Thinking Outside the Box

Wow, I thought I'd purged in preparation to sell my home, but I kept filling more and more boxes with "my stuff."  It took 4 men 5 hours to load the truck, and they said it was about 8000 pounds worth. In the past year I know of 2 families that have 'lost it all' in a house and/or apartment fire.Though pets sadly perished in one fire, thankfully no human beings were hurt or home at the time. That crossed my mind as I was packing---it's incredible what we amass over a few decades. If something happened to these things, it's just stuff, and stuff can replaced. it's true, I spent a lot of time and effort finding, buying, refinishing, defining a style. But you can't let stuff define you!

And so it was odd to see my life taped up into boxes...being hauled and hoisted first into a moving truck, then into two 12 foot containers, for eventual delivery to my new home in North Carolina.

An important "moving tip" is not to pack important documents or jewelry into a moving truck. It was a challenge deciding what to pack into my car for the 12 hour drive down south. I'm in a furnished apartment until I find a house. Aside from near-term essentials such as clothes, golf clubs and flipflops...I packed Doc-Boxes with vital records, current files, camera, chargers, my Dell desktop, etc... Pretty straightforward.

I packed all the costume jewelry into the truck, having taped and labeled that box "Odds and Ends, Office"

I watched it get passed from the truck to the POD, then I locked the POD... so it oughta be there when I empty it out on this end.

I mean, you can't write "Family Jewels. Silver. Heirlooms." You may as well write "STEAL ME!"

So for the box of real stuff that went into my car, I wrote 'Broken Puzzle Pieces" and howled with laughter when my friend Jill and I decided we should subtitle it, "Puzzle: Leopards lounging on leopard-print throws." That way, NO ONE would bother to open it.

Like I said, don't let your stuff define you!