Wednesday, December 27, 2023

CHRONICLES OF OUR PRE-RETIREMENT - Episode 9

 Hi y'all!!  I have fallen behind on my update to our pre-retirement journey, life happens all the time here in the Smiths household specially with Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons.

We have had some pretty warmer weather in November and even the early part of December.  I figured I'd better take care of the leaves all over our front and back yards if I want the house to show nicely when we list it for sale so that's what I did one day.  The next day was so windy that the neighbors' leaves blew over to our yard so I had to do it all over again.  Luckily, I only had to do it to our front yard as there wasn't any blow-over on our back yard.



I was able to sort our stuff in the basement and hauled a lot of them to Goodwill.  We will slowly sell some of our furniture (desks/dressers/chest of drawers/occasional and side tables and other little fixtures).  I have a couple of them displayed in my booth at an antique store here in town and will bring in another one once something is sold.  Hopefully we will slowly get rid of most of them as we work on the house to get it ready for the market.  Mike seems to not care about having another garage sale and I hope he will agree with me to have a moving sale in late January.

Mike has disassembled the lawn mover, got all the parts cleaned and I have packed it in the balikbayan box and it's ready for shipment to the Philippines.  We need the mower in the Philippines as we have a large yard and a push mower just won't do the job as quickly as a motorized lawn mower.  Next he disassembled the tiller as we will be doing a lot of gardening.  We are not sure how good the tillers are that are available for purchase in the Philippines so we decided to bring our own.  It's waiting for me to box it up in a balikbayan box.  I might need to pack it in 2 balikbayan boxes though, we'll see.

Mike has unused paid vacation and floating holidays that he will lose if not used. So his last work date is December 21 and the rest of December is his vacation.  Then he will go back to his employer to sign the necessary paperwork and turn over keys and other stuff on January 4.  He's so looking forward to that day.

Well that's it for now lovely people.  I pray you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and a blessed Christmas!  We thank you for following and God bless us everyone!


SEVEN WEEKS AWAY FROM OUR TRIP BACK TO THE PHILIPPINES

 Hello everybody.  It's been a month since my last entry.  We are seven weeks out and then we are flying to the Philippines to retire, l...