Moving Out, Moving In

So I realize that I haven’t posted on this blog for well over a week. I am sure if there was anyone reading it, I’ve lost them. I’ve been working on moving our household and keeping up with all the other irons I’ve got in fires. Moving has not been the miserable experience I expected it to be. Before this move, we had just moved back in August. We had been in that house for 5 years and it was big enough that we could collect a lot of stuff and spread it out. In that move, we consolidated the junk and boxed it. We really didn’t get rid of much. This time, we moved into a smaller house where there isn’t room to spread accumulated junk out. We have to get rid of stuff. As I sit in my new breakfast nook/homeschool room typing (with the rest of my family sleeping peacefully), we still have stuff in the old house. It is both a blessing and a curse that our previous landlords have allowed us to “stay” in the other house until the end of this month. It is nice because we have the freedom to move over at a sane pace, allowing us to keep up with school and work. It is bad because it allows us to leave stuff there and feel nice and comfy in our new house….even though we have a lot of purging to do.

Let me digress because the name landlord just struck me. My wife and I owned our home for 9 years (living the American Dream and participating in the ownership society envisioned by the neoconservatives) and have only recently returned to the status of renter. The term landlord has a real feudal vibe to it. That is because it is a term that came out of feudal systems like that of medieval England. You, know that system where the few that owned land allowed the landless masses to work on it. The peasants were bound to the land of their landlord and usually paid rent in the form of produce or labor. The landlord had a paternalistic responsibility—to provide peasants protection and justice. I am sure the way it all worked varied from lord to lord, but in many cases the peasants were powerless, exploited, and effectively functioned as indentured servants or slaves. Well, the situation has changed somewhat. I am really only bound to my lord’s land for the tenure of my lease and the protection and justice I am provided in return is pretty narrowly defined. Still, that name makes me feel uneasy.

So back to moving; I feel like I was smart about it this time. Instead of renting a truck and relying on my labor and that of friends and my ever loyal graduate students, this time I hired a couple of movers and a truck. They moved all the big stuff out of my old house and into the new one. They were big, strong guys. They did it all in about 3 hours. The cheaper way (friends and graduate students) took a few more hours, but most importantly it was very taxing on me. This time, not so much. I watched, I directed, and I shoved stuff in their direction. It was a lot easier. Sure, it may have cost a bit more, but it was different in a very important way. I didn’t break a sweat. In case anyone has forgotten, everything always comes back to me, me, me.

Now, my chance to sweat will come. We still have a basement full of boxes and bins that need to matriculate to the new house. The thing is, we don’t have as much room for them in the new house. That means before the next migration, we need to go through all that stuff and get rid of as much as we can. Now, I am hoarder by nature. I don’t think the main reason is because I don’t want to get rid of stuff. I know what I want or need to keep and what I don’t. I hoard because I am incurably lazy. It is easier to throw stuff in a pile than throw away the useless stuff. It is easier to shove junk in a box than it is to go through it and figure out what I really want and don’t want. If you let this approach go long enough, stuff builds up. At this point, my lazy nature is attacked from both sides. I don’t want to have to go through all that stuff, but I don’t want to have to bring it all to the new house. And I really don’t want to have to shove it all up in the attic. There is lots of room in the attic of the new house, but the problem is that you can only get it up there by using one of those folding ladders. That means getting heavy stuff up there or big stuff up there is going to be hard. As a general rule, I avoid hard if I can. In this case, I am forced to choose the lesser of two efforts. It will be easier to throw stuff away than it will be to move it into the attic. And, if I play my cards right my wife will do most of that work anyway.

I may not be obese anymore, but I am still fat and I am still lazy.