I’m sitting on a rock in my front yard right now, stealing the internet from some unknowing neighbor, drinking coffee from a travel mug. This sort of situation has been my reality for the past week or so, as we pack up more and more of our belongings and get ready to leave this house.

It’s been trying both emotionally (last night we went out with all our friends to say goodbye and the only way I could handle it was to explain to them that we must, simply must, plan some weekend get togethers in the near future) and physically (this morning, upon waking with a slight hangover, but deciding I needed to get up, shower, and power through this day-before-the-move, I stepped out of bed directly into the dogs’ full water bowl which is sitting at the foot of our bed because that’s the only place it fits).

Oh, and my new favorite show is “The Hills” on MTV. I’ve been reading about the stars of this sort-of-reality show in Us Weekly for months now. Hating Heidi and Spencer and rooting for Lauren without even really knowing why, but I watched a few episodes the other day to take a break from packing and let me tell you something…Best Show Ever. I mean, if you need to relax, there’s nothing like watching young, attractive Hollywood Hills types get all worked up over whether or not they should get back together with their ex. It’s very good.

Anyway, regarding the practical state of affairs, J and I are taking off tomorrow. We’ll be in New Haven for a few days and then at the Bay starting this weekend. We’re getting internet out there sometime next week, but before that happens I doubt they’ll be many posts. You never know though. I mean, we’re driving a Prius, a U-Haul, twelve trillion boxes of books, a very tiny dog and a very big dog up the east coast. Something might happen that I need to tell you about.

But first we’ve got to pack up, take one more look around wonderful Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and drive away.

When I was a graduating senior in high school we all got a half-page of the yearbook to post a picture, some quotes and private jokes and since it was a time of transition the first quote I chose to put on my page was by the great American author John Steinbeck, who wrote in a book called “Sweet Thursday” that, “When people change direction it is a rare one who does not spend the first half of his journey looking back over his shoulder.”

Even though I’ve changed a lot since I was 18, obviously, I still find those words very true, and comforting.

Man, I used to read John Steinbeck all the time. I I know everybody has to read “The Red Pony” and “The Pearl” and all in school, but really, the rest of his work is even more amazing. f you ask me, I’ll still say he’s my favorite author, but, I mean, I used to stay up late into the night finishing his novels. For real, and I wasn’t cocky about it or anything, but I knew it was pretty cool, you know, being a teenager and reading really good books. I knew my parents liked it that I was into great literature.

And now I watch “The Hills.” Times change.

Ok. Here we go.

Before I leave, the story of how I got here.

May 2000 - I graduated from Boston University with a major in English, a minor in Philosophy and the drive to become a well-known and respected writer of some sort and dominate the world. I was 22-years-old.

In September 2000 my then-boyfriend and I packed up a U-Haul and moved to North Carolina for, literally, no reason except for the fact that he’d briefly considered Chapel Hill for grad school, without jobs or a place to live. We take up residence in a two-bedroom apartment in Raleigh, which costs the same in monthly rent as the bedroom I rented in a three-bedroom place near Fenway Park in Boston. We both get jobs easily and I start work answering phones at a media group that owns multiple radio stations. North Carolina is great!

The year passes…we make good friends…I get promoted to “Continuity Director” at media group and spend my time placing advertising on the air and sometimes voicing commercials, most notably, the commercial for “Maximus,” a natural male-enhancement drug, but after a year on the job my prior enthusiasm for “anything!” and “everything!” is waning and I realize I really don’t like working there. I need a change.

Right around Labor Day 2001 some important things happen. I meet, through my boyfriend’s co-worker, two new friends named Bethany and Carissa in a brewery in downtown Raleigh. They are very funny and I love them and we start hanging out regularly. A few days later, the night before our friends’ Max and Karla’s wedding in Roanoke, Virginia, a tall guy with blue eyes and dark hair comes up to me in this hospitality suite in the hotel where we were all staying and says, “Hi, I’m Justin.” And I tell him my name and introduce him to my boyfriend. I am immediately struck by the fact that this…this is going to be trouble. And then Justin and I spend a lot of the weekend talking to each other. We like the same music. We dance to a Rod Stewart song during the reception (not that we like Rod Stewart) because everyone is dancing with everyone else and it doesn’t matter. It so happens he has just moved to Chapel Hill to start graduate school at UNC.

