Uhhh..how's this thing work again?

Oh, yeah, I have to log on and TYPE INTO IT.

So it's been a crazy few months around here. We're just over a week from having movers invade our house and pack all our stuff into small boxes, which will then be placed into bigger boxes, which will then be sent halfway around the world to our new home. As usual, the blog has been low on the priority list.

We decided early on we'd sell our house, but it's only been on the market about a month. As I spend more and more time keeping our house looking like a museum, I'm discovering that there's a good reason I've been a crappy housekeeper all these years -- being a good housekeeper really, really sucks ass. Instead of looking at the past few weeks of vacuum/sweep/mop/repeat as a curse, I'm thinking of it as training for Japan, where I'm expecting lack of space will require me to become a better housekeeper.

Despite this being our first overseas move, I have none of the usual worries and angst about the movers arriving. This is my fourth change-of-station (plus one cross-town move) in 9 years. Even though this one is overseas, the process has been similar enough to a move in the states that I haven't really been too stressed about it.

I did let myself get far too worried, for a while, about selling the house. We can afford to carry the mortgage on this house for a while, but doing so will put us in a bind financially. I really wanted a contract before we left, but in the past couple weeks I've realized, it just ain't gonna happen. So I've chilled about that -- with any luck, negotiating with buyers from 8000 miles away will make the whole process smoother.

Moving overseas does require a whole new level of organization. I'm going to write more about this process, but last weekend I identified six different "piles of stuff" in our house that are all headed different places: 1. Our usual household goods move; 2. Our non-temporary storage, provided by the Navy because we're going to a duty station off the beaten path; 3. Our "unaccompanied baggage"; a smaller shipment sent overseas faster, of just what we'll need to get by when we move into our new house; 4. The stuff we're carrying on the plane; 5. The stuff we're leaving at my parents' house; and 6. The crap we're pushing out of our lives, either throwing away or giving away.

Amazingly -- perhaps because the house is so clean these days -- this level of organization isn't stressing me out at all.

Theo is still amazing and surprising and a whole lot of fun. His preschool teacher told me just before Christmas that he'd overnight transformed from a baby to a 3-year-old; and it was definitely noticeable. Now he's talking, he has an AMAZING will of his own and he is driven to do anything and everything he can by himself. I have some record of the past few months via twitter and photographs, but not blogging the first part of this year will someday be a regret of mine, I'm sure.

Running has come along fairly well this spring, even though it's been pushed down the priority list. I felt like I'd hit a new level of my training a couple weeks ago when I ran a 21:55 5K race -- beating my old record by over 90 seconds -- but that was followed by some pain in my foot that put me off my running for a week and has made getting started back kinda rough.

So my goals for the near future with the blog are -- 1. Post daily, even if it's just something short that I would ordinarily tweet. Even if the posts suck, there's no other way to keep the momentum going for the days I actually have something to say. 2. Talk more about running and my training. I enjoy it, I enjoy talking about it -- not blogging about it more is probably part of the reason I'm not blogging.

I might fill in this post more later with more details -- oh, who am I kidding, that never happens....