Almost finished packing up our house!

Heather: We have a little more packing to do. We've been packing during the day and swimming in the pool at night almost every night. Tonight, after working all day we had dinner with friends and we all came back to the house and swam. It feels like we've been on vacation half of every day. We've eaten two watermelons, mostly poolside and we have one for tomorrow, a huge one that Jamie weighed on the bathroom scale. It is 35 lbs! Tomorrow, we are taking a break from packing. We've invited Rob, Courtney, Steve, Ashli, Ed and Ben for another pool party. We'll be making pina coladas, pasta salad and a roast from Jamie's dad. I'll be making the drinks the way I learned on Isla Holbox during the trip for Emilie's wedding - lots of pineapple and a sprinkle of cinnamon on top. Then Monday it will be back to the grindstone with only two packing days left!

Jamie types from this point forward..... We are tired as all hell, but it's like vacation tired, not stress tired, so we're having fun. We sleep till mid morning, eat breakfast and read the papers (Terrell gets the Macon Telegraph which is interesting....the Asian Massage Parlors have just been survived there annual raid and are back in business again...and the New York times, which is actually good...both are equally valuable for packing dishes), go back to our house and hang out with the cats (who are taking all this in stride) and move (dusty) stuff around, then it's dinner with friends and back to Terrell's for a nightcap and a swim. It's a pretty good deal.

We are enjoying our friends and our hometown (neither of us is from Macon, but it's really our hometown just the same), but we're excited about Ames. Living in a college town is gonna be fun, and living in a cold Midwestern place is gonna be an adventure. And it's a more German influenced culture (for anyone who's never been to north central Iowa, everybody talks like an extra from Fargo, or like Garrison Keillor...they're all absurdly polite, which is odd for someone whose spent time around some of the colorful people who live in Macon) so there will be lots of very very white people (pleasant but dull), but lots of really good beer (there are at least three microbreweries within a half our of our house). It seems like it'll be a cozy fun place to be once the snow shows up and makes it exciting. Also there will be beer.

Anyway, once we finish moving all our stuff around we'll be off. But first we gotta eat a pork roast and drink pina colodas tomorrow. Keep your hands to yourself.