…the sun is shining and we are smiling, because we just put down a deposit for a lovely little apartment that we think is going to feel just like home. More on that whole house-search thing later. For now, we’re off to have our second-anniversary lunch at a yummy restaurant that is just around the corner from our new place.

Thanks, Estee! The ptb were right!

I am beginning to realize just how much I am out of practice with moving.

I am feeling like a nervous monkey about how strange everything is going to be, and how even the slightest frown on someone’s face will make me wonder if the whole city is going to be mean.

I am missing my home in Cambridge already, and imagining what that first night in our unfamiliar, dark, half-empty house is going to be like, when we don’t know where the best pizza place is to get dinner from and we keep bumping our shins when we get up to pee because nothing is in the right place.

I think about the hour and forty five minutes it took us to get from Hyde Park to the North side to see a play yesterday, and I make a mental list of epic tomes I am going to be able to get through on audiobook within months of our arrival.

I understand that loneliness is going to come back into my life after years of having been away.

I remember that when you move, you shed your history and become a new person, at least until you make one real friend who knows you for you who are. Who will they be, and who will I?

The last foto from her visit; I did not take enough!

We’re leaving tomorrow to go look for our new pad. We’ll be gone for four days. We’ve already packed most of our suitcase and printed out all of the maps and tickets and necessary informational materials we’re going to consult as we tool around an unfamiliar city and inspect potential apartments, and now we are preparing for the trip by doing laundry, eating cereal, and watching episodes of The Office. Life is pretty ok, I’d say.

P.S. Today was Ross’s last day of work!

We are making small, slow inroads into diminishing the mountains of possessions that have crept their way into our lives over the past nine years in this city and the last three years in this house, and I am making small, slow attempts to memorize pieces of this place that has become, if only temporarily and without pain, home.

We’re going to be doing an unusual amount of traveling this summer, so last night I decided to calculate how much it would cost to offset the extra carbon contribution from all of our upcoming trips using Native Energy. I input the following journeys:

Round trip flight from Boston to Chicago this weekend to look for apartments: 0.68 tons of CO2 from flying 1,699.44 miles
Round trip flight from Boston to San Jose to forage for baby iguana food: 1.917 tons of CO2 from flying 4,791.59 miles
Drive from Boston to Syracuse, NY, for Sean and Tracy’s wedding, in what will likely be a small SUV: 0.074 tons of CO2 from driving 302.58 miles
Round trip flight from Boston to Washington, D.C. for Rachel and Matt’s party: 0.316 tons of CO2 from flying 789.59 miles
Drive from Boston to Chica-go-go in a large MOVING truck!: 0.637 tons of CO2 from driving 977.18 miles
Round-trip flight from Chicago to Baltimore to attend Jordan and Autumn’s wedding: 0.485 tons of CO2 from flying 1,211.32 miles

Total: 4.231 tons of CO2 from 9,771.67 miles of travel.

It costs $60 to offset 5 tons of carbon (we chose to put our money into funding wind energy projects), so I doubled that (even though we’re sharing all the driving, so it doesn’t really count twice) and for a grand total of $120, we paid to offset the carbon output of our entire summer’s epic travels, and more. That’s really not very much. If it were to be converted into a CO2 tax, for instance, it would only cost each of us an average of $10 for each trip we made. I know I’d happily pay that much extra each time I traveled. Wouldn’t you?

Edited to add that actually, the calculations worked out just right for the two of us, I realized, because I didn’t put in round-trip numbers for the drives. Also to note that the reason we’re going to Syracuse in a large vehicle is that our travel partners will be my parents-and-grandma-in-law.