closet catharsis

there's been a growing mountain of stuff for Goodwill in my hall. for the past month, pretty much every time i get dressed or open a closet, something new gets tossed onto the pile. i just have too much...crap. my mother has offered to store some things, which makes sense for say, furniture, but really, do I need 15 winter coats? the answer is no. so with great difficulty, this packrat bagged everything up and drove it over to the Oakley drop-off center today. while i probably won't even know most of this stuff is gone, the seemingly endless pile of sorority t-shirts and bad gifts from Christmas past is is a little piece of my history that for some reason, I have carted from house to house to house. i guess it's just not a piece of history i particularly need to take overseas. :-)

down the rabbit hole

it's official! yippeeeee! God willing, six weeks from now i'll be an ex-pat tooling around London town trying to figure out stuff like how to weigh myself in stones. start date is 11/2. got a few things to do between now and then such as:

- get a visa (company will help with this).
- purge my closets of anything i haven't used in a year (hello, Goodwill!).
- attempt to sell some furniture.
- figure out where to store the rest of my furniture.
- pack up stuff i'm not taking, e.g. dishes, anything with a plug, etc. and bribe my parents to keep a few boxes for me.
- cram my clothes and perhaps a set of sheets into a very large suitcase and a backpack. if something doesn't fit in there, i don't need it.
- sell Scion (will be a sad day indeed).
- figure out how to back up the 15 gigs of music i've stupidly stored on my company laptop.
- think seriously about at least looking at a map of the Tube system.
- buy a raincoat.
- maybe get a bank account or something over there.

really not sure where i'm going to be living, nor can i figure that out from this side of the pond. my plan right now is to couch surf a few days with a pal who is going to work in London for two months. i'm hoping i can find something quickly once i arrive. it only took me a week to find an apartment here in Cincy (and i looked at about 15), although i knew the city and where i wanted to live. i'd love to live within walking distance of the office, provided that the neighborhood is cool and affordable. my worst fear was having to live underneath a train, but my friend Emily who lived there for three months said you just get used to the noise and anyway, the trains stop running around 11 pm. Grand. :-)

this might actually happen

i got the transfer offer today! needless to say, i had a hard time focusing this afternoon at work, given that my hands were shaking and i wanted to stand up on my desk and yell "i'm moving to london" alternating with "holy shit, holy shit, holy shit."

benjamin button

i found out today that i am going to have to have roommates in london. massive amounts of roommates. just 2-6, actually. i don't know how i feel about this BUT i do know that one of the things i liked about peru was having other people around. and i already know what it's like to live alone in a good-sized apartment in Midwest, US. and isn't the whole point of me moving to have a new experience?

either way, i've decided i'm benjamin button. i've gone from owning a house and having a husband to getting my first apartment on my own to getting an apartment with roommates. but then, doing everything ass backwards seems to be my MO... :-)