A somewhat tense but exciting four months pass where feelings are analyzed and discussed and everyone acts on their best behavior despite the trying circumstances. In October our group of friends went on a now infamous camping trip to Uwharrie State Park where we drank “boilermakers” by dropping shots of whiskey into Budweisers (no, I don’t think that’s really how you’re supposed to do it) Karla sat me down in the woods and said “What’s going on?” She was very supportive. Several weeks later during the World Beer Festival at the old ball park in Durham Justin and I found ourselves alone for a brief moment, in the midst of the inebriated, cheerful crowds of people and we both admitted we wanted to say something, specifically, that we like each other a lot.

I decide I have to end the relationship with my boyfriend (obviously no fun at the time but now everyone can see it was for the best - for both of us). I also decide I’m going to quit my job even though I don’t have anything else lined up. I tell my parents all this when I’m up visiting one weekend and my father spills a beer all over the table and my mother suggests maybe I see a therapist.

At the strike of midnight on January 1, 2002 Justin and I celebrate the new year and our friendship-now-turned-more-than-friendship with a long, romantic make out session at our friend Liliana’s New Year’s party in Richmond.

Once we get back to North Carolina I move into Bethany and Carissa’s place - a townhouse on Kelly Ct. in northern Raleigh because they have, even after only months of knowing me, said “Of course! You can live here!” thus proving what really good friends they were and will always be. It’s a funny/scary place to live because the neighbors have pre-teens who always seem to always be on the front step drinking from a handle of vodka. Bethany, Carissa and I make the best of it. We drink a lot (a lot) of margaritas. We have a lot of funny times that now make amazing memories.

The rest, as people say, is history. After we’d all lived together for a couple years (thankfully moving from Kelly Ct. into a nicer place without the vodka-drinking kids, as entertaining as that way) Bethany moved to D.C. but we still keep in touch. I eventually moved to my own place in Chapel Hill, while working for a stint as the Education and Volunteer Coordinator at a non-profit animal rescue (hence, the rescued dogs I accidentally kept). Then I got into working for newspapers, which I did for three years before setting off on my own last year as a freelance writer.

And Justin and I, well, you know that story.

It’s funny, because during those first few rocky months after I’d met J and I didn’t know what to do - not wanting to hurt anybody, not wanting to act too impulsively, but also not wanting to miss out on something wonderful, Karla took me out one night so we could talk, since she was one of the only people who knew how I felt, and she gave me what I consider one of the best pieces of advice I’d ever received, maybe simply because I needed it so badly.

She said, “Don’t worry too much. Think about ten years from now. You’ll look back on this time in your life now and you won’t remember all the stress. You’ll just think, ‘Oh I almost changed everything in my life and got together with that guy, Justin,’ or you’ll think, ‘I almost stayed with my boyfriend and missed out on being with him.’ Whatever choice you make, you’re going to have a happy life.”

Her saying that allowed me to step back, calm down and take the time I needed to take to make the decision I did. And, of course, I can’t imagine the alternate - ten years from now looking back on meeting my now husband and not being with him. Despite Karla’s assurance that it wouldn’t matter in the end, I guess you could say that means I made the right decision.

Whatever the case, it’s clearly calmed down since then. We’re all not making bogus boilermakers around the campfire anymore, for one. But those early days made for an unforgettable introduction to this great state, and all the wonderful people I’ve met over my seven years here - from those very first months in Raleigh to those I’ve worked with over the years and all the people I’ve met through Justin’s graduate program and more - are a constant reminder that I’m so happy I moved here for no reason, and if you want me to get really sappy, which honestly, sometimes you’ve got to do, I could say that the reason I moved here, even though I didn’t know it at the time, was to meet them and make so many new friends that I know I’ll be friends with for the rest of my life.

In between watching movies we’ve already seen that inevitably play all day long most Sundays, J and I got down to some serious packing yesterday. Not the wimpy, put-a-few-kitchen-utensils-in-a-box kind of packing I’d been doing up until now. The kind of packing where, after some effort, shelves are now empty. A few shelves anyway.

