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May was our "cat month", intended to get our cats the rest of the way ready to go to Hawaii (and leaving plenty of time if there are gov't screw-ups on the other side).
The easy task was getting the cats their second rabies shots, now that we're (far more than) 30 days out from the previous shot and (far less than) a year out from our arrival. Well, it was easy if you consider carrying two cats and their carriers four or five blocks easy. Unfortunately, Kimberly is no longer cat-carrier-carrying ready.
The hard task was untangling the requirements of the Department of Agriculture and the Kauai Humane Society. Well, hard except I managed it in just about two hours and maybe four or five phone calls. You see, I had to tell the Department of Agriculture our flight number to Hawaii, and that required the agreement from the Kauai Humane Society to meet us. So I had to figure out the flights with Alaska, then get the tentative agreement from the Kauai Humane Society, then make the reservations with Alaska, then make the reservations with the Kauai Humane Society. Whew!
(Why Alaska, you might ask? It's because Hawaiian Airlines outright lies and says that the State of Hawaii will not allow them to have cats in the cabin. Neither the State of Hawaii or any other airlines seem to know about this alleged restriction. So rather than our typical Hawaiian, we flew Alaska, because we ultimately decided we wanted our cats in the cabin with us, to minimize trauma, for them at least.)
That also means we now have our flight reservations to move to Hawaii. We'd long said 2020, then we said January 2020, then we said early January 2020, then we said as soon as flight prices drop in 2020 after the holidays. So we're moving to Hawaii on January 1st. It'll be a truly momentous New Year for us.
(After I got the tickets I thought, "Oh no! We have tickets to see Arcadia at Shotgun Players the previous evening, and it'll be late!!" But that was last year. I'm getting old.)
After that, I had to pick up some money orders from my bank and then put together the packets to send to the Department of Agriculture. With the end of May being my deadline I got that last step done shortly before midnight on May 31st. Whew.
And, oh my, there were a lot of costs to this. I mean, ignoring all the vet bills we've already paid, I had to pay $330 to the Department of Agriculture to get our permits for the cats and another $800 for the Humane Society to meet us (which is pretty much a convenience fee so that our cats don't have to go through Honolulu, and well worth it for the lesser stress on them), and we'll eventually have to pay Alaska another $200 to carry the cats. So, about $750 per cat to get them to Hawaii, as opposed to about $250 for us. (Mind you, it's nothing compared to what our moving costs will be for books and games and clothes and kitchenware and small amounts of furniture.)
There are still tiny things to do for the cats. We got a collar for Lucy, and she's actually been accepting of it, and we got a new one for Callisto with a cell phone number rather than our land line number that we're abandoning (and good riddance!). We need to order soft carriers for both, to use on the plane. And in December we need to get them original health certificates and flea and tick treatments, sometime in the 14 days before we leave, which will unfortunately be pretty near the holidays.
But the big chunk of work is done, provided we have no problems getting our neighboring-island release permits now that everything has been submitted.
We have continued with the packing project that we started as our big thing in April. I've now got nine small book boxes packed, which covered all of our literature, which was three of our tall six-foot shelves. (Yes, we have lots of books.)
The culling of books has meanwhile begun to fill of foyer, but I found that Friends of the Berkeley Library would pick up donations ... but only if they were boxed. So, I started saving crappy Amazon boxes to send books off to them in. I got 11 of those boxes together by this Tuesday, at which time a volunteer helpfully picked them up for me. He was even nice enough to bring me back some boxes afterward, which will get me started on the next batch. (The foyer is still pretty full, as we're continuing to cull at about a 50% rate throughout all of our fiction.)
Oh, and my dad has given the OK to mail them our books. So, I think we're going to start that up at some time in fall, as media rate will be much cheaper than sending them all via boat (though we accept some will probably go missing).
And meanwhile our gardening project continues too: our front-yard flowers and plants continue to grow and prosper, even though we've been told they weren't good plants to go on the mostly shadowed north side of a house.
I just had to take another pass on the backyard for this Thursday's BBQ, and it had grown entirely unreasonable amounts given that I'd already cleaned it up at the end of March ... but that was on the early side of when I usually do that, and meanwhile we've had unseasonable cold and rain through April and May.
I'm going to see if we can get our gardener out to more extensively clean the back-yard jungle out there in July, because then I can get some new one-day parking permits and not have them expire within a month, which will allow him to work for more than two hours. (For whatever reason, the calendar year for parking passes is July to June.) I guess I can just get more than I need, and then hand them off to our realtor in December for use by her, the stagers, etc.
