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Craigslist fever is starting here in the Reeves-Offermann household.

We sold the girls’ kitchen (and they pocketed the money). We sold the futon in a matter of hours. (The guy practically jogged out of here with it.) We have a fair amount of interest in the girls’ bunk beds. We just posted the minvan late tonight.

We are happy to see stuff moving out of the house.

Now for our car buying tip. This comes courtesy of the awesome car detailer we found who is starting on the PT Cruiser tomorrow so that we can list it on craigslist a bit later this week. During the course of our (long) conversation about car detailing, he told us that we should avoid any new car with cloth seating because the new fabric that the auto industry is using cannot be cleaned and wears horribly. He said to buy leather all of the way because it holds up better.

So there you go!

Yes, I always have a strategy, and a plan!  (Tom finds it exhausting.)  The current moving plan involves minimizing time with movers.

We will soon rent a long-term storage space in a climate controlled building and then slowly pack and move things in there ourselves over the next two months.  (As soon as the Olympics are over, the TV is going into storage.)

Simultaneously, we shall be selling all kids furniture and other household items on Craigslist (which I hate–people call and say they’ll be “right over” and then they never show up).

At the end of September, we should only have a few large pieces of furniture that will require a truck to move, which we will hire out when the time comes.

When I lived in Taipei, London, and Madrid I didn’t own a car and was able to use a combination of taxis, public transportation, and my feet to do everything that I needed. That will be the plan while in Buenos Aires.

Avoiding car ownership is one of the reasons that we really want to make sure that we scope out neighborhoods and schools very thoroughly before committing to a long-term rental. We want reasonable access to school, a market, a gym and, of course, some good restaurants. (Do we ask too much?)

I hate movers. I love movers. Yes, I have a love/hate relationship with movers.

I love it when they come to your house and pack up all of your stuff in one day. I hate it when they break your cherished crap and try to get out of paying you for the items they destroy.

My last run-in with movers involved our move from our house here in Portland to the condo we are renting in Portland. We paid a national moving company to pack, move, and unpack our belongings. The moving day started well. Tom was stationed at the house to supervise the move out (they had two crews working) and to ready the house for the new buyers, and I was at the condo moving in boxes and putting stuff in closets and drawers that the movers unpacked and set on the floor.

Halfway through the day, one crew went home. Then everything unraveled.

We got a call that Zelda was sick and we had to go pick her up from school and take her to the doctor (ear infection). As soon as the appointment was over, Tom had to go back and pick up Zoe at the end of school. So he was out of action for most of the afternoon. About the time Tom got back, he had to leave again for a class. Upon his departure, it became apparent that the crew that had left the job half way through the day had screwed the remaining moving crew because they put everything in the condo in the wrong order–we were hemmed in and couldn’t move, unpack or place furniture. A large chunk of stuff had to be moved out and then replaced in the condo.

On top of it all, the movers had underestimated the amount of hours the job would take, and the crew chief tried to pull a fast one and get out of the scope of work they had agreed to. When I wouldn’t let him weasel out of the job, he started opening my boxes and throwing the stuff out of them onto the floor in one big dump

I wigged out. I had a vomiting kid with a high fever, I had been moving and unpacking for 10 hours side-by-side with the various moving crews, Tom was gone, movers were throwing my stuff around the house, and some asshole was trying to tell me he didn’t want to finish his job because he had somewhere to go. (He pulled the passive aggressive male strategy of “I’m going to be so awful she will let me off the hook because she’s a woman and won’t want to deal with a man being truly icky.”)

I got so mad I dropped about a million f-bombs and told the crew chief he was a **&$$%@##. The kids freaked out and stayed in their room. I called Tom and told him he “better get his butt home” and hung up the phone. (He and Ian still laugh about that telephone call. Tom turned to Ian and said, “uh-oh.”)

In the end, the movers stayed and finished their job. The worker bees apologized to me for their crew chief being a complete tool and thanked me for working so hard with them side-by-side. Needless to say, it has become a funny family story that we all laugh about. (Well, I’m still working on the laughing part.)

That experience, along with our other two cross-country sojourns (don’t worry, I won’t tell those stories), has made me rethink this next move. (Yes, that means I will be posting in the future regarding my current moving and storage strategies! Woo hoo!!)

I have moved out of my office…everything shuts down officially at the end of the day today.

(Truthfully, Tom moved me out of my office. With my knee surgery and all, I could only organize and marshal the forces, if you will. Good timing on my part, eh? The long-suffering man I call husband was introduced to the subculture of the high-rise office building freight elevator as he carted 25 file boxes out of my office and into the minvan.)

