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OMG! I didn’t mean to sell that! It happens. It happened to us today when we visited the just-posted estate-sale website of our stuff. It’s an exercise in folly. And fate. And, well, surrender.
Surrender
20 Wednesday Mar 2013
Posted in Travel
Tag Archives: packing
Venus and Mars
18 Monday Mar 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
With a sigh of relief, everything destined for our storage unit is now there – and there’s room left over. It’s kismet. However, two disparate storage strategies have emerged, vindicating the Venus-and-Mars interpretation of the gender binary.
The Half-Life of the Incipient Expat
17 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in Travel
We glance around to see what time it is, and the clocks are gone. We go out to sit on the balcony, and the chairs are gone. We look for clothes in the drawers, and the clothes are gone. We sit down to watch Jeopardy, and the television is Just. Not. There.
Like Living on Death Row
12 Tuesday Mar 2013
Posted in Travel
We’ve collected numerous bars of elegant soap over the years, all destined for future use. You know how it is: you spend a night in a chic hotel, you take home the soap. We’ve visited a few chic hotels in our days; we’ve snitched some pretty elegant soap.
Florencia the Frontier
08 Friday Mar 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
A red letter day! We put the first boxes in storage. This gave Tom a chance to rent his preferred method of transportation, a pickup truck. (Tom and truck pictured above.) It was a black Nissan Zipcar named Florencia the Frontier. (If you don’t have Zipcars in your ‘hood, it’s an hourly vehicle rental service with cars parked conveniently around the city, and they all have names that go with their species, such as Harry Hundai and Felicia Ford. It’s adorable.)
Box Town
05 Tuesday Mar 2013
“Shambles” is much too nice of a word to describe our apartment — or our lives, for that matter — as we remove our worldly goods from closets and shelves and box them up for sale and storage. In a two-minute video, Louise conducts a tour of our Portland apartment — or what’s left of it — 25 days before we begin the expat life.
It’s the Little Things That Hurt
06 Tuesday Nov 2012
Posted in Sentiments, Travel
I was chatting with my son Ted about our adventure, and admitted I was a little scared. (Don’t worry—I have run all the cognitive therapy questions and I know intellectually that leaving home is no scarier than staying home. But I will allow myself to be scared anyway, because it’s a normal reaction to a big forthcoming change.)
The Half-Empty Bag
05 Friday Oct 2012
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The optimist claims his cup is “half full.” Usually. But today, this optimist says “half empty.” And it’s not a cup, it’s a bag.
Bag and Baggage
07 Friday Sep 2012
Posted in Accommodations
Tags
While Tom writes rhapsodic thoughts about the true meaning of home, I am pondering luggage. He is a poet; I am a Capricorn.
