Nomads

Please let the long hiatus from this blog serve as a testimony to how crazy busy our lives have been since we left Saba! After living on Saba for 20 months with an average of 1 thing to accomplish per day, I had completely forgotten how long to-do lists can get. It would be impossible for me to write about everything that has happened in the last 3 months, but I will sum it up.

We intended to come home and live with my grandparents until the end of September while Lee studied for the USMLE Step One. After the test was taken, the plan was to move to Dayton, Ohio for Lee to begin his rotations at the beginning of October. Well that's not quite how it ended up going. Lee decided to take a 4 week review course in Illinois to prepare him for the test. So for the month of September, we lived 7 hours apart. While Lee was gone, I searched for housing in Dayton and planned a trip up to find a place to live. In the meantime, Lee got caught in a flash flood from the remnants of a hurricane and flooded his car. His dad had to drive him up a car and tow Lee's back. Fortunately it's fixed now.

Anyway, the last weekend in September we found a cute, old house to rent in a neighborhood we really like. We have friends in the neighborhood also, so we are excited about that! We planned to move our original move date back to the end of October because Lee wasn't going to start a rotation until November. Not so fast with the planning! We found out through a series of very confusing emails that the rotation in Ohio in November wasn't going to work out. Lee's only option to get a rotation in before the end of the year was to go to North Carolina to do a psychiatric rotation. We found this out 10 whole days before he had to leave!

We put ourselves into overdrive, packed everything up, and moved our stuff to Ohio a week earlier than we had planned. After the big move we drove back to Tennessee, and I moved back in with my grandparents while Lee went on to NC for 6 weeks. We are now starting week 5 of living 10 hours apart. So we've been home from Saba for about 12 weeks and Lee has been gone for 8 or 9. It's not how I pictured our lives going once we got back to the States but we're making it!

The single most difficult question to answer now is "What's your address?" People, you have no idea what you're asking! I mean, you're gonna have to be more specific. Do you want the address where I am living, where Lee is living, where our stuff is living, or the address where we get our mail? Perhaps even more of a headache was filling out the application to rent our house. After about 20 minutes of filling it out with my head in my hands, Lee finally asked me what in the world was taking me so long to fill out a simple form. Where do I begin? Current address? The upstairs of my grandparents' house. Current landlord? My grandparents. Current rent? Not only do I live for free, but my grandparents buy all my groceries, and, oh yeah, cook all my meals. Previous landlord? I can give that info but it does not fit into the street address, city, state, and zip blanks. Current employer? Medical student and stay at home supporter of medical student. Current salary? Uh, do student loans count? Previous employer? Again, I can provide that info but I'm not sure that knowing that I was an apprentice at a glass studio in the Caribbean where I made a whopping $6.00 an hour is helpful. So I filled out that application and sent it in with a several-paragraph-long explanation for our craziness. It must have been acceptable because we got the house!

I was slightly concerned about us being able to get all our stuff back under one roof because we had stuff in a storage unit, at both parents' houses, and at my grandparents'. When we moved to Saba, I made a rough list of what stuff was at which house. We got to Ohio and unpacked, and we seemed to have found everything except for the glass top to one of our end tables. No problem...I have a list! The List said that this piece of glass was either underneath my parent's bed or in the attic. Well it wasn't under the bed, so it had to be in the attic. Easy enough. Except that it wasn't. Twenty months earlier my very considerate Dad wrapped the glass in batting and put it where it would not be broken, knocked over, or disturbed in any way. He accomplished this with great success. The problem was that it took us weeks to find this super protective hideaway! I must point out though that the glass was in tip-top condition when we did find it!

And so we are nomadic people. We plan (with cautious optimism!) to both be living full-time together in our house in Ohio the first week of December. We will see what happens!