What do we call it?

Before we left Beth’s dad told her “two moves is like one catastrophic fire”. He is right. We got rid of a lot. It is surprising to see how ruthless you can be about the possessions that you have accumulated over the years. Objects that meant a lot to you now don’t seem very important because the room that you have to ship is limited. Of course the limitation is financial. It is expensive to send a box over here, the books you bought during university (college over here means prep school), that you haven’t opened up since then, become expensive…..again.

Just because you state a cliché doesn’t make it any less true. We were going to peel away layers of an onion. I know that Beth doesn’t like onions but if you peel away layers of a tomato you just get a big mess.

We started by getting rid of what was truly not necessary, namely garbage, papers that had been sitting around, recycling, and clothes that I had purchased in 1985. That was the easy part, each time it becomes exponentially more difficult. My 1995 clothes that I had just recently stopped wearing still had some life in them, after all a hole in the right knee doesn’t mean that the left knee isn’t still good.

Hour after hour we labored at this task, which items move with us, which go into storage, who among our friends and family wants this or that, and will Goodwill take the rest?
After weeks of this pain and misery we had finally found it. Our life had been boiled down, and the essence of our onion, was in eight bags of clothing, and four boxes.

Two of the boxes are our bikes. We knew that we would want these over here, and we had heard that bikes were very expensive and whoever had told us that is right. Generally things are costly, and if we were to buy bicycles in Melbourne I think we would have gone without them.

The other two boxes are filled with the few books we couldn’t part with, electronics like power cords and ipod essentials, a few sheets and towels, files that we will need, etc.
Strangely we did not bring very many photos. I think the reason for that is the computer. Most of our pictures are stored in a digital format. I guess we can print off whatever we want.

We were not able to ship any clothing, so we elected to pay the money for extra baggage. Strangely enough this is the cheapest way to get things from Minnesota to Melbourne. Since I could only pack things that were purchased in this millennia, it was easier for me. It was more difficult for Beth because of work suits and besides she is much more stylish than I am. Shoes are always the biggest issue because they take up so much space.

One of our prized possessions that we had to find a way to pack was a gift that was received from Alice for Beth’s bridal shower.
For some reason it has become the symbol of home and the people that we care about. I am not sure how this little guy made it through customs, but we are happy that he did. As you can see from the couch and pillow in the background he is the most colorful and artistic piece in the apartment.

The problem now is we don’t know what to call him/her. So we are taking solicitations. If you have an idea let us know and we will consider it, of course Alice will have the final say.

Cheers

ET