2026, March 2-8

Mike surprised Hallie and the kids by showing up in Springville late in the week. 

Earlier in the week, March progressed normally. Hallie's tattoo is healing up nicely. Her right arm is her Disney arm.  

Fergus is ever alert to Eliza. He's been spending nights with her lately. 

After visiting with the realtor and stager, Hallie is feeling the reality of getting the house ready to be sold. We have a lot of little things to do. Part of the overall task involves freshening up the outside of the house, decluttering, and removing a lot of what makes the house individually ours. 

Apparently there was a lunar eclipse Wednesday night into Thursday morning visible in parts of Montana. Mike had rain and clouds, so he didn't see anything other than a near-full moon early Wednesday evening. 

On Thursday, Hallie sent Mike a few vague texts asking about whether he had meetings on Friday. Turned out that what she was really asking was whether he could come down and help out with getting the house ready. And it also turned out that Mike's coworker and her husband happened to be coming down to Utah that very afternoon. So Mike quickly asked if he could bum a ride, ran to his apartment to grab some clothes, and was on the road to Utah within a couple of hours of Hallie's texts. We live in an amazing world that a person can wake up in one state contemplating another set of quiet activities on and around campus and before bedtime be back home in the thrall of all the moving drama. Pinkbox helps (and so does seeing everybody for the first time since Christmas break). 

We spent the weekend packing boxes, cleaning bedrooms and the office, and babysitting the neighbors' dogs. This little figurine we got years ago in a Kinder Surprise egg and which we adopted as our house's kitchen witch will make the trip up north along with dozens of boxes as we vacate the house of most of what makes it our own to make it look more enticing to prospective future owners.  

Eliza continues to enjoy her online high school experience. This week included creating a Venn Diagram comparing and contrasting two countries and their influence on world culture and finishing up an origami art class. Here are some of her projects, replacements made this week for others made with origami paper last week that accidently got thrown out in the cleaning frenzy before they got photographed as evidence of Eliza's successful completion of her work. 

No trip down to Springville is complete without neighborhood walks with Kai. Mike captured signs of spring in birdsong and flower. 

The kids are having a hard time working on their rooms on their own. Landon fell asleep cleaning out under his bed. Poor guy!

Here is just a sampling of a morning's worth of packing. Joy. 

Pinkbox helped, and so did Thrify Chocolate Malted Crunch. This is not to say that we only ate junk food. In fact, we had some tasty wholesome oatmeal and protein-rich carne asada quesadillas. We just happened to get two fun treats this week to act as the metaphorical "spoonful of sugar" as we get serious about the move.