Shopping

So in preparation for moving to Europe one of our goals this year is to change the way we buy groceries. Both Sasha and I have spent time living in Paris and Europeans approach grocery shopping differently than Americans. Usually I'll go to Winco once every payday and stock up on all essentials and then go to Safeway or Raleys if I need anything in between. Winco tends to be cheaper but I often end up wasting food because I can't eat it in time. Europeans shop on a daily basis (or every few days) to get the freshest food available. Maybe it has to do with living in a flat that you don't have a lot of room to store food? Or not having a big enough freezer to have an entire pork loin cut into chops just waiting to be eaten? Regardless it seems a more efficient way to do things and it's my mission over the next few months to accomplish it. I say this after just spending $150 at Winco stocking up on meat and fruit and veggies. I'm not a food hoarder but I like to have options. But what sounds good for dinner while I'm making a grocery list or at the store isn't always what I want to cook or eat later in the week. I have, in the past, created a menu for the week. It helps to quantify what I need to buy and how much time I'll need to allot for cooking dinner. So that's an idea, reinstate that system. Then I would need to shop just once a week. I also need to work on my, and my family's, mental approach to food. We have to learn to eat what's in the fridge/pantry. That means that I need to be more creative with my meal ideas. I try to be, I have a million cookbooks, magazines and recipes I've printed offline (or off online? they both sound wrong) and I have grandiose ideas. But when Wednesday evening rolls around it's usually steak, chicken or the aforementioned pork chops. We eat a lot of meat. Always once a day and sometimes for every meal. Not that that's a bad thing. But I don't know how affordable meat will be in Prague so I'd like to decrease our culinary dependency on it. As of now our "vegetarian" meals all consist of some form of pasta, which is delicious but I'd like more of a variety. I also find myself wasting a lot of fruits and veggies that go bad before I can (want to) eat them. So maybe instead of buying 5 bananas at once I buy 2 and go back to the store every few days. Some things to work on...

Change

It's funny how everything can change in a week. Sasha was hired to teach French at Sparks High School. It's only a year contract but he's starting up their French program that has laid dormant for 7 years. It's going to be a lot of work, fairly monotonous since he only has first year students. But it puts our future in question. If they offer him a position for next year will he be able to say no? Will he feel obligated to give them two, three, four years? Will he even like full-time teaching and all the stress and responsibility it represents? But the biggest question of all is what will this mean for our future? As of now we're still on schedule to move to Prague in the fall of 2012. Who knows what this year will bring or if that will change. I think for all our sanity's we're going to assume and plan for moving next fall and then if it gets pushed back by a year or two at least we'll be prepared. I feel that the longer we stay here the less likely it is that we'll move. Dacian starts kindergarten next year and how hard will it be to uproot him from that? I know people move all the time but this is only the second time I've moved since I was an adult and the first time the kids will go through that. Dacian's very sensitive, I can see him having a problem adjusting. But let's not dwell on the negative. Next fall we'll be in Prague!

Hoarding

I have been watching a lot of hoarding shows lately. They've got me in the mood for declutterizing. I started watching them a few months ago because my mom was a hoarder. Well she would probably still be a hoarder but she's lost her mind and doesn't know anything anymore. She was diagnosed with a form of dementia about two years ago but we'd noticed a problem around our wedding in 2005. She started forgetting words, names for things. I thought it was cause she was getting older. She wasn't old, only 60, but you start forgetting things you know? She used to be able to describe the thing she had forgotten the word for but in 2008 she stopped being able to do even that. I stopped letting her watch my son by herself then. I asked her what she would do if Dacian started choking, she said "oh that's because he eats gluten". Yeah not good. She was forced into early retirement because her disease was affecting her work. In 2009 her drivers license was revoked. She couldn't read signs and would get confused driving someplace new. In 2010 her behavior had escalated to the level that I and my siblings didn't think she was safe living at home by herself. It was when we got a call from the Truckee police department that we knew it was emergent. My mother had tried to walk the ten miles into town to go to the grocery store. When she got tired of walking she hitchhiked. The young girl who gave mom a ride was so concerned that she called the police to do a welfare check on her. The officer found mom lugging grocery bags down Donner Pass Rd. That was one of the scariest calls in my life. We called a guardianship service in Reno and had them file for incompetency. It took a few months but mom was placed in a memory unit in July of 2010. Her mind's gone, she doesn't recognize us anymore, she doesn't speak much anymore. But she's determined to get back to her house. They have her medicated pretty heavily because she's an "exit seeker". My mothers house is the real reason I watch the hoarding shows. I helped my sister clean out decades of food, clothes, furniture and pictures. She had canned food that expired in 1985. She had her maternity clothes. She had every picture and craft project that all her kids had done. They say to keep tax records going back 7 years, she had hers since 1970. She had a mountain of yarn. Her garage was so packed with stuff you couldn't see the two cars that were in it.
Seeing this made me callous about my possessions. Why keep things just in case I could use them later? I'm not as decluttered as I'd like to be but watching the hoarding shows keeps me on my toes. I will not become my mother.

