The Joys of Moving

Day 000 – July 22, 2011

The short reply to my choice of title is that there are no joys of moving. Moving can only be described as one of four settings: “Hell”, “quasi-Hell”, “Purgatory”, and “southern Utah” (Mental Note: Share that story for another post).

Your mileage may differ, but my recent moving experiences have all been complicated by “The Last Five Percent”. The last few weeks have seen this phenomenon come to bite me in the tuchus yet again. Here’s how it works…

When we first received the schedule from our moving company for when they would come to pack all our belongings for our sojourn to Peru, we found out we would have to sort our stuff into four piles:

1) Items to be stored in a warehouse in the States. These are items that we would not need for the next ### years we are in Lima. This was known as Storage.
2) Items that we would like in Lima, but did not need for 2-3 months. This was known as the Boat Shipment (BoSh).
3) Items that we would like in Lima and would need in 2-3 weeks. This was known as the Air Shipment (AiSh)
4) Items that we would like in Lima and that we would need upon arrival. This was known as Luggage.

During sorting, we quickly saw the rise of a fifth pile: CWNLN, which is not a very handy acronym for Crap We No Longer Needed, so we shortened our word for it and simply called it “Trash”.

After piles were made, yard sales were had, donations were given to charity, and boxes were readied, Day One (of three) of the Pack-Out arrived and 70% of our belongings went into either the Storage pile or the Trash pile.

(Aside: It was astounding to me to see just HOW MUCH stuff one can accumulate and how much of it, when push comes to shove, can be so casually tossed out.)

Days Two and Three saw the packing and carting away of the AiSh and BoSh piles which constituted 20% of our belongings.

The day before our flight left was spent packing away our Luggage pile into ten suitcases and five carry-on pieces of luggage. That accounted for 5% of the stuff we owned.

For those of you who have been playing along with a calculator realize that I have only accounted for 95% of the stuff in our house. As my wife and I surveyed our home, there was a variety of items strewn about the rooms, closets, drawers, nooks, and crannies of our abode that we had forgotten to pack in Storage, BoSh, AiSh, but these were items that could not be thrown away.

Since we were renting out our house, we couldn’t leave the items there so we had 24 hours to remove that Last Five Percent. Not the way I wanted to spend my last days in the States.

In the end, it was done through a variety of means including having my wife’s sister come and take all the cleaning supplies away, storing items with my wife’s parents, giving items away to neighbors, and decided (reluctantly) that some items just needed to be thrown out. All in all, and like I said, dealing with the stress of the Last Five Percent was a pain in the nalgitas (Spanish for tuchus).

We also reserved a small corner of our unfinished basement for a few items that fit none of the above categories in the paragraph above and we told our tenants about it. Hope they understand, but I simply could not part with my framed Seurat poster from the Art Institute of Chicago which I had forgotten was in the garage.

With our life in (not-so-) tiny little boxes, we boarded a plane to Newark and then to Lima.