¡Nos mudamos a España!


After we recovered from our 3-week vacation in New Zealand, we came back to the craziness of OMG WE'RE MOVING TO BARCELONA!!      

Yes, it's true. John officially retired from UT Austin on March 31 and already has a job contract from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. I applied for a job at BSC, but haven't interviewed yet. I'm not too worried.

There are SO many steps in this process. While our future employer helped with our visas (thank goodness), we had to go through every single piece of paper in our house and make sure anything identifiable gets shredded.

We're not moving back to the US anytime soon, so we're selling our house and almost everything in it. That required us to sort through absolutely everything, so that the Estate Sale people could come in and set up the sale (10-11) -- and they came in 2 weeks before the date, so we had to be out by Friday 4/25! Fortunately, the sale seems to have gone well, and most of the "big stuff" is gone. The rest can go to shelters, or Habitat for Humanity, or the dump.

To help with the processing, we got a storage space about a mile away, so anything we *do* want to ship to Spain (in some portion of a 20-ft container) can go to storage. That includes our bed and two large recliners, and a bunch of books, and our winter clothes and such. We're also leaving the fridge and washer/dryer to go with the house sale. Everything else, from the kitchen to the library to the garage to the closets, had to be reviewed and rated "ship/sell/toss". Fortunately, there were many things we could rule out, like appliances, because we'll have to get European ones anyway.

The Visa paperwork has now been shipped off to the Spanish consulate, so really now all we have to do is wait for them to do their thing. In the meantime, we're also looking for a place to live in Barcelona, and planning time to go to Dallas and DC to see our friends and family. We have purchased one-way plane tickets for June, and the house will go on the market next week!  Cross your fingers.

It's a big adventure, but we're up for it! Vamonos!

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