that was only about a quarter depleted after I've owned it for three years. (I hope for their sake that they have an entire house of glass.)

Favorite item that nobody bought:  Andrea's  yellow bowl that looked just like sunshine.  I loved it, and would have taken it home in a heartbeat if I had a functioning kitchen, apartment or pantry. Which I don't.

Best dressed:  Andrea, who wore her signature heels...at 7 in the morning...at a yard sale.  We've been friends for three years and I have never, ever, even once, seen her without heels.  She's classy, folks.

Best thing about yard sales: getting to eat an unhealthy breakfast as congratulations to yourself for waking up well before 7 on a Saturday.


Worst thing about yard sales: Mentally comparing how much you are selling your stuff for with how much you originally paid for it. Wondering how much money you have spent wasted in your life on material objects dumb crap that you didn't really need.

Oh, and I got to see this sky.




Also - this weekend a photograph of my trip to the Middle East was featured at the Matador Network, a website for travelers.  I'm still blushing a little bit.  Check it out.

Why Creativity is Like a Bowling Ball

Someone else asked me to write on their blog today!  Check out my guest post on creativity and inspiration at Inspired to Write.  It's called Why Creativity is Like a Bowling Ball and there are all sorts of state secrets in there, so shhh.

*picture taken on 7:30 a.m. on Saturday - proof that, very occasionally, there are worse things than waking up early on a weekend.

Packing removes all the personality from a space - or does it?

  

Before

Packing things in preparation for a long-term move is a strange thing. While theoretically I know that my car, my apartment, my desk at work are all identical twins of a thousand other copies, sentimentally they feel unique and MINE.

You know that old musing "If only these walls could talk..."?  I've been wondering lately what mine would say.  Even if the furniture was cleared out (it is) and the pictures and curtains unhung from the walls (they are), I wonder how much of a person's intangibles remain.

I'm not getting all new-agey on you here, it isn't that I think that something actually happens, but sometimes you walk into a house and you just know that the people there are unhappy or depressed or lonely or joyful or happy.

You just know it.

I think my apartment walls would say "Sarah you really need to work on your laundry skills, because we notice that you never seem to take that last load of laundry out of the washer and you are always having to re-run the cycle because it gets mildewy.  Seriously, all the time.  Set a text message reminder or something, okay?"

I think my car walls would say "Stop being a cheapskate and get me in a GARAGE, for heaven's sake. STAT!"

And my cube walls: "Let's drink coffee."

What would yours say?

After