Greetings from Sacramento

Our last few days in San Diego have passed and were quite eventful. On Oct 3rd, the shippers came over to our apartment to pack up and move all of the things that we are planning to take over to Japan with us. Also, I dropped off my pickup truck with the vehicle shipping company that is transporting it to my dad in Virginia. It was a long day. The movers arrived at about 9am and didn't leave until they were finished, at around 7pm. It seemed like they did a good job with the packing and moving, though, so Nicki and I were pretty comfortable with the job that they did. We left Josh with our neighbor, Robin, on the 3rd to let him have fun while we stayed with the movers. On the night of Oct 3rd, we checked into the Hyatt in Mission Beach for the first of three nights.

On Oct 4th, the second round of movers came over to pack our stuff that went into storage while we're in Japan. That day was a bit less stressful, because we only had a relatively small pile of things to store, but we were a bit more concerned because we are storing quite a few of the sentimental and valuable things, like old photos, our bikes, and my surfboards. Yes, I'm storing my surfboards even though I fully intend to go surfing in Japan. I just figured that I can rent one over there our maybe find a good deal on a used one if I plan to paddle out a lot. We got done with the second round of movers early in the afternoon and went back to the hotel to get some rest and unwind.

On Oct 5th, I had to report back for my final day of work in San Diego for the next few years. Around lunch time, my office threw an excellent going away party for Nicki, Josh, and me. Thanks again to Rick, Allison, Chuck P, Alan and whoever else helped make it all happen. The menu included shrimp kabobs and carne asada, along with side dishes and a cake for dessert. It was very cool of everyone to show up and as I mentioned in my farewell speech, I have had a wonderful time working with and getting to know everyone on the team there these past 5 years. I hope to work with them again when I get back from Japan.

After lunch, my boss mentioned that I had to go through the check-out process before the end of the day. But first, I took Nicki and Josh back to the hotel so he could get a nap. On the way, Nicki asked about the whereabouts of Josh's medical files and our CD/DVD storage folder. Neither of us had seen them for the past couple of days, so we decided to go into full search (and panic) mode to find those, especially since we had no luck finding them in the hotel or the car... but first I had to get back to work. I took my external hard drive to work with me, saved as many important files and emails as I could, then went downtown to our main office to start checking out. Turns out that it's a bigger deal than I anticipated, especially since my brain was still focused on Josh's missing medical info. What I thought would be a 15 minute check-out turned into an all-afternoon affair. In the meantime, I kept racking my brain about where we could have left Josh's medical records and the CDs/DVDs. After getting done at work, I stopped by our neighbor's apartment in hopes that we may have left it there while she was babysitting Josh, but she wasn't home so we were out of luck. On the way back to the hotel, it dawned on me to check with the front desk to see if someone had found the missing items and left them for lost-and-found. Turns out that they were there, but they were labeled as "children's books and wedding album", so I got a little bit of resistance from the front desk personnel. Fortunately, Josh's name was all over the medical binder, so I was able to identify that the stuff was ours pretty easily and the stuff was finally back in our possession, much to Nicki's and my relief. After that afternoon ordeal, we decided to treat ourselves to a nice dinner down in Seaport Village, where we ate and watched the sunset over the Pacific for our last time before the big trip.

On Oct 6th, we said goodbye to San Diego and started up to visit Nicki's family in Sacramento. The drive through Los Angeles was terrible... traffic backed up for hours, a screaming toddler in the backseat, and children's songs blasting from our radio to help calm Josh's nerves. But we finally made it through and got up to Sacramento by sunset.

Since then, we've been to a family wedding, driven a few hundred miles from West Sac to East Sac, through outskirts of town, etc. But we're having fun seeing all of the family and hope to enjoy the next few days before taking off for Japan. As I've mentioned before, we're flying out on the morning of the 16th, so today marks our one-week point before the trip.