The Storm Before the Calm

Lots going to storage, we're on the road to FL tomorrow or Tuesday....

Obstacles: over, under or around (Monica)

The realities of moving every 6 months require that we be light. It is economically and environmentally unfriendly to move a household of furniture and personal items across the country twice a year. It would have cost about $4,000 to move a 1 bedroom apartment from California to Florida.

Here are 2 solutions that we employed to work around this obstacle:

1) Rent Furnished and just take your clothes and personal items.

This is what we are doing for Miami. Renting a fully furnished condo was a bit more expensive, but considering the cost savings in not moving our furniture, it was a bargain. I figure for 6 months, the difference in renting furnished will be $1,200 vs. $4,000 to move our stuff, and we get to live with cool, modern "design out-of-reach" type furniture. When we leave for Miami, we will be taking only what fits in the back of the Element, plus the 2 bikes on the roof racks.

2) Garage Sales - buy when you get there, sell when you leave.

When we moved from Portland to Sacramento 7 months ago, we did not bring a lot of furniture. We needed to supplement what we brought. 2 days of craigslist and yard sales and about $120 purchased the following: 2 leather chairs as you might find at Dania or Scan Design or another high-end Scandinavian furniture store, a coffee table, a dining room table that we used as a desk, 2 dinning room chairs, a TV, a vacuum cleaner, some side-tables and some pots for plants. The photo above is a picture of what we sold 2 weeks ago at a 4 hour yard sale. The items we sold consisted mostly of what we had bought in April (plus a few other things like Joe's naked lady painting). What didn't sell, went immediately to Goodwill, but I think we grossed just over $100. Bottom line: we effectively rented a half a house of furniture for 6 months for about $20!

I'm sure we will be faced with other obstacles with our next move. It is fun to find creative ways around the challenges. This is one of the reasons we are doing this.

Of Apparent Importance (Joe)

You might think the details of moving across the country would suck all the romance out of the operation.

Quite the contrary. In the planning of a trip, one assures oneself the trip will be taken.

While I work in New England, my beautiful partner works away back in California arranging our move: Obtaining signatures from barely-competent real estate agents^[1] on our lease, adding her boyfriend to her suddenly-Floridized auto insurance^[2], and lining up a storage unit for the possessions we've decided to keep, leaving our stuff at a variety of locations like consumerist pod people^[3].

It's that third one that's been an interesting path. I don't know about you, but I've always had a particular path when decluttering: I ask myself

"What would I have to do to replace this if I needed it later and didn't have it?"

It leads me to keep some mementos, but fewer than you think: After all, do I need to keep every single crayon drawing my kids did for me when they were 8, or can I keep a select few to convince myself of their nascent genius? Do I need every class picture from 1st grade on up? You know the answer.

Find me. It ain't that hard, I was on the short side.

Bottom line, we're looking at a couple small (twin) mattresses and deciding their fate. Monica says to me today, if they fit in storage, great, if not we can donate them. My response was "Let's save them if we can. There's a cross-country 'Sleep in the back of the Honda Element' trip in our future."

Could we get another couple mattresses anywhere? Sure. Sometimes, though, it feels right to hold on to a symbol, to help sculpt your future. Possessions are kinda funny that way. Happy travels.

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[1] The only thing more frightening than the property owner's agent-- Who doesn't return phone calls and takes a minimum of 8 hours to answer emails-- is the prospect that, given the law of averages, the reason s/he's still in business is that there are people worse at this job than they are. Monica and I took turns on the phone last night exchanging adjectives to describe their 'professionalism' for a solid 25-30 seconds. I'm told this is something endemic to Miami Beach, where "that guy driving your taxi can probably sell you a house."
[2] Predictably, higher. Lots higher. The feeling of being Floridized is apparently what spawned the phrase "Next time at least kiss me first."
[3] Just Portland and Sacramento. For now. No, really.

Pondering the manifestation of small treasures (Monica)

It was on a walk at Ma-le’l Dunes beach at low tide. We’d seen hundreds of sand dollars all week, but none that were whole. I said to him I’ve never seen a whole one before, that they must be very fragile, and therefore rare to find without damage.

Then, that time at low tide, I thought to myself, if one were to be found whole, it would likely be here at low tide. Almost instantly, one appeared. It was nearly unbroken, was still a whole disk, but it had a small hole in the front. I presented it to him. He said, I should keep looking for a perfect one. I told him not to be greedy, that we were lucky to find this one.

Then, 10 minutes or so later, after pondering my response, I decided it was silly to dismiss the possibility of finding a perfect sand dollar. I started to expect that I would find one, and that I just needed to walk ‘over there’. I walked ‘over there’ for about a minute and it appeared: the perfectly whole and unbroken sand dollar.