Jeez, we're now T-7 months. It's actually starting to feel close.
The easy task was getting the cats their second rabies shots, now that we're (far more than) 30 days out from the previous shot and (far less than) a year out from our arrival. Well, it was easy if you consider carrying two cats and their carriers four or five blocks easy. Unfortunately, Kimberly is no longer cat-carrier-carrying ready.
The hard task was untangling the requirements of the Department of Agriculture and the Kauai Humane Society. Well, hard except I managed it in just about two hours and maybe four or five phone calls. You see, I had to tell the Department of Agriculture our flight number to Hawaii, and that required the agreement from the Kauai Humane Society to meet us. So I had to figure out the flights with Alaska, then get the tentative agreement from the Kauai Humane Society, then make the reservations with Alaska, then make the reservations with the Kauai Humane Society. Whew!
(Why Alaska, you might ask? It's because Hawaiian Airlines outright lies and says that the State of Hawaii will not allow them to have cats in the cabin. Neither the State of Hawaii or any other airlines seem to know about this alleged restriction. So rather than our typical Hawaiian, we flew Alaska, because we ultimately decided we wanted our cats in the cabin with us, to minimize trauma, for them at least.)
That also means we now have our flight reservations to move to Hawaii. We'd long said 2020, then we said January 2020, then we said early January 2020, then we said as soon as flight prices drop in 2020 after the holidays. So we're moving to Hawaii on January 1st. It'll be a truly momentous New Year for us.
(After I got the tickets I thought, "Oh no! We have tickets to see Arcadia at Shotgun Players the previous evening, and it'll be late!!" But that was last year. I'm getting old.)
After that, I had to pick up some money orders from my bank and then put together the packets to send to the Department of Agriculture. With the end of May being my deadline I got that last step done shortly before midnight on May 31st. Whew.
And, oh my, there were a lot of costs to this. I mean, ignoring all the vet bills we've already paid, I had to pay $330 to the Department of Agriculture to get our permits for the cats and another $800 for the Humane Society to meet us (which is pretty much a convenience fee so that our cats don't have to go through Honolulu, and well worth it for the lesser stress on them), and we'll eventually have to pay Alaska another $200 to carry the cats. So, about $750 per cat to get them to Hawaii, as opposed to about $250 for us. (Mind you, it's nothing compared to what our moving costs will be for books and games and clothes and kitchenware and small amounts of furniture.)
There are still tiny things to do for the cats. We got a collar for Lucy, and she's actually been accepting of it, and we got a new one for Callisto with a cell phone number rather than our land line number that we're abandoning (and good riddance!). We need to order soft carriers for both, to use on the plane. And in December we need to get them original health certificates and flea and tick treatments, sometime in the 14 days before we leave, which will unfortunately be pretty near the holidays.
But the big chunk of work is done, provided we have no problems getting our neighboring-island release permits now that everything has been submitted.
We have continued with the packing project that we started as our big thing in April. I've now got nine small book boxes packed, which covered all of our literature, which was three of our tall six-foot shelves. (Yes, we have lots of books.)
The culling of books has meanwhile begun to fill of foyer, but I found that Friends of the Berkeley Library would pick up donations ... but only if they were boxed. So, I started saving crappy Amazon boxes to send books off to them in. I got 11 of those boxes together by this Tuesday, at which time a volunteer helpfully picked them up for me. He was even nice enough to bring me back some boxes afterward, which will get me started on the next batch. (The foyer is still pretty full, as we're continuing to cull at about a 50% rate throughout all of our fiction.)
Oh, and my dad has given the OK to mail them our books. So, I think we're going to start that up at some time in fall, as media rate will be much cheaper than sending them all via boat (though we accept some will probably go missing).
And meanwhile our gardening project continues too: our front-yard flowers and plants continue to grow and prosper, even though we've been told they weren't good plants to go on the mostly shadowed north side of a house.
I just had to take another pass on the backyard for this Thursday's BBQ, and it had grown entirely unreasonable amounts given that I'd already cleaned it up at the end of March ... but that was on the early side of when I usually do that, and meanwhile we've had unseasonable cold and rain through April and May.
I'm going to see if we can get our gardener out to more extensively clean the back-yard jungle out there in July, because then I can get some new one-day parking permits and not have them expire within a month, which will allow him to work for more than two hours. (For whatever reason, the calendar year for parking passes is July to June.) I guess I can just get more than I need, and then hand them off to our realtor in December for use by her, the stagers, etc.
Jeez, we're now T-7 months. It's actually starting to feel close.