A hiatus for the Odyssey

August 5, 2015

 This is our final post on the Odyssey blog. We had planned to continue it with our move to Mexico but since that isn’t going to happen for at least a year it is time to close.

 We are pretty settled into the condo. See photos in our previous post. We still visit our storage unit as we discover we don’t have some items we need here. We have grown weary of the unit frankly. But we have made great progress in separating things to be stored into a smaller unit and things to sell at the yard sale. We now plan on having the sale at a friend’s house ion the 23^rd of August, a few days after Ron returns from VA. He will leave Sunday and spend 10 days helping Rachel and Mark pack for their big move to Wyoming where Mark has accepted a full time position in the music department of the community college where he will develop the strings department. We are so happy for them. I feel badly that Ron has to pack more boxes after what he has gone through here.

What doesn’t sell at the garage sale will go to Goodwill. It will feel good to have that behind us and to get the remaining items into a smaller unit. Ron plans to have help moving into the smaller unit the week after the  yard sale.

I continue to progress in my healing from the two surgeries. I have been released by the gyn doc and don’t need to go back until my annual checkup in April. I see my eye surgeon on Tuesday next week. I am still in stage four in the recovery process and am hoping I will be in stage five by next week. This will allow me to bend and to drive. I am most eager to be able to bend. House cleaning and cooking require lots of bending. Without Ron around it would be good to be able to function on my own.

Our condo looks great and has many of our travel mementos around which makes both of us feel at home. We have just started to take time to explore the neighborhood. Today we discovered a non profit three blocks away with a fitness center and lots of classes/programs geared for all ages. Today we will walk up the street to see about becoming members. I will be awhile before I can exercise but both of us are eager to find a place with exercise equipment that we can walk to easily in the winter so we can be consistent with our exercise. I am selling my exercise bike and weight bench at the yard sale.

August 17, 2015

 Time flies. Ron gets home Wednesday from VA. I am so ready to have him back. We have never been separated for more than two weeks in almost 30 years of marriage. That only happened once many years ago when he attended  leadership training in CO.

While he has been gone I managed to do most of the pricing on the items for the garage sale. I visited the storage unit daily for about four days and the only things left for Ron are technical equipment and computers.

I had a visitor from LA one night, a former exchange students from Germany who lived with us the year the Berlin Wall came down 25 years ago. He is now a father of three and happily married in LA. He was here on business overnight. It was great to have a good long visit with Tom.

Mark spent last night with me. He wrapped up his gig with the Britt Music Festival in Jacksonville and flew out at 0 stupid 30 this morning. He and Ron will have one day of overlap to finish up the packing.

My doc appointment went well. I am now allowed to bend, no longer have to wear the ugly eye cage that made me feel like a Cyclops instead of a sexy pirate (ha) and I am allowed to sleep on my left side. All good things. I still cannot lift more than five pounds. I will not be driving from probably two months. I am thankful that Portland has such good public transportation. I tried out the neighborhood laundry mat and it pales in comparison to the Spin Laundry and Lounge. So I most probably will use Spin, using a taxi to get there, while Ron is in Costa Rica from Sept 17-Oct 7. I think I have mentioned that we were invited to return to Costa Rica and staff the airbnb where we stayed in April. We thought it would be fun and a way to see more of Costa Rica. That was in April and this is now so I asked my doc if I could go for two weeks when Ron was there. His response was ‘That is a really bad idea’. End of conversation.

Our odyssey has ended, not as planned but we all know that life is what happens while making other plans. We are grateful for the months of travel and adventures we had and we look forward to our next adventure. I cannot travel for the next year so we anticipate moving to Mexico in mid to late 2016 if all goes well.