The Final Countdown

It's on, y'all. It's really, really on. Team Stevenson is truly moving to France. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around all of this.

We spent last weekend deep-cleaning our house and packing up two huge trunks of stuff to ship to France. This is, of course, to say nothing of the one suitcase and two carry-ons each that we have sort of packed, and which I have had to unpack (B had made me roll my underwear up and stuff it in my boots, but hello. I am not going commando for a week). Stuff has been organized into piles to go to storage and some stuff to go to my parents' house for safekeeping. Credit cards have been alerted to our travel plans and mail has been forwarded.

Side note: Moving abroad is not for the disorganized. B is an engineer and I have a fairly healthy level of OCD, so this has gone as smoothly as it could, but I could see this being an unmitigated disaster for anyone who is less than on top of things.

My last day of work was yesterday. I have been ready for a new challenge for a little while now, and moving to France is the perfect catalyst to put me back into a creative mindset. Whatever I do when I come back, I know for sure that I want to be in some kind of creative field, preferably freelance writing. Finance has been a fantastic learning experience, but it will never be my passion.

Still, it's a little bittersweet. After five and a half years somewhere, your coworkers start to feel like family (even when they annoy the crap out of you). When our investment guy, a burly man's man, gave me a huge hug goodbye, said he enjoyed working with me and told me to keep in touch...well, that got me. Plus, I'm going to miss the venison, beef and fish he has killed that he constantly brings to the office to share (I told him this, and he said that he wasn't too concerned about me not eating well in France. Touche).

So to celebrate happy endings and new beginnings, last night we had champagne. We also had a little something special: our "first anniversary cake." Our bakery, Bakery off Augusta, thinks that a frozen, year-old top layer of wedding cake is gross and wasteful (we agree). Instead, they give you a new, fresh top layer on your first anniversary. Just one problem with this: we're not going to be here on April 26th. So we called and got it early. This is kind of unorthodox, but when do B and I ever do anything in the normal, ordinary fashion, anyway? Never, that's when. So after a dinner of Mexican food with B's parents, who came to help us with stuff, we had wedding cake. Not bad at all.

On Friday, we'll head to my family's home in North Carolina for Easter, and then next Monday, they'll drop us off at Charlotte-Douglas for our flight to Paris. I cannot believe this is actually happening! Stay tuned...

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