Moving, again

[resonant]

I'm gearing up to move again; now that I don't have to stay in the school district*, I'm looking at a couple of places that are smaller, cheaper, closer to work, and ideally a little less damp.

But of course the idea of touching every single item I own, again, is incredibly intimidating.

So I decided to try packing one box a day.

There's quite a lot of low-hanging fruit -- at least ten boxes that I never got around to unpacking two years ago when we moved here. I may very well bog down when it comes to starting from scratch. But here's two days' worth of progress:

Day 1

Packed: One box from the bedroom. Mostly books and miscellaneous desky stuff.

Discarded: One bag of books and three bags of clothes to Goodwill. Half a recycle bin's worth of paper.

Find of the day: A bunch of little spiral notebooks from the pre-Iowa days, when I used to get Saturday mornings alone to write. Much probably-doomed writing in there, including the title of a Discworld story ("Hard-Boiled Egg") and the summary of a Sherlock story ("Suicide by vampire. At least, that was the plan.") and about 500 words of a story I was going to write about how in an Alpha/Omega universe the end of fertility must be heralded by an Omegapause ("Everybody around him was so goddamned fucking young.").

Day 2

Packed: One box of cookbooks and other non-fragile kitcheny stuff.

Discarded: Another bag of books ready to go to Goodwill, and a garbage bag full of things which stop being edible after being left in a box on the living room floor for two years.

Find of the day: So that's where all the AA batteries were.

* Let's just take a moment to let that sink in. Barring really strange circumstances, I am finished with school districts. School districts will never again play a role in my real estate decisions. I am no longer the parent of a public school student. I have attended my last teacher conference, and probably also my last progress report.

Comments

[resonant]

Yep, college starts in August. Then it will be just me and the cat ... until Thanksgiving ...

(Questions of how much space is enough space are probably easier when you send your kid off to college from a house rather than from an apartment with one bedroom per person.)

Moving is hell, isn't it? I just re-read one of my posts about cleaning out the house when we first came up here, and it filled me with stress even though it's years later.

[fox]

I feel your moving pain, though we haven't done it in a couple of years. Two Thanksgivings ago when we had people over for the first time after a lot of reno work was finished, at some point someone said "And you're planning to live here for a long while, right?" and she had not finished the question before I said "We're planning to die here."

[resonant]

How I wish I felt I could stay in one place. I'd build a Katrina cottage at the foot of the bluff and buy a couch without thinking about whether I could lift it by myself.