LG's Excellent PC Adventure

I am officially retired. Ian has officially graduated and Andy has been home this week on official leave. I look around my home and it doesn't seem like I've gotten rid of anything in spite of having taken an entire truckload to a garage sale, had Andy and Ian in to pillage and plunder to their hearts' content, shifted as much stuff off on their mother as she could bear and donated another truckload to the Salvation Army. I've got yet another truckload designated for the St. Vincent DePaul Society and a few more things that are destined for friends and neighbors homes. I've had two storage companies in to give me estimates and realize that being a born packrat has definite disadvantages. After weeding out all the non-essentials from my belongings, the first estimates came in between $350-$500 a month for storage. Believe me, if I hadn't sold my chainsaw at the garage sale I'd be using it to whittle down even more stuff. I'll continue working on downsizing all this coming week and then on Friday, Ian and I will take off on our roadtrip. We'll head down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to visit Andy and then move up the Eastern Seaboard until we hit Maine. I will try laying out all the things I intend to bring with me to Bulgaria before Friday just to get a handle on how much there is and how large a suitcase I need to find. Then for the next three or four weeks I'm just going to enjoy myself and have some fun. I'll try updating this journal and adding photos as we go along just to see if it works.

On Thursday, June 10th I'm going into Chicago for a Peace Corps party/celebration. I think it's sort of a recruiting meeting and I've been invited along with prospective applicants as well as returned volunteers. It should be interesting and it'll be the first contact I've had with the PC since I was invited to Bulgaria. I'm looking forward to getting any information I can scrounge up. I haven't been able to get much of a handle on the state of things in Bulgaria even though I've been in touch with a couple of volunteers currently serving in the country. I gather that most things, internet availability, phones, projects, housing conditions, etc. vary greatly from location to location and you can't predict what your situation will be like until you're almost through with training and have been assigned to a site. I saw in one post or another that the monthly stipend is around 400 Leva a month, which at current exchange rates equals approximately $250. It's a lot more than I expected.

Stay tuned, more to follow on this channel.