Packing, Selling and Packing

We’ve now reached the point where sold (or packed/disassembled) house­hold items are no longer the ‘fat’ of our lives, but some ‘mus­cle’. In other words, stuff that we actu­ally used day to day is now either unavail­able or gone. I can still cook din­ner (fewer pots) and con­nect to the Inter­net (lap­top), so I’m OK, but things sure feel different.

Yes­ter­day the Microwave cart and TV (and com­po­nents) each went to their respec­tive pur­chasers. Today we took apart my office desk, and the desk­top com­puter, screen, periph­er­als and other attach­ments also had to be taken apart so they could be moved of it. It took a long time and we had to clean a lot of accu­mu­lated dust, fur and sticky residue. Every­thing in this house even­tu­ally gets a bit of a sticky film over time, prob­a­bly from cook­ing food. It’s funny (and a lit­tle sad) to see rem­nants of Socrates (and per­haps even his sis­ter Steffi, although she’s been gone for much longer) show up as lit­tle hairs and balls of dusty fur in the cor­ners of fur­ni­ture and at the bot­tom of table legs. Socrates loved to lounge on my desk while I worked, and left much of him­self in the seams over the years. Those cats lived their entire lives in this house, and when we leave, it won’t be just mem­o­ries of them we leave behind, but lots of genetic mate­r­ial. Prob­a­bly not enough to clone a cat from, but cer­tainly enough to make any per­son with a cat allergy react. I hope the new ten­ant is not aller­gic to cats.

There are boxes every­where, in every room. The bed­room is flanked by large gar­ment boxes. The room that I used to call my office con­sists now mainly of small boxes and scat­tered com­puter and periph­er­als. The first floor is dom­i­nated by a pile of boxes and other items where the piano used to be. It’s a good thing, too. In 19 days, the truck pulls up and the movers load all of those boxes. In the mean­time, I’m also pack­ing for our trip to France. Prob­a­bly won’t be able to blog from there, but I’ll update when we get back, for sure.

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By David Drucker | Filed in Moving, Pets | June 16, 2005 7:03 pm

6 Comments to “Packing, Selling and Packing”

  1. Avatarpapijoe
    Posted: Jun 23rd, 2005 at 11:11 am
    1

    Is it too late to con­vince more of your like-minded friends to join you? Per­haps if you set some goals now you could have a core group for an ex-pat community.

    Would your whole com­pany con­sider relocating?

    I’ve been to Canada, and believe me, there’s TONS of room up there.

    Keep us posted.
  2. AvatarAlphaMu42
    Posted: Jun 23rd, 2005 at 12:00 pm
    2

    From “About Me”

    “I�m going to be writ­ing about this in my blog, and hope that it will pro­vide some insight and tips to oth­ers who might be think­ing about doing the same thing.”

    Damn, I sure hope so!
    Per­haps you can char­ter a bus with Alex Bald­win, Whoopie Gold­berg, Bar­bara Striesand, Susan Saran­don, Rosie O’Donnell, The Dixie Chicks, Cher
    Phil Don­ahue, David Gephin, Mar­tin Sheen…
  3. AvatarDavid
    Posted: Jun 24th, 2005 at 6:02 am
    3

    Well, Papi­Joe and alphamu42, I’m assum­ing this is more of the ‘Bye-bye Lib­eral, and don’t let the door hit you on your way out.’ In a curi­ous way, you’ve only made it clearer why those who don’t agree should leave. It used to be, in the Amer­ica that I grew up in, that diver­sity in points of view was some­thing that we (Amer­i­cans) liked to keep. Now, those who don’t agree are told to get lost. I got the message.

    As for con­vinc­ing my like-minded friends to join me (and inci­den­tally, I’m a big fan of all the celebri­ties alphamu42 men­tions, despite some alter­na­tive spellings of their names), I’ve talked about emmi­grat­ing to many of them, and there are many obsta­cles (many of them prac­ti­cal) to mak­ing the move: fam­ily, career, sav­ings, edu­ca­tion, etc. For my wife and me, we are just lucky that our sit­u­a­tion made it pos­si­ble and per­haps even prac­ti­cal. As for my whole com­pany relo­cat­ing, since I’m an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant, that will cer­tainly be the case.

    By the way, I’m writ­ing this while on vaca­tion in that coun­try that Repub­li­cans love to hate, France. Guess what? They have uni­ver­sal
    health care, mass tran­sit that works, a mid­dle class that isn’t los­ing ground each year, and they aren’t up to their necks in a war in the Mid­dle East. I’m also not count­ing incred­i­ble food, great wine, and spec­tac­u­lar art. I’m hop­ing that the oppo­si­tion at the very least can appre­ci­ate a good bot­tle of Ros�
  4. Avatarpapijoe
    Posted: Jun 24th, 2005 at 7:04 am
    4

    David, you vol­un­teered to leave, no one is forc­ing you. If “lib­er­als” (left­ists like your­self have co-opted that term) want to aban­don the US and shift the demo­graph­ics in favor of con­ser­v­a­tives, more power to you. The only time I’ve ever heard red state Amer­i­can tell “lib­er­als” to get lost is when they were lec­tured on how morally polit­cally and cul­tur­ally supe­rior other coun­tries were to the US. And clearly you (like Kerry, Dean, et al.) would pre­fer to make this coun­try less like the US and more like Europe:
    By the way, I’m writ­ing this while on vaca­tion in that coun­try that Repub­li­cans love to hate, France. Guess what? They have uni­ver­sal
    health care, mass tran­sit that works, a mid­dle class that isn’t los­ing ground each year, and they aren’t up to their necks in a war in the Mid­dle East. I’m also not count­ing incred­i­ble food, great wine, and spec­tac­u­lar art. I’m hop­ing that the oppo­si­tion at the very least can appre­ci­ate a good bot­tle of Ros�.

    If you pre­fer a stag­nant econ­omy choked by enti­tle­ments, shrink­ing mar­kets, ris­ing anti-Semitism, increas­ing jihadi vio­lence, euthana­sia, and declin­ing birthrates, great. But most American’s don’t. You aren’t leav­ing because we kicked you out, your leav­ing because even Cam­bridge is too Amer­i­can for you.
    Don’t get me wrong David, you seem like a basi­cally nice guy and I appre­ci­ate that you are nowhere near as ven­omous as most left­ists. As a for­mer bohemian, “lib­eral” and Cam­bridge res­i­dent, I under­stand this Arca­dian EUtopia that you are pur­su­ing. I was in its thrall too. But 9–11 broke the spell for me.
    We “lib­er­als” have done a lot of dam­age to this coun­try. If you want to pre­tend you are an exile, fine, but the truth is you are sim­ply a Man With­out a Coun­try now.

    BTW did you like my blog?
  5. Avatarpapijoe
    Posted: Jun 24th, 2005 at 1:36 pm
    5

    Here’s some­thing to do while you’re in Paris:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1509317,00.html

    Whether it changes you opin­ion of the moral supe­ri­or­ity of the French is another matter…
  6. AvatarAdam
    Posted: Jun 26th, 2005 at 5:39 pm
    6

    Hi, I am con­duct­ing a sur­vey of Boston area blog­gers for my Mas­ters dis­ser­ta­tion and have selected your Blog through its list­ing on http://www.boston-online.com. Your par­tic­i­pa­tion in my online sur­vey would be greatly appre­ci­ated and would only take around 5 min­utes to com­plete. The sur­vey can be reached at the fol­low­ing address
    http://FreeOnlineSurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?id=101775

    Thank you!
    Adam
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