Everything is just about complete and there is not much left to do. Honestly, we are starting to go a little stir crazy waiting for the move. At least tomorrow we have our real estate agent and good friend Rick coming over to say goodbye, run into Richmond to do some document signing with the real estate lawyer. Today, we have nothing and are going stir crazy.
Moving day is almost here. Only the essentials we need to survive over the next couple of days are already in boxes, we have donated most of the stuff we have wanted to donate and thrown away more stuff than I imagined we even had. It boggles my mind that we trucked all that junk around for, literally, decades. Well, it is gone now and we are grateful for that. Today is the day we clean out the garage refrigerator, give a few more things to the neighbors, and make what I am sure will not be the last trip to the dump. We plan to tear down the computers and set aside other important things we plan to take in the cars on Wednesday. The house will be loaded on Thursday morning. We have one day to clean up and pack the cars on Friday. Christian is scheduled to arrive at about noon on Saturday. We plan to pick him up at the airport and head straight to Trump Winery in the afternoon and then head up the road for a few more hours to find a place to spend the night. We are not sure when we will get to Texas, but we are going to take our time and enjoy the ride.
After 26 weeks and 6 days of healthy eating and weight lifting, I have hit my intermediate goal of under 199 lbs. for my weekly average weight, measured daily. That is an average of about 0.8 lbs. lost per week. I still have a good amount of hard belly fat and my girth is quite a bit more than what is considered healthy so I am pretty sure 170 lbs. will be my end goal.
We have most of everything packed and ready to load on the truck, the donation service will arrive to remove some big stuff we have decided to downsize, the final service call for the house sale is scheduled for later this morning, Lorena is taking the Acura down to get a checkup, oil change, and tire rotation to be ready for the trip, the services have all been scheduled for shutdown or transfer to the new owner, and the apartment and storage are all lined up in Texas. We have on more unscheduled event, signing documents for the house sale in front of a notary, and we think we will have complete other than that and a little bit of packing of stuff we need to use up until the moment we move. Now we are just in waiting mode.
This really has been the least painful move we have ever made. We both wish we would have downsized a bunch a few years earlier. Only God knows what He has planned, but this may be our last big move ever. We kind of hope so. We are in wait mode now. We have planned so much better than we have in the past that our hope is the actual move itself will be anticlimactic.
I started working in machine vision back in 1984 at a long defunct robot and machine vision company named Intelledex. With a brief hiatus to start a company with my father, I have been in it ever since. Intelledex was a great place to work with brilliant people and interesting products–many products today, especially in the area of machine vision were heavily influenced by work done at Intelledex. I still work with and stay in touch with people I met in my time at Intelledex. I have to admit, I never thought I would be able to repeat the joy I felt in my work and friendships during my time at Intelledex.
It is a huge surprise to me that I am finishing my career at a company for which I feel the same way I felt about Intelledex. Today is the eighth anniversary of my start date at Thrive Bioscience. I actually started working on Thrive products several months earlier as a contractor. God willing, I hope to finish my career at Thrive. I love the products and I love the people. Of course it is not perfect, but I am very grateful to be at a place where the people around me really try to do their part and are colegial in the very best sense.
I so this picture of the kids on social media this morning and it gave me great joy. They were inseparable as kids. I am not sure where this was, but fine dining with friends is definitely one of their things. We are glad Christian has tickets to fly to Virginia in a week or so to help us drive to Texas. We plan to stop at the Trump Winery and a few other places along our leisurely way.
Olecranon bursitis is often called “students elbow.” If anyone should get it, our son Christian is definitely a prime candidate because hard study at a desk or table is his livelihood. He had to go get that taken care of at the urgent care clinic yesterday. It reminded me I am going to have my own procedure or two coming up here in the next couple of months. Getting stuff dealt with in a timely fashion is something my mother, Sarah, instilled in us. With all the craziness in the establishment medical system around the world, it is harder to figure out how to do it judicially than when the world was ignorant of their machinations.
I have talked to two banks (the one that currently holds our mortgage and the one we hope will give us our next mortgage), four insurance companies, our builder, and sundry others. Lorena called the gas company, AAA, and a service to help haul of a bunch of “stuff” we do not want to take with us. Moving money around to make ends meet is always a challenge at times like this. I am more grateful than ever that Lorena can handle a lot of these kinds of things with me now. What a gift is a capable wife.
We are rapidly moving toward the end of our stay in Virginia. We have been finding housing, insurance, a house building loan, and all the other stuff we need at the Texas end of our move at the same time we are signing documents for the sale of the house. We the inspection and appraisal behind us, we think the only things we have left are the termite inspection and sewer pumping. The picture with this post shows the last box of documents we plan to sort through, after which there is mostly just big stuff like beds to deal with.
I have been working through weekends building AI models to find organoids in cell culture images to give myself a window of time to make the move from Virginia without being a bottleneck for the people at my work because something only I can do is impeding their progress. I made some huge breakthroughs this weekend and have to admit this work is very much like sports to me–very addictive. I have to watch myself so I do not go down some rabbit hole for days on end because I am so driven to finish that one last thing. That said, I think I am in pretty good shape now to make the move. We have a week and a half before I have to pack up the computer.
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