We are moving in a week and a half and it’s funny how - from afar - I thought this time would be most notable for a certain party-ish, but organized vibe…all the beers we’d be drinking with our buddies, finishing up a few projects for work and relaxing lazily in the rocking chairs on our porch, enjoying a few last North Carolina summer evenings. I mean, we’re doing some of that, but there are other memories that, I’m sure, will be etched upon my mind when I think back to this time. Like trying desperately not to trip on the stacks of CDs and precariously stacked boxes of heavy books while making my way from the couch to the refrigerator.

Mostly though, despite the glaring annoyance of having our stuff strewn all over the place and losing all drive to clean up after myself because, really, what’s the point, this is an exciting time. And, of course, sad. A couple of our friends who graduated around the same time as J just recently moved away and after spending so many years hanging out in Chapel Hill together, believe me, it was hard to say goodbye.

A bunch of people have been a little confused about what the two of us are up to after we drive the U-Haul out of here, and rightfully so.

J doesn’t actually start working at Yale until this winter. At first we were a little worried about this scenario, until we realized how AWESOMELY GREAT it could be. I mean, he’s worked really hard for six years and when better to take some well-deserved time off than right now?

So we figured since one of our favorite places in the world is my family’s house on the Bay in Shadyside, Maryland, and since, you know, that would be a rent-free place to stay for a while, we’d head up there after leaving North Carolina and live there indefinitely, until a) we buy a house in Connecticut (I’ve just started talking to realtors) b) I find the perfect job or c) J decides we’ve got to head north for the winter migration of the Two-Breasted Cliff Swallow or whatever.

At first I thought the intermediary Bay period would last a couple weeks, tops, but now I’ve really settled into the idea of spending as much of this fall there as we want. I’ve written to some newspapers in the area about freelancing. I’m looking forward to jogging along the water. And J says he’s going to become a regular at the local pub, the Snug Harbor Inn.

Where, by the way, despite the fact that the place has a kind of nautical/no nonsense, serious drinking kind of feel, they have karaoke every Saturday night. And which, also, isn’t actually an inn. And Budweisers cost, like, $1.50. So, stories? Yeah, we’ll have stories.

“I’m kind of sick of, like, people telling me how much different it’s going to be in New Haven. Even Justin. I KNOW that it’s colder up there. I don’t need people telling me over and over again that ‘I’m in for a harsh winter’ or ‘I’m going to be shocked when I get up there,’ like I’ve never traveled anywhere before, you know? I’m not from the south. I mean, I went to school in Boston.”

“Exactly. And also…you’re not retarded.”

This past weekend we held a multi-person yard sale with a bunch of our friends who are also moving. It was fun - not only because we got to spend a morning hanging out with our buddies and haggling with strangers, but because in preparation, we’d gone through a bunch of the old stuff we have lying around the house, deciding what could go.

I really enjoy this process. I mean, sometimes, if I’m in the mood, nothing makes me happier than rooting through my closet, pulling out old clothes I haven’t worn in a while and making a pile to take to the thrift shop or Goodwill. Then I organize what’s left over, all nice and neat. Maybe I’m drinking a cup of tea while I do this. Heaven.

So when it came to choosing what to sell at this yard sale, I was up for selling a lot. J, however, doesn’t share my disposal-enthusiasm. He’ll look at something, say an old sock or a beaten picture frame, get all nostalgic and state, “But that reminds me of my childhood.”

We’ve talked about this and the discussion inevitably ends with him telling me, indignantly, “But you’re a packrat, too!” I then ask him if by “packrat” he is referring to my handbags, or shoes, and he says yes, and I have to explain to him that having a lot of fashionable things, like purses and shoes, does not make me a packrat.

I mean, I’m not naming names, but one of us likes to keep old magazine issues, in stacks, lying around the house, because “what if we want to read them sometime?”

Stacks of old magazines vs. really cute sandals. You be the judge.

Luckily J finally got in the groove regarding the impending yard sale and the night before was excitedly pulling old posters and t-shirts out from God knows where and exclaiming “Hey! We can sell this!” It’s a good thing, too, because we actually made the majority of our money from his old belongings.

Of course, the event was also a chance for J to act on another great passion of his, and that’s attaining other people’s old stuff for free or really cheap. So while I was dead set on paring down our material bulk to make for an easier move, urging customers who looked even remotely interested to go ahead, buy that warped bookcase, I’d glance over to see my husband in some kind of shady deal with one of the other participants. Rooting through the pocket of his shorts to find ten cents while glancing around furtively, then handing it over to one of our friends in exchange for an old photo album.

