I am sitting in my office right now. The northern light from my big window is lovely and serene. There are no books on the shelves in here anymore. There are no pictures of the children around. Almost everything has been taken down from the corkboard so that there is nothing left except ghost shadows left from so many years of being faded by the sun. No one else is around and it is so quiet that I can hear the clock ticking. I am waiting for time to go to class.

The feeling of waiting is particularly pronounced in this moment, but it is there -- more or less -- all the time now. Our friend the electrician did not show yesterday to prepare us for our inspection exam. There was a scheduling snafu and now he is coming next week instead. We are waiting.

We have almost completely sorted through the books and clothes; we don't go to the storage unit every day anymore. The other things in the house can't go yet because we are still living here, still using them. I did get a wild notion last Tuesday (brought on by having attended the Chair's Meeting last Monday) that we could go ahead and store some of our less necessary furniture, so I took away a little table we had in the bathroom. Then I came back and wandered around forlornly for a while holding my hairbrush in my hand and realizing that I had nowhere to put it down.

I made a bunch of origami swans to put on my office shelves because the emptiness seemed so sad.