Division

I talked with my Dad about moving, what to do with all our stuff. He's been in our position, not exactly but close enough. He lives in Seattle and a few years ago he moved from a two bedroom house to a boat. That's right my Dad lives on a boat. It took awhile to sink in for me too. So he knows a bit about reducing possessions. He gave me a very good suggestion, divide all our possessions into three piles. One to sell, one to take with us and one to store for the time being. Some things are immediately placeable, some things will take some discussion. I'd like to keep our new dining table, we just bought it and it's super cool. We need to take the computer with us, obviously. I'd like to sell or pass on all the clothes and toys the kids have outgrown. The kitchen poses the biggest problem for me. I'd like to take many things with us: knives, pans,  utensils. It's silly to take the small appliances because Prague runs on different voltage and the outlets are different too. I don't know how much we can take with us. Will we just take what we can carry over? Or will we ship more stuff with a moving company. I think it all comes down to cost. It also depends on how long we'll be there. If we'll only be there a year there's no sense in bringing our life with us. If we'll be there longer, why not? So we've got some interesting decisions to make over the next six months. We've decided to sell things off a bit at a time. It hopefully will ease us into the lack of stuff shock rather than jumping in all at once.

Stuff

I have never before been so aware of all of my possessions. Thinking about how little we'll be able to bring makes me reconsider every object in my life. Even though the move is a year away my day is filled with deliberations. I don't know if we'll be able to afford to ship belongings there. I don't know if we even want to. We're looking at this move to shake up our lives, as a restart. So it doesn't make sense to drag along a bunch of furniture and toys. So that's an easy decision there. No furniture, few toys nothing big. Clothes will be pretty easy, this will be a good reason to give away all my accumulated crap that doesn't fit anymore. Shoes will be problematic though. I love shoes. Not all crazy like some people. I don't have hundreds of pairs but I like to have options. You don't always want to wear the same shoes, or even the same 5 pairs of shoes. But that will probably be my limit. Five pairs of shoes. I don't think there will be a call for flip flops but maybe a pair to wear around the flat. Definitely a pair of boots, a pair of running shoes, a pair of dressy heels, a pair of casual heels and a pair of flats. That's pretty boring maybe I can make room for more? I think my biggest problem will be my books. I have a lot of books. I love to read, more than that I love to read real books. And I have probably four or five series that I'll reread every other year. Then there are all the kids books we have. I have books from when I was a kid, ones I've bought for my kids, books in French, ones that I don't want to lose. I think I'll get a Kindle for my books. That frees up some space for extra kids books. Next genre to tackle would be movies and music. In preparation for the move to Europe in 2005 we got rid of all of our CD and DVD cases and put them all in binders. Since then we've continued this practice which really helps w/storage space. The music is technically electronically stored on our computer but a back up is always good. Maybe a back up hard drive? It seems silly to cart all those CDs halfway around the world when we won't use them. The only time I listen to an actual CD now is when I'm in my car. We won't have a car in Prague, ergo we don't need CDs. DVDs are a different story. Yes there are some that we could leave behind, but that will be the main source of English language entertainment so I don't want to limit myself to only bringing a few things. We're spoiled here by cable TV and free streaming on Netflix anytime we want. But on the other hand, we'll be in Europe with history and culture right outside the window. Will we need to be couch potatoes? Will we have a couch? These are the things I think about as I go through my day. Will I need this in Europe? Can I bring it? How will this work?

Speculation

How to expatriate to the Czech Republic. I typed that sentence into Google yesterday. I was looking for advice both technically and emotionally. Logistically how do you get a work visa, how do you find a job, how do you get a bank account? Emotionally how do you leave your home, what do you tell your children, how do you shed 11 years of accumulated stuff? I got a few international moving companies, a few expat resources, one on retiring to the CR but I didn't find what I was looking for the most. I want reassurance that this is a good idea, that uprooting my families life, just to pursue a youthful dream, won't be the biggest mistake we've ever made. My husband and I met in French class in high school. I was 17, he was a baby at 15. We've always wanted to live in Paris, you know if we won the lottery that we don't play. Living in Paris is a dream an ideal that may never happen. We married in 2005 and decided that Europe was the place for us. Sasha took a CELTA course in 2004 so he was going to teach English. We decided on Prague because at the time it was a "fringe" country, not yet part of the EU, so hopefully easier to get a job. My father-in-law also has business contacts in the CR so it's not an unfamiliar city to Sasha. He took a trip in April, before our wedding in June. He met with a few language schools and actually got a position! So we were set to move to Prague in August 2005. Then life intervened. Out of the blue Sasha got a call from Mark Kalin, the world famous magician. He was responding to a letter Sasha had sent several years before looking for a position with his magic show. In the interim they had scaled down the show and bought their own theater, but he'd kept Sasha's phone number. They sat down for a meeting that ended with Mark offering Sasha an unpaid internship learning light and sound for Magic Underground. There was already a light technician and a sound technician so now there were 3 big men crowded around a board really only big enough for one to operate. He learned lights, he learned sound and then one day he was running the whole board by himself. And then one day he was in the show, assisting. And then one day he had taken over for their lead assistant and was running the theater. And then one day the theater closed. In the meantime he had turned down the job offer in Prague, we had bought a house and had our son Dacian. So Sasha went back to school and got his teaching credential to teach French and Drama. We had our daughter Chiara. Now 6 years later we are underwater on our house and have two little kids. Why Prague? Why now? We've become stuck in a rut, not a bad one, not in a negative way. But it would be very easy to live in Reno for the rest of our lives. And that is not what we want. Dacian should start school next year so now's the time to go. I'm not saying that it's not going to be hard. I'm not saying we're going to be there forever. But this is an adventure, one we'll take as a family.