“Wait a second!” I’d yell. “What are you DOING?!” But it would be too late. He’d already have purchased something we “could totally use,” and as he ran away from me, shouting out the merits of someone’s discarded wooden box (”But I love boxes! You know I love to collect boxes!”) I’d slowly give up the chase. This was the trade off. Sell three or four things, gain two in return. This is what I married into. And furthermore, as payback, there was no way I’d be packing his impulse buys.

This is a line of philosophy I’ve tried employing during the packing process. I tell him, “Listen, look at the stuff surrounding you. If you honestly feel you want to put it in a box, carefully tape up that box, then put it in a truck and cart it off to New Haven, fine, do it. But if you feel at all otherwise, let’s put it in the trash, or aside for donating.”

Now, I’m totally defeating the purpose by writing about it here, in a public forum, but one trick I have learned to employ is getting rid of what he won’t miss while he’s not home. Before J reads this and has a coronary, I’d like to add that I don’t do this a lot. But I think the fact that he has never said to me, “Hey, have you seen the June 24, 2006 issue of the New Yorker?” proves my point. Sometimes you don’t miss what you never missed in the first place, even though you insisted on keeping it around.

Yesterday I did something that felt very good and I made sure to do it before J got home from work. I went through every drawer and shelf in the bathroom, throwing away old travel-size tubes of toothpaste with barely enough product for one brushing…hair gel that may have been used once or twice in college…deodorant that hadn’t been up to par for one reason or another.

I ran from the bathroom to the recycling bin outside our back door, getting rid of the remnants of circa 1993 hand lotion, and to the trashcan where I’d dispose of rusty old scissors, all the while looking frantically out the window, watching for J’s bus.

I finished shortly before he arrived home. The only evidence was the clean, organized bathroom drawers now depleted of overflowing baskets of tiny plastic containers, and the faint, lingering scent of hairspray and perfume samples.

He didn’t notice and I know that, if it wasn’t for this public declaration, he never would, but still I felt slightly guilty because I knew the process would have been different - longer - had he been home. I’m getting over it, though, because I suppose, to put it all into perspective, there are far worse things to hide from your husband, and really, it’s in his best interest. For his own good and sanity. Or, at least, for mine.

First of all, it’s very, very hot.

Not that this is unusual, exactly, here in the south…in the summer, sure, it’s hot. But somehow compiled with the boxes we’re slowly filling with the random contents of drawers (trinkets and old photographs), the crew of handymen who have suddenly appeared to make improvements to our house before the new tenants arrive and all the other details, emotions and conversations related to leaving…for good…the heat seems abnormally oppressive. While I’d like to take a long, cold shower and relax with a cold beer and good friends and just be generally lazy and slow, instead, everything has taken on this air of urgency. And I’m constantly reminded that every time I do something it could be the last time I do it for a while, because we’re not going to live in North Carolina anymore.

I generally try and avoid the saccharin displays of weepiness that often accompany this kind of life change, but this time I can’t really help myself and have found it necessary to quickly alter my thoughts (”Think about something funny! Think about something funny!”) on several recent occasions when going over the various social events we have planned for the next few weeks. I mean, crying when I actually say goodbye is one thing, but just crying in the middle of day? That’s different.

And, I mean, it’s most difficult when I think about people - our friends - but not limited to that. This morning, J and I went to one of my favorite coffee places, Three Cups, where they are, yeah, a little snobby, only serving press pot coffee and all, but believe me, it’s so good you don’t care, and when we were leaving J mentioned that we should bring my brother, Vinnie, there sometime because he’d probably like it, and I reminded him that there wasn’t any time left for Vinnie to come visit us, because we are moving. And J said, but yeah, we’ll be back, and I just stood there with my paper cup, and thought that yes, it’s true, it’s not like we’re never coming back here, but we’re not going to live here anymore, and it’s a range of emotions I feel when I think thoughts like that - excited and sad and nostalgic and ready - but it’s certainly complicated, not something like simple stress or grumpiness that I could always appease with a cup of really amazingly good coffee, especially when very minor things like the very coffee shop where you bought it is one of the things, even just one of the minor things, I will miss.

