Two weeks and a few days until take-off and our lives have been sorted into three piles:

• Pile Number One – This is going to France with us. Besides clothing, we’ve packed everything from a 3G wireless router with the “Hoop” network already set up, to France-compatable Apple adapters for our all-Apple electronic lives, to Sandra’s favorite essential kitchen tools, including the rotating chicken timer. The clothing decisions take into consideration that we’ll have two winters in France. They’ve had a far colder winter than we’ve had. We were sent a photo showing 3 inches of ice in the canal around Hoop in Toul.
• Pile Number Two: This gets stored away in Ipswich, either in our new storage room in the basement or in an upstairs loft.
• Pile Number Three: This is all the detritus of twenty years of living in the same house, things that haven’t surfaced in years but have been stored away just in case. Now it has all been either recycled, taken to the town dump or donated to Big Brother, Big Sister. Included in the donation bags were just about all of Harvey’s lawyer suits, the kind he wore, not the kind he filed in court.

It is a cathartic experience to have to sort all your possessions this way. And it shows how much we accumulate that we certainly never needed (except for all the priceless parts that have come off a fleet of old wooden boats, including every rusty washer and bolt, just in case. That is all stored in the basement still.)

Of course, in the spare moments, there is still preparation for the February 27 Supreme Court argument going on. The recording of that argument will be posted on the Supreme Court web site on Friday, March 2.