And Then There Were Three

Since June of 1991 there have been four of us living at Casa de HolyCoast, and we've kind of gotten used to that. However, that all changes today. As you read this I'll probably be somewhere along a 475 mile journey north to Rohnert Park, CA where we'll be depositing HolyCoast Daughter and a truckload of her stuff at Sonoma State University. You think I'm kidding about the truckload part? Look here:

And that's before I hook the bicycle on the back. We'll be driving up today with check-in at 10am sharp on Saturday. The rest of the day will be moving in, setting up, and in the evening, a welcome barbeque for the new students and their parents. She'll spend her first night in the dorm on Saturday night, and then after checking to see if she still needs anything from us on Sunday morning (fat chance), we'll make the long, lonely drive back home. It won't be the same without her (though there will be substantially less debris on her bedroom floor).

We had a bit of a blessing in disguise. At 7:20 last night the power went off at our house and was out until 10pm. We had visions of what it would be like to try and get out of the house in the pitch dark, but the power came back in time to save us the trouble. The blessing was that we spent about 90 minutes sitting in the back yard by candlelight talking and enjoying each other's company. It was a better way for us to spend the last night at home with our daughter than had we all been scattered around the house watching TV or working on the computer.

We probably won't see her again until Parent Weekend in October, and we're hoping to figure out a way to get to her two fall concerts in October and December. Where there's a will (and a kid 475 miles away) there's a way.

Blogging will be sporadic this weekend - probably limited to cellphone shots of the day's activities. The truck is so full I literally don't have room to put my laptop in there, and I'll probably be sufficiently busy that I won't have time to do much with it. I'll try and give you updates every now and then as the weekend progresses.

UPDATE: I posted this before we turned in Thursday night, and just in case there was another power interruption, I equipped myself accordingly. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought it was unusually quiet. We normally have a couple of fans running on warm nights and at first thought the Mrs. had gotten cold and turned them off. I looked around and realized that none of the familiar lights from clocks and electronics were blinking at me and the quiet was caused by another power outage. My cellphone clock read 3:20 am and we were planning to get up at 4. It was not going to be easy to get dressed and get out of here in the dark.

About 3:55 the house suddenly whirred to life again (thankfully) and with 30 minutes until departure, so far everything's still humming. We've got to get out of here before it all goes down again.