After the excitement of celebrating J’s PhD, having family and friends in town and traveling up to D.C. to see even more friends at a big party this weekend died down, I found myself sitting in my parents’ house in Alexandria Sunday, absolutely exhausted. So, even though it was about 100 million degrees outside, I decided to take a bath. My parents have a fairly big bathtub and, even better, have a rather incredible assortment of bath products - so many a person could really get caught up trying them all out. Bath salts? Sure. Foot scrub? Definitely.

Most of this stuff is sitting around unused, since my parents aren’t really the bath types. They’re more the quick shower, coffee and get moving types, which, honestly, I like better too, but every once in a while it’s nice to do something totally unnecessary and relaxing like breathing in the scents of aromatherapy crystals or, you know, whatever you’ve got at your disposal.

The other thing that was so great about my Sunday afternoon, was that it was the first time in a while I’d been completely alone.

Give me the choice between a quiet night in by myself and a loud party with hundreds of friends and strangers and I’ll take the party nine times out of 10, so when I feel like I want to be alone, I really need it. So, since J was off gallivanting at the local wildlife preserve and marsh, looking for another bird species to add to his Life List, I played around with some really expensive facial exfoliant and took a nice long soak in the bathtub. I mean, it wasn’t that long, because, seriously, it’s hot as hell outside, but still, it was exactly what I needed.

Doing things like that for yourself every once in a while really makes a difference, and now that we’re really on the brink of moving (August 29) and haven’t, ah, really done any sort of substantial packing, and are thinking about houses and jobs and money and driving the moving truck, I’m going to have to remember to take a break every now and then so I don’t, you know, lose it. Beat people up.

So I thought maybe in the comments section people could share their favorite ways to relax. Anything, because I know mine range from the really simple, like watching the Food Network, to the really extravagant, like getting an $100 massage.

Even though I’m using my current state of mind as a springboard, it’s not all for my benefit. I figure everyone feels better when they hear that other people get anxious and need to de-stress every now and then. It always makes me feel good to hear people’s tips, recipes, etc. after I write a post. That’s one of my favorite things about writing a blog…the feeling of connectivity with all these people.

So let’s hear it. I’ll start - A good glass of wine at the end of the day. What? You didn’t think I didn’t know about that one already, did you?

“What do you think Cecilia is thinking about?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’d like to say she’s thinking about times she had with her brother when she was little…her childhood, you know? But really, when you really look at her size, I’d guess she’s probably thinking about Beneful.”

Yesterday was a big day.

The McDonoughs, the Rotondaros and various friends, including many scientists, gathered in a conference room on campus to listen to J give his final talk as a grad student at UNC. He explained all his research to us, six years in the making.

It’s official - I have, literally, no idea what my husband does. He knows a scientific language that I cannot comprehend. There were parts of the talk where he seemed to be just uttering a stream of consonants that stood for God knows what while I looked on, aghast, watching other microbiologists in the audience nod their head solemnly because I guess they got it or something.

He is, like, a genius. And, very good at giving Power Point presentations.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, I offer this, my best attempt at a recap of what he said, which, no doubt, will be a mostly incorrect translation:

Many people get tuberculosis every year. They get it when people sneeze on them. Sometimes they don’t take their drugs and multi-drug resistant versions of the bacteria crop up. This is unfortunate. There is a thing called the Tat (twin-arginine translocation) pathway and it causes some things to happen. For instance, some very, very tiny pieces of part of the bacteria might travel through it, to the outside of a cell or molecule or something like that. When this happens, tuberculosis might become more virulent. Or it might not. There is another thing called BlaC and this is pretty important as well. Sometimes J works on this type of bacteria called smegmatis instead of tuberculosis because it grows faster. Tuberculosis grows slowly. It is difficult. But, apparently, pretty interesting. J did a “Western Blot” at one point. This experiment proved a couple things. Some findings. One thing he did a lot, over and over again, was delete the Tat from DNA. Maybe. He looked at a lot of strains, which are identified sort of like this

XYCBAATATBVBBCDTAT
TATJJGUHSHUGEHHBBD
HHSCIENCEUUBBDDXYC

Other scientists could do some more work on the Tat if they wanted, and this might yield some additional findings. But for now, these are the discoveries. Take your full course of antibiotics. TB kills.

I am so incredibly proud of Justin McDonough, PhD.