Introduction/24 days and counting

We've started this blog to keep friends and family informed about our activities during our year in France. Book mark it and check in when you feel like it to see what's going on with us. Right now we're frantically getting ready to leave the U.S. We've booked our flight for Paris for Tuesday, April 18.

It's Saturday, March 25, and we just had our yard sale to get rid of things we don't want to take with us to France or put in storage. It was pretty successful; we made some money and shed a lot of stuff, some of it decades old.

It's now just shy of two weeks before we close on selling our house. Next week we fly to Ohio to help Madeline's mom, Marian, celebrate her 85th birthday. When we come back, we'll sell our car, have the movers take what's left of our stuff to storage, and move out of the house.

The to-do list (of things that have to be done before we leave) is still long, even though we've been running around like crazy. One thing we did this week was to set up our U.S. mailing address. This is a mailbox from which mail will be forwarded to us.

This address is primarily for bills and to maintain our U.S. residency for tax purposes. We'd prefer that friends and family contact us directly, so when we get a French mailing address, we'll post that on here. We'll also post our French phone number so you can reach us that way as well.

We now have an account on Skype, which allows us to make international phone calls over the internet at a very reasonable price. Once we're in France and we have internet service, we can call you on your phone for less than 3 cents a minute. If you happen to also be registered with Skype (which is free), then we can talk to you for free. We'll tell you more about this later on.