The empty office really hit home for us both that whatever happens, we are closing a chapter in our lives and starting a new adventure with a clean slate.

We have decided to completely eliminate TV from our lives while in Argentina. We figure that we can get all the news/media we need from our computers. And, most importantly, the kids will have to engage their brains rather than veg out in front of the television (and we will not be tempted to used it as a quiet-the-kids magic box.)

Our kids never experienced having cable TV in the house until we sold our home last year and moved into the condo. Well I can tell you, that experiment is now over!

In our old house, in the basement, we had an HDTV hooked up to an antenna (much to Tom’s embarrassment), which needless to say, didn’t work very well. The kids would have to move the antenna around constantly in order to even tune a channel in, and then once they got a picture, they could not move or it would disappear again. Not really worth it.

Now, in our wired-for-cable condo, the kids have discovered, much to their delight, that there is a vast array of programming available to them besides a fuzzy PBS channel! They have become addicted to TV. So, we ran an experiment a few months ago where the family “went hard.” We eliminated sugar (which was really for Tom and I since we sneak dessert after the kids go to bed) and all screen time for the kids (computer, video games, tv) from our lives for a month. The kids were on board and it was magical to see the change in them. Their overall mood was much better, they were more civil to one another, and the games and projects they undertook to entertain themselves were truly inspired.

Funnily enough, when we told them that there would be no TV in Argentina, they didn’t really seem to care.

We get asked this question a lot. The short answer is that we can’t imagine living anywhere else in the United States than Portland.

But, what we are doing is a bit different than a traditional sabbatical in the sense that we are dismantling our professional existence here in Portland. We are closing up shop and pulling out, starting with a clean slate. That means we will not be returning to a cushy, high-paying job at the end of the year. (See the earlier post stating emphatically that we are crazy.)

I guess that means we really have no firm plans other than leaving for a year and seeing where that takes us. (Boy do we sound flaky when I put it like that.) I suppose that if we are having fun overseas and figure out a way to support ourselves after a year, we might remain overseas for awhile because the kids are the right age for a vagabond expat existence. If we are ready to settle back down in good ol’ USA, then we anticipate returning to Bridge City.

We sold our house last year and have been renting a condo ever since. I have been happy with the arrangement until now, when it just occurred to me the tremendous downside to having a condo–WE CAN’T HAVE A GARAGE SALE!

I am a relentless organizer. I eliminate clutter and extra crap in my house constantly, and still it seems to accumulate. When I move from a house, I count on: 1) a garage sale to get rid of the good stuff; and, 2) the “free pile” set outside the house to get rid of everything else. Other than hazardous waste, you can successfully hand off all unwanted items in your house between the garage sale and the free pile.

I am trying to imagine our stuffy condo board embracing a free pile outside the building…hmmm, it might be worth doing just to shake everyone up! And of course, for security reasons, they don’t want people tromping through the building for an estate-style sale in the condo. *Sigh*

Since the girls are enrolled in the Mandarin immersion program at Woodstock elementary, and since I speak some Mandarin from my days in Asia, everyone wonders why the heck we aren’t going to China. All legitimate wondering.

At the end of the day, we were concerned about two things that ultimately ruled out China: the exchange rate and pollution (not listed in order of importance).

Having worked in a heavy industry in the region back in the late eighties and early nineties, I got to witness the ravages of pollution first hand. The breadth is astonishing. China depends upon coal fired plants for electricity, which dumps a lot of mercury into the air, which then gets into the food supply. Air quality is low and asthma and other lung related illnesses are high. I worry about heavy metals and other industrial pollutants that are dumped into the water supply that then get integrated into the food chain. (I remember meeting with one building owner in an industrial park who advised me to dump all of our manufacturing waste in a creek behind the facility…yikes.) Those kind of pollutants have a big effect on small growing bodies, so we decided to stay in the Americas and head south.

We also would like our dollar to go as far as possible, which makes China less of an option.

When people ask Tom and I if we are going to home school the girls while we are away, Tom and I always have to wait for our hearts to resume beating after the moment of sheer terror passes. NO, we are not going to home school. Reasons are below:

1. School is how you get rid of, I mean socialize, your kids.
2. They never listen to us, so I can’t imagine them starting once we arbitrarily declared ourselves “teacher.” Anyone with kids can tell you that parents rank down around, oh, I don’t know, armadillos, in terms of the stock our children put in our knowledge. Pretty much any first grader on the playground is given more cred than we are.
3. The wee ones are supposed to be learning the language (that would be Spanish) while we are there.