resonant: Ray Kowalski (Due South) (Default)
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.
resonant: otter floating on its back, eating a clam. Text: KEEP CLAM (keep clam)
I use January to clean the insides of things.

Or ... every January I intend to clean the insides of things. Some years I do a cabinet or two, some years I get around to the file box about March, some years I do nothing. One glorious golden year I did all the kitchen cabinets. It's been a while.

This year, though, I have an additional incentive because we'll be moving come summer, which was enough to get me going today on the two kitchen cabinets that cause me the most annoyance from day to day.

That's how I discovered that thinking, "Might I use this at some point in the future?" is one thing, and thinking, "Do I want to put this in a box and take it to Iowa?" is something quite different. An impending move makes me a much more ruthless discarder. (The Ruthless Discarder is now going to be my superhero identity.)

Two down, and how many to go? Difficult to be precise; how do I compare one kitchen cupboard with a closet? Or a garage? If I use a weighted scale based on the capacity of the space, there are 37 space units in the living area (not counting kidlet and spouse bedrooms), 13 in the basement, and 8 in the garage, which means that if I actually keep up the pace of two units a day, I will seriously finish this by the end of January!

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resonant: Ray Kowalski (Due South) (Default)
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