The final day:

Early February’08: After much of huffing and puffing, packing and repacking, we finally managed to get the car stuffed. And by that I mean, literally!! Just look at that! We had mounted Dan’s bike on the trunk. The back seat was filled right up to the roof of the car. Thinking back, I can’t even remember what was in the back seat. And oh, my precious Christmas cactus was resting in its place that we had carved amidst the cooler and day bag, and was facing the rear window to get plenty of sunlight. I was wondering if the plant was going to survive the cold and the journey in our car!! The passenger seat where either Dan or I was going to sit had my laptop squeezed in. Wow!! Isn’t that travelling comfortably? The good news was that between the two of us, we had managed to keep all the stuff that we wanted to retain.

It was around noon, and stopped by Life Sciences building (SUNY, Stony Brook), (our sweet home, pun intended) for the last five and a half years. Time to say farewell, close this chapter of our lives and start a new one!!

Last Ride on LIRR to Manhattan

End of January '08: One thing we absolutely wanted to do before leaving Long Island (LI) was to spend a day walking around in Manhattan and of course meet up with Moni. So we did, what we usually do – drive to Hicksville (seriously, that’s a name of a town in LI) and take a train (LIRR) to Penn Station.

We got in around afternoon and decided to go to the Battery Park. We were supposed to meet Moni for dinner so we still had a few hours to hang around. My brilliant idea was to take the boat ride to Ellis Island (where Dan’s ancestors had first arrived). So we bought the tickets and being a cold, cold winter day we didn’t have to wait in the line for the ferry. As I was walking up to the security check point I saw a big sign “no knives allowed on the ferry”. Damn!! I was carrying a beautiful pocket-knife that Dan had made years ago and had given to me as a Christmas present few weeks back!! We thought of several options, nothing seemed good enough and I didn’t want to part with the knife. So, yeah we left our tickets at the entrance and walked away!! We will return for that ferry ride some day…

The next best thing we could come up with was to walk across to the street to spend some time at the National Museum of American Indian. We then took the subway uptown to meet up with Moni at the Thirsty Scholar. That brought back interesting memories of our previous visit there with Soni and Moni ;)

After a nice meal at an Afghani restaurant, we head back home. I am definitely going to miss Manhattan :(

Countdown to the Big Move - II

End of January '08: Just few days remaining now and we have been packing at a feverish pace. Most of the stuff has been packed and set aside. Dan decides to pack the roof box. I will take a moment here to rave about the Yakima Space cadet. It has tremendous amount of capacity and probably more space than my car trunk!! That's the picture of my car taken from my basement window. Dan manages to pack in quite a bit of stuff into the roof box. That makes us hopeful - maybe we can after all fit all our belongings into the car.

My friend Shachi, who was my lab-neighbor in Stony Brook few years back, stopped by to say goodbye and help me pack. Shachi now works for Estee Lauder and brought a bunch of Estee Lauder goodies with. I will really miss hanging out with her - our meetings in the Malls and Starbucks (yes folks, that's all LI has to offer)!!

Countdown to the Big Move - I

Some Date, January'08: So, finally the day we've been long waiting for is here. Time has come to pack up our bags and leave. Or more appropriately, stuff up the car and drive away. Packing is not an easy task. Are the boxes from Life Sciences going to be enough? Sparing you the details, we finally have (between the two of us), 12 boxes and 2 gigantic suitcases. Thank god for USPS's extremely low shipping rates!!

OK, so the rest of the stuff has to go into the car, which is not much, just some clothes, some breakable items near and dear to us, some shoes, some camping gear, Dan's toolboxes, miscellaneous stuff, and this and that. Things just keep popping out of the wood work!!

So, we decide to pile up our stuff into two categories: stuff we take and stuff that's giveaway. Stuff we take goes on top of the coffee table, doesn't seem like a big pile does it? We'll see about that.

There's this new Japanese guy - Mr. Yo who joined my lab (or my ex-lab) recently. I rope him in to collect my stuff that he can use. Yo is a very nice guy and takes most of our stuff. The same day I am selling my futon and I get a buyer!! He is this Indian guy, who has just moved to LI, he shows up the same time as Mr. Yo. He is slightly confused, but anyways buys my futon.

We go out to dine out with Mr. Rhee and his wife (our Korean friends). Dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Rhee is very pleasant. We sure will miss them!