Nicole Kidman is from Hawaii

An update is long over due.  I meant to write a week or so ago, but perhaps this is better, as this post will [hopefully] be considerably less whiny.

Currently, I think Ruthie and I are T-19 days until we leave the country.  I say "I think" only because I'm waiting for something else to go wrong.  Originally, we were supposed to be T-5 days until we left the country, but I had to ask for an extension.  I had to ask for an extension because [as I think I see it] the request for the piece of information that enabled the various powers that be to pay me while overseas sat on one person's desk for two and a half weeks.  That one line of accounting information filled one box on one piece of paper that held up my entire progress of moving forward.  That paper, my orders, was necessary to hire the movers, pick up our passports, inform Australia I'm preparing to bring a motorcycle into their country, inform Australia that I have the correct security clearances, and allow Ruthie to do various things she needed with her current job and apply for jobs down under [or so she tells me].  Suddenly we were two weeks away from July 9 and I requested my departure date be moved because none of those things had been done.  So I finally got my orders on 6/24 [and then had to get them redone on 6/27 because yet another piece of financial information was missing], and so then I was able to move forward. 

As it stands now, the contract has been put out on the streets to hire movers, so hopefully that will happen soon.  In the mean time, Ruthie found us a tenant: a freshly minted PhD from California who will be working at Edgewood.  All things look good with this tenant, including move-in time frame, so even if the movers don't pick up our stuff until the week after Ruthie and I leave, we won't have to pack everything up and move it all to my parents' just so we have to unpack it for the movers to repack [although that would be perfectly fitting the way things have been going so far]. 

In the mean time, the derby team threw us a good-bye pool party, which was awesome.  And while I thought Ruthie had successfully broken her party curse because there was no Stormageddon '11 when we had the friends and family good-bye party, MWR tried to screw us over by claiming a bunch of bent tent poles.  Without going through the entire story, the short of it is the guy who we dealt with is a total jerk, tears were involved, and Ruthie now has a new credit card, preventing him from charging an unknown amount to her card for alleged damages.  So, maybe she's not over her party-throwing curse just yet ... but closer?

In the vein of random things for preparation, Ruthie has continued to read various things on Australia, and we have watched "Crocodile Dundee 2", "Australia", and "Discovery Atlas: Australia Revealed".  "Crocodile Dundee" is next on the Netflix queue [no clue why Netflix sent them out of order].  We also got our fix for shootin' since there are no guns in Australia.  This weekend we fired quite a few rifles in the Maloney arsenal and who knows how many rounds [what better way to celebrate July 4th?].  Good times.

Happy Independence Day - we won't be here for the next one.

-EP