People have asked a lot what it feels like a month before this all begins.  We’ve been thinking about that too.  What does it feel like?

There are different ways to look at the situation over the next few weeks.  We could begin to wean ourselves from our daily rituals and work to ease the transition through practice.  We could minimize and prepare.

Or, we could live life trying to take advantage of every minute of our blissful domestic existence.  We could maximize and take it all in.

Our dog Amos is one example with an easy answer.  If we minimized, we could start to disengage a bit and try to get ourselves prepared for missing him.  That’s not too doable, so we’re going for the full-on maximizing- trying to take advantage of every minute.  He is more spoiled all the time.

Knowing that our food choices will be limited and we will long for the comfort of our home choices of food, we’re faced with a similar decision.  We could start experimenting with more healthy and practical options, minimizing our normal diet in preparation. Or, we could gorge ourselves on the food, meals and places we love and hope that it will help us appreciate their existence.  The way it’s looking so far, we’re appreciating the existence of a lot of home comforts, but not gorging, per se.

We’ve been thinking about Seattle (and the surrounding area) and how we can make it part of the trip by taking a look at it as a tourist would.  I’d love to maximize Seattle before we leave, but minimizing would save money and make more time for preparation.

Just tonight I was buying milk and remembered learning that people often miss having milk on long international trips.  I considered maximizing and going for the whole milk, but reconsidered and stuck with the 1%.

We could start to let go of our media habits by minimizing TV consumption and non-productive computer time. Or, we could take advantage of the media access and veg out with the TiVo while we can. 

It’s all about philosophy I suppose.  I think we’ll have a healthy mix of minimizing and maximizing with a leaning on the maximizing side.  It may make the transition a bit more harsh, but we’ll have peace of mind that we considered it and did what we wanted.