Wheat-dogg's World

Moving is a pain in the ass. Moving yourself overseas is even more so.

Since school ended in May, I’ve have been trying to condense our belongings into a somewhat more manageable size, since our son’s spare bedroom will be our storage locker for the next year. That means being ruthless in discarding or selling stuff.

It’s not easy, lemme tell ya.

In my younger days, it would have been a lot easier. The hardest things to leave behind would have been my LPs. As you get older, you tend to acquire possessions like barnacles on a boat, and sorting through those is difficult. If you have kids, you want to keep their childhood stuff – photos, awards, newspaper clippings, drawings. If you’re the oldest child (or an only child, as I am), with deceased parents, you also have all their stuff to deal with.

It’s not been hard to let go of our furniture, save for two or three “nice” items, most of it is disposable. The nice items are going to our two older sons’ places. The rest are either being sold or handed off to the local Goodwill a few miles down the road.

After decades of being a book hoarder, I finally lost the yen to keep every single book I have touched year ago. Books are heavy and bulky. They’re a pain to pack and unpack. They’re like a boat anchor, tethering you to one place. Still, I have two or three boxes of books I cannot bear to part with, including some I plan to take with me to China.

We watch movies a lot, and record (god knows why) stuff off the TV. (We’ll never watch it again. Really.) After months of hemming and hawing, we finally gave up on VHS tapes, deciding to save only those we will never be able to replace and disposing of the rest. DVD packaging, meanwhile, is pretty to look at, but like books takes up space and weighs a bit. The DVDs are now stuffed into binders.

Small kitchen appliances — the bane of my existence — are useless in China without a ton of AC converters and transformers. They’re all going bye-bye. Ditto cups, mugs, glasses, plates, bowls, pots, pans, knives, forks, etc., etc. (Imagine bringing a wok and a bamboo steaming basket INTO China!) With a few exceptions, they are all replaceable. We don’t need to keep them.

Our remaining car will go either to our 16-year-old niece of Hannah Montana extras fame or the VA. Our clothes, other than the stuff we will probably need to wear in China, is going to the Goodwill. Clothes are cheap there. My desktop computer, after I sanitize its hard drives, will go to my former place of employment.

That’s the easy stuff, the stuff that has no sentimental or intrinsic monetary value. It sounds radical to dispose of so much, but the alternatives are less savory. We could keep all of it, spending money to store it someplace. (Waste of money.) We could ship it to China. (Ha ha ha … no.)

I envy those corporate types who get move their entire households abroad because their firms are paying for the moves. Professionals come in, pack up their stuff, and sometime later it all reappears in their new domicile. Plebes like me don’t have that luxury. It’s a DIY thing for us.

So for peace of mind and preservation of capital, the non-essential and replaceable go. The essential and irreplaceable stay.

What does that leave? Obviously, the things you need to bring with you — clothes, toiletries, shoes, laptaps, teaching materials (in my case) — compacted down into one or two large checked bags. There’s the dog, who cannot come to China and would not survive a 15-hour flight in any event, who needs a new home.

And all the sentimental, quasi-historical items that older people acquire and for whatever purpose want to preserve for themselves and perhaps for future generations.

For the last two months, I have been sorting through the sentimental stuff that my grandparents and parents — and we — have accumulated, scanning what I judge worth preserving, and (gasp!) throwing away about half of it. For a genetically-predisposed packrat, the throwing-away part is heart-wrenching, you have no idea. (A less biased or genetically challenged sorter could have probably pared the detritus down another 25%, I reckon.)

Remember those LPs I mentioned? Still have them, but not for much longer. They have been gradually been converted to mp3′s, using a really nice linear-tracking turntable, a preamp and my desktop PC. (Yea, Audacity!) I can now fit my entire music collection (CDs and LPs) on one portable hard drive, instead of several boxes.

I’m pretty much done with the sorting and scanning. The music is nearly all digitized. I’m selling some things on eBay and craigslist, giving a lot away to the Goodwill, and I know where most of what we still have sitting around is going.

Now if modern technology could just perfect digitizing people, pets and luggage and squirting them through the Internet to their destinations …