11 May 1999
Derry NH USA

Well it is getting real close now.
Yes we are still in the good old U.S. of A.

We have an offer on the house and it looks as though the deal is going to go through. For those of you that have sold a home in the last ten years you know what a hassle it can be. the lawyers and the dreaded home inspection people can make life miserable and then for extra misery add in a banker / loan person. Well even though the house inspector made us feel like our house had a million things wrong with it in reality they were all minor and the deal now moves on to the bankers.

We are also in the process of selling our cars. This is a really weird feeling to be selling most everything you own. It is very liberating in some ways and very scary in other ways. The other strange thing we did even though I swore I would never do it again was to have a garage sale. The way it happened was like this: I called a junk guy who said for $50 bucks he would empty our house of the stuff we did not want. This sounded like a fair deal to me and I made an appointment for him to do his thing. I then got to looking at the stuff we were going to give him and realized there was a lot of good stuff there. So I talked to Sue and on Friday night we decided if anyone in our neighborhood was having a sale we would throw up a sign and have one too. Well lo and behold as we went out Friday night there was a sign saying someone was having a sale. So Saturday morning we were in the junk business.I felt like a cross between Fred Sanford and Monte Hall. It really was not to bad. We got rid of every last thing. Now you have to realize that my barging technique went like this. The guy says what do you want for it I say $10 he says $5 I say O.K. or he just frowns at my price and I tell him to take it for free. You can not imagine how happy people get when you give them some of your junk for free.Speaking of making people happy, our neighbors walked away very happy if not a little tipsy. We have gathered and acquired over 25 bottles of different kinds of hard liquor. Well we primarily drink beer and wine so we saw no reason to drag this over to Europe and pay an import tax. So when our neighbors stopped by we loaded up their car with all our liquor. They were very happy! Yes we are taking two years worth of my wine with us the rest is in the cellar at my parents house. Hope it is still there when we get back.

German lessons are going pretty good. We have a woman who is a native German speaker come over to the house three times a week. She is a really good teacher. Our German is still pretty non existent from a conversation standpoint but we are building a vocabulary and a good basis for putting it together.

Sue is having over her Garden club friends next week to give away all our house plants and probably dig up her whole herb garden is some garden club frenzy that will make soccer riots look tame.

The movers arrive tomorrow to give us an idea of what kind of space we will be allocated for our stuff. We have elected to move only 1700 pounds of stuff instead of moving all our furniture. Lucent will pay for a 40 foot container or they will give you money to buy furniture in Germany and move only 1700 pounds of your stuff.

Here is some interesting but strange stuff. Not only do you need to deal with different power output in Germany but the TV signal is also different. They use one system, the French another and us guys (Americans) another. So we need to buy a new TV. We also will not be able to play American videotapes because of the way their TVs receive power and signal. This moving stuff gets more exciting everyday .

We do plan to go to Indy and then a day or two after the race fly off to the Fatherland. Talk about multi cultural... from the speed fields of Mid America (and the worlds most spectacular sporting event) to the medieval town of Nuremberg. Ain't life grand! And remember you can't call them Indy cars if they do not race at Indy.