Was it just a coincidence all of this internal dialog that I had, or did I manifest the shell as in ‘The Secret’. I hate to think it was the later because magical thinking is simply delusional (my grandmother was practicing magical thinking when she decided she was recovering from her brain tumor days before her death). On the other hand, a part of me likes to think that perhaps we do have a way of influencing the physical with our beliefs.

Or, perhaps, and I’d like to think this is most likely: I just needed to keep looking.

Journey to the Center of your Mind (Joe)

I started doing yoga to indulge her. Because that's what I do, not just because I'm a Wonderful Partner (hee), but if it's important to her, if she sees value in it, then by definition there must be something there. This has been going on for about 6 weeks now, her telling me "You don't have to keep doing it if you don't want to," and me tossing back my snide little barbs so she knows I'm Doing This For Her. When I tell her "I function better when I'm in a relationship," that's what I'm talking about. A lot of the good things I do for myself, I might not already be doing if she wasn't there crooking her finger at me to come along with her.

So yes, the physical aspect of yoga is what drew me to it, to unkink my 50-ish Eastern European frame.. Or at least that's the reason I rationalized to keep going. I could sense rather than feel that there was something else there, some deeper spiritual aspect, even though I resisted, cackling internally when the New Agey instructors prattled on about "breathing into your root Chakra," and "releasing your negative energy."

Then last night, a switch flipped. It was the first time in class where no one else mattered, as far as my need to rank myself vs. my fellow humans. I decided to push myself, I decided to see what I had in me. I decided it was time, and how it all came out, was completely up to me.

It felt incredible.

For maybe the first time in my life, I'm glimpsing the person I can grow into if I wish. I'm understanding how the moat I built around the castle didn't just keep the other horses out, it kept me in. I'm understanding that calcification can happen in the body as well as the mind (And that ain't pretty), and it's best to catch that early.

My bottom line? Sure, this blog, our trip, our 6-Month Sojourn might seem to some people like we're indulging in some hair-brained scheme that leverages a Geographical Cure. That's not it at all. What this experience taught me is that when you're adventurous in your mind, the adventure in your life just manifests naturally.

Happy Savasana, y'all.

P.S. Yoga's cool, but don't be This Guy.

'In Seed Time, Learn. In Harvest, Teach...' (Joe)

I'm not saying I never want to hunker down in some log cabin with only a fireplace and a pile of logs in between me and some forecast that ends with "...and a wind chill of...".

I'm just saying that, for now, I've had enough winter in my life. Every body needs to feel the passing of the seasons. This winter, though, the turkey will be carved at a restaurant somewhere between here and Florida, on our drive to our new home. When we get there, Santa Claus is just as likely to be in board shorts singing "Feliz Navidad" when the inevitable onslaught of Christmas comes.

There will be a winter with that fireplace and that forecast, and when it happens, I will love and embrace it because I chose it.

This year, though, I'm polishing my Spanish and finding bicycle routes I can discover in February.

'In seed time, learn. In harvest, teach. In winter, enjoy.'

--William Blake

Too High a Spirit (Joe)

We had dinner with the friends we're housesitting for last night before their wee-hours flight this morning. They're more Monica's friends than mine, so I asked: Why this vacation out of the country, and why now? The short answer was, because we're not getting any younger, because we have close friends who had Bad Things happen and never got to realize their dreams, and because every day is a gift.

Someone who merely parrots this as from a greeting card, that sentiment rings hollow. They merely articulated, though, what I'd been trying to put my finger on about them since we met earlier that afternoon. They actually do live their whole life that way. What he is, what she is, comes through so clearly, so transparently in the look of their home, the work they do-and-love, the love they show their dogs (present) and their adult children (not present, but so much on their minds), and to me especially, a stranger before today but treated like a college frat brother. My own openness to revealing myself to new people is palpable to me here, reflected in the warmth it allows me to get back. Instant karma.

In addition to running his own business, our host is active in providing quick-construction housing to stricken areas here (Think Katrina) and abroad. I asked him how this came to be a passion of his, and if I hadn't I suspect he never would have told the story, he doesn't seem the self-aggrandizing sort. Almost sheepishly, he wove the tale of his activist post-college days and an "If not for the Grace of God there go I" tragedy that galvanized his future path. It struck me that I don't meet too many men who I instantly respect, admire.

So I don't know that I am privy to the complete reality that encompasses the reason Monica and I have undertaken Doing A 180, for "now we see in a mirror, darkly," if you will. But today, one of the reasons is that I am opening myself up to more people like this. A one-time meeting or a lifelong friend, it's clear that I am charged to understand the give-and-take of the situation, and the gifts of our Selves that we give each other in these small ways.