micheleandtom.com

One of the side effects of doing your own packing (which I try to avoid as much as possible) is that you grow to hate all of your shit. As more time passes, and more packing has been completed, the less I want to keep anything.

At one point today, I waved a hand around encompassing the downstairs and said, “send it all to Goodwill, I don’t care anymore.”

As Tom says, the life of an international vagabond is not conducive to owning crap.

We have a 10X15 storage space rented and it has all got to fit. It’s going to be close, but Tom thinks we can do it. Perhaps that should be a goal–don’t keep more than you can store in a 10X15 room.

Suspicious people would think that I encouraged Tom to pursue CrossFit over the last year so that he could become my studly personal mover! (Moi?)

Truly, he has been a rock star during this move and I feel horrible (really, I do) that I haven’t been able to help as much as I would like because of my knee. Normally I am the insane whirling dirvish of moving energy, but this time around, it’s all Tom.

So, I would like to go on the record with my supreme appreciation of my dearest husband (who gets a break from my nagging to post here due to heavy lifting extra credit)!

Tom and I are digging the look of the condo right now!

We have art on the walls, carpets on the floor, and a few choice pieces of furniture here and there. (Most of the clutter has been given away.) We are really coming to enjoy this spare open look. (We call this living like an architect. Our favorite example is the Seattle architects that had one chair in the corner of a room with a black floor. Black floor? How cool is that?)

The girls enjoy it for sliding on the floor, wrestling, and strange games involving throwing soft balls long distances. So, there is a downside.

We continue to make progress on getting the apartment ready to hand off. (We leave a nice apt.) We had the pros clean the carpets upstairs and had window cleaners come shine up the atrium windows and the outside of the windows near the grill (they got a bit greasy, since Tom likes to get a good char going).

We inch ever closer!

Aaaack.

We have to get EVERYTHING out of the upstairs tonight so that the carpet cleaners can come and do their thing in the morning.

The biggest part of that will be dismantling the bed–that’s right, it’s mattress-on-the-floor time. Then, in the morning, we’ll just slide it on into the bathroom. *Sigh* I do miss the way we usually move–live normally until the day before the move, when the professionals would come and pack up our house.

With the amount that we are liquidating, we decided our normal moving strategy wasn’t really practical since getting rid of that much stuff requires waves of cleansing (for emotional reasons) that suck up a lot of time.

I sometimes feel that the basement (or the equivalent space wherever we are living) is where computers go to die–ALL computers.

There are many benefits to marrying your own system administrator: you never have to network your own computers again, you don’t have to figure out cascading style sheets, you will have responsible back up procedures in place, and you will never be forced to remove Dr. Pepper from your diet.

But, even with all of the good, some rain must fall. The rain, in this case, comes in the form of computer equipment (towers, screens, routers, Cat 5 cable, crimpers, wireless access points, etc.) stashed everywhere.

Tom has spent the last few days reviewing the graveyard and wiping drives and is now taking a long-needed trip to Free Geek to clear out the dead bodies!

Hallelujah!

Oh My Gosh! Packing up the girls’ room today really sucked and took forever. They had little pack rat piles of crap everywhere.

Our strategy was to ban them from the room. We brought in garbage bags, boxes, tape, markers and went to town. Nothing left the room unless it was something we were keeping in storage. Everything categorized as trash or items that would given to Goodwill were stashed in the room until we were done and Tom could spirit them directly to the car.

Our goal was to prevent the Zs from rooting around the trash/Goodwill piles and pulling items out declaring, “this is my favorite…”

They actually didn’t protest our strategy, rather, they seemed to understand, on some level, that it was just going to be easiest this way.

The tainted milk scandal is a great example of why we are not living for a year in China with the girls.

I think of all of those poor parents who served their children something as innocuous as a dairy product who are now just hoping their child doesn’t die as a result. Four children have died and 6,200 babies are ill.

Okay, anyone who lives in Portland, I have a HOT tip for you–Willamette Moving Company.

These guys were so good, Tom and I have now made a pact that we cannot ever move out of their service territory, thereby guaranteeing our future moving success.

I picked them based on their citysearch reviews–which were so glowing, I was slightly suspicious that they were planted. Charles and Brent were our movers, and they transferred some heavy, very bulky pieces of cherished furniture to storage for us, and they did it beautifully with nary a ding, complaint, or scuffed wall.

I have had my first happy moving experience!! It can happen.

We feel like we’ve done quite the purge on our library of books.

With an eye toward minimizing our storage needs, we are getting rid of mucho stuff before we leave, including (gasp), a bunch of books. Frankly, all of our shelves looked decimated when we were done–it was sort of sad.

Mom and Dad scored, taking a bunch of books home.

Tom then took the remainder (easily over 300 books) to Powell’s warehouse (near Montgomery Park on NW 29th) to sell. He wasn’t very popular though, dragging in 5 boxes of books right before closing, but they soldiered through!

Now we have a nice Powells credit, which we can use when we return!

Tom (you know, the guy who rarely posts on “our” blog), being the thorough young man that he is, was doing some research prior to renting our storage space and discovered the idea of laying pallets down on the floor of the storage space to a) provide circulation; and, b) protect items from water leaks.

Well, you know how it is, once you read something like that, you kind of feel as if you have to do it, because if you don’t, the space will spring a leak and everything will be ruined.

So, we have our storage space rented and the piano moved into it. The space has pallets on the floor. In four days, we have movers coming just to transport several heavy pieces of furniture into the storage unit. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that we have nothing else boxed up, packed, or sorted. *Sigh* Guess what we are doing for the next 4 days?