Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Two continent living

So my father has decided to move out of the place we've been living in since I was 12. And for some inexplicable reason, he doesn't want to move the random combined junk of four children that is now taking up most of the volume of the current place. I know- WTF?! So apparently, we are no longer allowed to use the parental home as free storage space. The nerve.

Anyway, I swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster I don't have much there. Well, okay, yeah, so when I moved to Dublin, I did send nine years of accumulated stuff from Seattle down to San Francisco. But I was going to move back and reclaim it after the post-doc! At any rate, I got rid of almost everything via Craig's List (have I mentioned how disappointed I am in the lame-ass Craig's List over here?), but I couldn't part with my books. I think, in the end, I sent down 14 or 15 printer-paper-carton-sized boxes, 10 or 11 of which were filled with books. Not too bad, really.

This was back in the day when the US post office still had a book rate option for shipping, so those boxes cost only, like, 10 bucks each to send across three states. However, they've gotten rid of this option, and posting my stuff to the UK would cost crazy amounts of money. So while The Limey and I were over there, we weren't going to waste our free baggage allowance, were we?



Between the two of us, we were allowed 4 bags, 50 lbs (23 kgs) each. So we filled two suitcases solely with books, and stuffed books anywhere we could in the other two to get up to the maximum weight (with some leeway; I wasn't going to get fined for being a pound over!). With this, and some culling of the collection, I've gone down to 6 boxes of books left at my father's, plus a few boxes of random bits and pieces. I think we're going to look into getting those sent over by sea freight or something.

The problem is...uh...where are we going to put all these books now?

2 comments:

Lien said...

That is hilarious!! I do the same thing where I use my parent's house as free storage. Luckily I own that house so no way can they decide they want to free up the spare room. And most of my stuff is books as well.

Woolly Stuff said...

I never thought I'd be able to part with my books - I carted them from NY to Albuquerque, where the collection grew. I carted them back from Abq to NY, and then from apartment to apartment to apartment. When I moved here, though, I put my foot down. I left behind about 12 boxes of books, on the ... gulp... sidewalk. They got gobbled up, every last one of them.