Home again, home again

Last night as we drove from our dinner in Arlington with friends down to our hotel near Dulles, I looked out at the monuments across the river and wondered if I was going to cry. I am ordinarily someone who cries very easily, so you would think that leaving the place I'd been for five years would be just the thing to set me off, but instead I'll be adding last night to the (short) list of times when I expected to cry but didn't.

It was a full week: a few "one last times", like a free concert at the Kennedy Center*, dinners at favorite places**, visiting with friends; a couple of sightseeing trips to the National Cryptologic Museum and Tidal Basin; and that crazy business of getting all of our stuff weeded through and packed and out of the house. It wore me out considerably, which is odd, considering that there were guys who came to pack up our stuff*** and put it on a truck, and my dad was in town to help with the baby while Brian and I got stuff done, so it wasn't as though I had to stay up until ridiculous hours to try to finish things after she was asleep.

Anyhow, we survived getting our stuff packed up and managed to make it through airport security and deal with a cross-country flight with both a baby and a cat. Now we're in California, and I am definitely not crying now. In fact, I'm smiling a lot.

*Erin Mckeown, who did a great show, and sang a lot of my favorite songs that I hadn't heard her do live before. I even have a picture of her and Adriana after the show, but it's on my cell phone and hell if I know how to get pics off of there.

**Brian really wanted to go to El Tamarindo. I told him that parking would suck on a Friday night, that the food and drinks there weren't as good as he remembered, and that he liked it so much because of fond memories of getting drunk with Becca there. But the food was actually quite good, as were the drinks, and we found parking almost immediately and only about a block away.

***One thing about the guys who handled our move on the Alexandria end: our stuff has to go into storage because our place isn't available until mid-July. For some reason, this means that the contents of our dressers had to be packed into boxes. When the packers left at the end of the day on Thursday we discovered that they'd packed up everything but my underwear drawer. I don't know what that's all about but it cracks me up.