July 2006

Monthly Archive

blog virgin

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USA, 17 Jul 2006 --

Andris may be an experienced blog writer, but I am a blog virgin. I’m also a wiki virgin and a discussion board virgin, and I never use chat rooms or anything like that.  I have published a several sites to the web but for the most part I am afraid of the web as a place where I can be easily embarrassed or cyber-stalked. I’m not sure if this feeling is strange because I am a web developer, or if the feeling is caused by being a web developer.

Anyway, I’m a pretty private person so this is a strange feeling. So why am I blogging? Well, because Andris is and I need to represent the “Cara” side of Andris and Cara. Also, we have many loved ones who are curious about what we are doing, and we have other friends who regularly read their friends’ blogs as a way of keeping up with them. However, I am thinking of this as a journal for myself that I can look back on years from now. Taking this trip, leaving our jobs, and moving all of our stuff was a major decision and this is a turning-point of sorts that I will want to document for myself. Hopefully, this blog, in hindsight, won’t be as embarrassing as the diary of my 13-year-old self I unearthed while packing, and instead will be  insightful.  Also, if I pretend this is just a  journal I don’t need to worry about  what everyone thinks of my writing or ask the question “Does anyone really care about what I’m writing?”

So as Andris described, we moved many, many boxes. We started packing on Monday and Tuesday with neatly catagorized boxes labeled “Books: Fiction” and “Books: Physics/Math” which degenerated into boxes labeled “Misc: fly swatter, etc.” by Wednesday evening. We gave away, threw away, and sold a lot of stuff, and we still had a lot of stuff after that. The most interesting part was trying to picture where and when some of these boxes will be opened again, and I just hope it is somewhere interesting.

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We like to move it, move it.

by andris
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USA, 17 Jul 2006 --

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It’s been a whirlwind week of carrying heavy things up and down (but mostly up) many, many stairs…but Cara and I managed to move everything we own from our (sadly now former) Dupont Circle apartment to my mom’s attic in Columbus.  Having had the pleasure of parallel parking a 14 foot UHaul with attached “auto mover” in downtown DC, I can definitely say I hope to never do it again.

We (foolishly?) thought that the temporary No Parking signs we put up 72 hours in advance of the move would at least guarantee us a perfect parking spot for our 35 feet of UHaul joy, but we returned from the UHaul office at 9 in the morning to find a shiny new black Mazda wagon occupying the majority of our Emergency No Parking zone.  After a brief dispute on the karmic repercussions of having our new best friend in the black Mazda towed by DC’s finest, we got lucky and a few other cars on the block left.  This left room for me to get the beast out of the middle of the street and allowed us to keep our karma intact.The move itself can best be described as epic.  As Cara and I carried box after box (after box, after box) out to the truck and having just seen Madagascar the night before, I found myself endlessly repeating the line “We like to move it, move it” in my head.  (If you haven’t seen the movie, there’s this scene where a bunch of lemurs have a dance party involving the techno song “I like to move it,” good times.)

Fortunately we managed to stick to our “no injuries” rule and the only casualty was the Ikea wardrobe that I managed to haul all the way out our back door and into the alley before watching it rotate in slow motion off the UHaul dolly to land face down on the attached mirror.  I smuggled the remains into a dumpster at an undisclosed location and moved on.  It’s rare that you get to see the net volume that you and your posessions take up in the world all in one place.  We have too much stuff.

So, the adventure begins…29 days until we get on the plane to Bangkok!

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