This last Tuesday, May 10th, was my final day living in Colorado.

Moving was quite the experience. After selling my apartment, the next step was having almost 70 boxes of different sizes and weights shipped, while dealing with different shippers due to one pulling some "bait and switch" move and wanting more for the quote. And then the selected one had difficulties getting a company in the US come and pick up the boxes. Then there was the process of giving away/donating/recycling/trashing my remaining possessions, which I will not go into details here, other than apologize to my beloved  Hamakei for it. :(

I handed the keys to the new owner of the apartment on Thursday (May 6th), after which Hamakei and I went on a short road trip to South Dakota and Wyoming to have Hamakei see Mount Rushmore, Reptile Gardens and Devil's Tower (I had not seen the last one in that list, either). Arriving back in Denver metro the following Sunday, the time came to sell my car. The current chip shortage meant used cars go for a higher resell value, so I got a fairly decent deal on a 6-year old car. However, it didn't make the process easier. By good luck, the buying company was able to pick it up Tuesday morning, before Hamakei and I were to head out to the airport. I didn't look back to see the representative drive away with it, as it painful to sell it -- of all my former belongings, I will miss my car the most. But shipping it to the UK would have meant several thousand dollars that I can ill afford. Not to mention driving an American SUV-type in the UK (that makes 30mpg at best) would have been prohibitively expensive (and I don't want to imagine maintenance costs).

We left for the airport late morning on Tuesday, which meant hauling quite a lot of luggage to the train station (again, my apologies to Hamakei for putting him through it). Three more phone calls to cancel some services and to contact my brother, and we boarded the flight to London. The movie options on United made the trip seem shorter and more bearable since I cannot sleep in planes.

Then there was the long line to go through border control at Heathrow, and a train ride and a car ride to where we are now, until we can settle on a permanent home later this year, hopefully. The boxes still need to make their way here, though -- I believe they are in New York waiting to be loaded onto a ship at the time of this writing. Once here they will be put in storage until the time arrives to get our home.

It will be a few days before I settle and feel comfortable enough to work on making new drawings again. I do have some doodles and sketches that I could use as a basis for making more color arts, and several others that could be finished.

Thanks for reading.