sixteen days--day zero

A lot has happened in what feels like a very short span out of my entire life.

Once again, we are moving. This is mostly due to economic reasons, given how little work I've been finding of late, so I'm not exactly contributing much to the household funds. The fact that a certain client still owes me thirty grand and has shown no sign of ponying up isn't helping either.

Starting tomorrow, I have sixteen days to try to whittle down our belongings, since the new place we'll be moving to is smaller. And, as usual, even though we have gottten rid of a lot of stuff before we came here, new things seemed to made it through our door since then, and we won't have room for it. Since we're not the types to adore cluttered living spaces (well, not too cluttered), and we don't buy into the massive movement that is self-storage here in America, we've got to weed out what's not needed before then, because it's the logical thing to do. At this point in time, logic does help with all the murky gray areas floating around.

I already jumped the gun a bit using freecycle tonight. I posted the first largish furniture item that just can't come with us. Sure, we'd love to try to sell some of the stuff we're getting rid of, but I tried that last time, when no one was admitting yet that this country was in a recession, and it didn't go so well, despite the fact that what we were trying to sell wasn't junk in any sense of the word, nor was it priced with high expectations of profit. So this time, there are a few things I'm still going to try to sell first, but everything else is first getting posted to my local freecycle list, and if it doesn't move by a week's time, I'll be listing it on the free area of Craig's List as well. I'm doing this because there's nothing wrong with what we're getting rid of, and I hate filling landfills with useful things.

I'll lose some time tomorrow in the effort because the landlord will be showing this place, so I have to somehow make a place that is in the midst of packing not look like a tornado hit it. But the rest of the time I have available, I'll be spending working towards my goal.

We're getting a 16 foot POD to put our stuff in, and we only have our wee Insight as well for moving. Since we don't have a time overlap of one place to the other, that means either we're going to have to find a staging ground for some things (even if I whittle down what we plan on, I still don't think what needs to will all fit in the 16 foot POD), or we'll have to let go of more than we care to. I'm hoping it doesn't come to that, so hopefully we'll find a place we can stash some things in between to save on money, because we really don't want to rent a van or whatever for the awkward period of February 28th-March 1st. Money is really tight right now, and with all the things that always crop up near moving time, we just don't want to lay out any more than we know we're going to end up paying for when everything's done.

So wish me luck! I'll be trying to blog each night to talk about what I've managed to do or not do. I don't know if it will make for the most exciting reading, but maybe someone somewhere will find the recant of my experience useful.