The house we are moving moved to is around the same size as our current house, but with much less storage space. That in itself doesn’t bug me–I want a house to live in, after all, not just a place to store our stuff. But over the years, Geoff and I have accumulated lots and lots of stuff. We’ve done a pretty good job of getting rid of some things, but there is still so much. And as we get got closer to the moving date, I am finding myself less able to consider each individual item and make a decision about getting rid of it or not. Compounding the problem is the fact that much (most?) the stuff isn’t mine. It’s really hard and energy draining to debate about keeping or getting rid of stuff with Geoff, especially when we are already stressed with the move, so it goes into a box.

It’s not that I don’t have useless crap of my own, but in the interest of reducing the crap in my life, I’m a little more ruthless about getting rid of stuff.

Anyway, I have a feeling what will happen is we’ll move all this stuff to the new place  and then we’ll end up getting rid of more as we figure out what just doesn’t fit. Seems a very inefficient way to do things but oh well.

Postnote- this is indeed how it is working. The more Geoff unpacks, the more willing he is to get rid of stuff. But I’ve been doing most of the unpacking, which may not be the best idea, now that I think about it.

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Well, I THOUGHT I was going to blog more anyway. Today is my first normalish day back after moving, traveling, and doing family stuff. And now Geoff and I have a house to get ready to sell and another house to unpack. Today, the plan is to get the food over to the new house (and throw out a lot in the process) so we can actually cook in our new, bigger kitchen.

Our move to the new place went very well – we ended up with 6 people helping, which was enough that we finished up in less than 4 hours. Of course, by “finished up” I mean “moved over everything that was packed and ready to go.” There was still a lot of odds and ends that needed to be dealt with. And, at the new house we ended up putting much of the furniture in the garage- so the new house is pretty bare apart from all the boxes. We also left quite a bit of furniture at the old house for staging purposes, so there’s not much to sit on (feel free to visit, but we’ll probably end up sitting on floor cushions.)

The day after we moved, I went to Washington DC to attend a couple of conferences (Digital Humanities 2009 and THATCamp, which I will blog about over at nirak.net). I had three days in which to do touristy stuff, and I took in most of the art museums, part of the museum of natural history, and the folklife festival. In particular, I really liked the Stanley William Hayter exhibit in the national gallery and the “Strange Bodies” exhibit in the basement of the Hirshhorn. I even got to meet up with a friend and fellow artist from Lincoln while in DC, which was great. I love going to museums with others that view the work obsessed with the question “how did they do that?”

My mom was kind enough to lend me her Verizon wireless internet card and cradlepoint while I was in DC- which I mostly used to get internet on my ipod touch. The experience made me want an iphone even more, but not so much I am willing to pay over $4300 over 2 years to own one.

The two conferences I went to (btw, these were not paid for by work) were really interesting and I was exhausted and my brain was full by the end. Monday I went to work 7:30 – 10:30 and after that went to a family obligation that lasted till 9:30 or so. I did some unpacking after that and tried to set up my computer only to find the install is broken somehow. So part or the plan for tonight is reinstalling Ubuntu (glad it’s Ubuntu because I have no clue where any of my system disks are). (update- install went w/o a hitch- smartest thing I ever did was putting the /home directory on another partition)

As we unpack we are making more tough decisions about what to get rid of. It’s a little easier to get rid of things now, as we don’t want to clutter the nice new house.