Monthly Archives: August 2004

Tim has done some last minute work on the website check it out and let us know what you think.

We are leaving Madison tonight. We’ll drive down to Mequon, WI to stay with Tim’s mom tonight and tomorrow. Our flight leaves at a painfully early hour on Thursday morning. Flying from Milwaukee to Chicago to Miami and finally to Quito, we’ll get in to Quito pretty late Thursday night. The first night we are going to stay in a hotel and then Friday we’ll move in with our host family.

Tim and I are excited to finally be on our way. We’ve been planning for this year for so long it’s weird to think we’ll actually be on the plane in two days.

Tim and I will be living and working in Quito, Ecuador. I’ll be working at a larger school which specializes in English instruction. For those of you with some Spanish language the school homepage is Centro de Estudios para la Comunidad. Tim is working at more of a community center/MATC type school. His school is more affordable than mine, so no fancy webpage for them. We will both be working with a mix of ages from teenagers to professionals. Our living arrangements are with a host family in Quito. Our hosts are Victor and Mercedes, a retired couple in their mid-seventies. We’re told that Mercedes is a former soap opera star who cooks wonderful meals. At the very least, it doesn’t sound boring!

We’re starting to take care of all the last-minute preparations, it hasn’t really sunk in for me that we’re leaving in a week…

Today we completely moved out of the house. There’s something conclusive and nostalgic about empty buildings. You stand there in a room that just days ago held the familiarity of home, and you wait for the voice-over — the one that poetically concludes the years’ ups and downs. And you look around as your wife plays Chopin’s Nocturne in E Minor for the last time on the piano and you say, “goodbye, piano; goodbye, bedroom; goodbye, wall.” And then you realize you’re being ridiculous. Cuz you’ll be back in a year.

Eileen and I have been cleaning the house with some toxic sludge. It’s ridiculous. We wouldn’t be doing any of this if we were’nt moving out and renting to someone else. But that’s our dysfunction. We’re dirty people. Once things are clean, we like it, but for both of us the process of putting on rubber gloves, pulling shirt collars up over noses, squinting and turning slightly away as we spray on the Easy-Off or Lime-Away is thoroughly unpleasant. We’d much rather talk about what we need to do rather than do it. What’s up with that? Why do we so often get excited about planning what to do, but not so excited about doing it?
We move out in three days or so. We leave for Ecuador in three weeks or so. I’m pretty excited. Hope that’s not a bad sign.

hey lightweights. I’ve got only one more week with the computer to burn the dvds… so, if you want one and haven’t ordered it yet, let me know by wednesday, august 11th so I can burn one for you.