Moving day, part 1

Nika (my stepdaughter) is moving to California. She’s lived in our house for the past eighteen months or so, and she brought a lot of stuff with her. In order to make space, Alla and I removed clothing from our closets, extra blankets from our cupboards, and other stuff we knew we could live without. We ended up living without that stuff for about a year longer than we expected, which meant that we had a little less variety than usual in our wardrobes. Not surprisingly, we lived just fine without so much clothing and now that I have it back I plan to go through it and give some of it to charity.

Still, it felt a little bit like Christmas to open up the storage locker and find clothing I’d almost forgotten about. Nika and I loaded Alla’s and my things into a rented truck and drove them home. Then we re-loaded the truck with everything Nika’s been using for the past 18 months. She already had a lot of things in storage, including furniture, linens, art and home appliances. Yesterday we added most of her clothing, books, art supplies, and other household items. We had to pack the truck carefully going back to the storage locker in order to transport everything in one trip, but we succeeded. And it all fit in the storage locker.

As I look at the amount of free space in the storage locker, I think I’m going to have an interesting challenge next week when the moving pod arrives. Nika is escaping in advance, and it’ll be my privilege to move everything from her storage locker to her moving pod. The interesting challenge comes because the moving pod is smaller than the storage locker. I’m confident that everything will fit, but I definitely won’t enjoy the luxury of wasting any space. I’ve got a lot of experience with moving, and I actually look forward to the challenge of fitting everything into the pod. I just don’t look forward to the labor involved, and dearly hope that Nika lines up one of her friends to help me with the lifting.