What We've Been Up To: Packing, Tattoos, and Hoarders

Well friends, as you know this week has been a zero-sum dash to get all of our earthly possessions together in one place and ready for a four-day cross-country trip.

This is mostly the reason why I've been so absent on blogs lately.  My Bloglovin' feed is almost to 300 new posts...yee-ikes!  I'm taking a break from the throwing away of things moving now, though, to give you an idea of what our week has been like.

To begin I'll tell you that early in the week I decided to grant total control of packing over to my husband. I wouldn't pack or throw anything away until he told me to in order to protect myself from a full-on meltdown.  At one point he even told me he'd wait for me to leave before he packed because it was easier when I wasn't huffing around all stressed-like.

On Monday we slowly began putting stuff in trash bags and planning what we'd keep and what we'd take to the dump.  Because our new place is so much smaller than our current house we knew we'd be purging like mad people.  I don't know about you, but the feeling you get when you pack one tiny box and end up with 3 huge bags of trash is unparalleled.  I don't understand how people can become hoarders (but more on that later).

On Tuesday we puttered around some more and I got a [freehanded] skull tattoo!  This was actually a going-away present from Adam, who didn't think I had the guts to get a skull tattoo.  Well, ladies and gents, I proved him wrong.

This is just at the beginning--he drew the skull in sharpie on my leg first.

 

An interesting note about this tattoo, and I hope it doesn't come across incorrectly.  I posted the freehand drawing on Instagram as well as the final result and literally received maybe 3 "likes", as opposed to my much more "friendly" sugar-skull couple, which got maybe 15 likes and many comments.  I don't really care, nor does it particularly hurt my feelings, I just find it interesting which tattoos people choose to "like" and those they do not.  Like it or not, we in the blogging world (most of us are hipsters, and I include myself in that) share a lot of the same tattoo fads--mostly American traditional pieces, non-threatening sugar skulls, swallows, roses, craft tools, baking tools, etc. It's not a bad thing and really makes a lot of sense, since many of us share a lot of the same interests.  I've never really seen a skull like this around the blogosphere, so I suppose it just isn't a lot of people's cup of tea and that's okay. I joked to Rob that maybe if I slapped a raven and an Edgar Allen Poe quote next to this one it wouldn't look so scary to people.  

Anyway my friends, on Wednesday we had a huge dump extravaganza (I didn't mean for that to sound as gross as it does).  We took two truckfuls of crap to our local transfer station and it felt amazing, like losing a collective 100 lb of weight in a day amazing. Funny story, actually.  At our dump we have a "share shack," where you can leave still-good items for other people to take.  When we drove up to it we were surprised with how empty it was but started unloading some of our items, such as a computer desk, a small dresser, some shelving units, an end table, etc. Almost as soon as we drove up, a swarm of people came to look at everything we'd left behind.  One woman managed to grab our dresser not 30 seconds after we'd put it down.  Another guy grabbed the end table from Rob's hands, then grabbed a vacuum cleaner hose and a broken door.  He had a huge smile on his face and said in a thick Maine accent, "One man's trash is another's treasure!" We left heavy with the realization that we probably enabled more than one hoarder that day.

On Thursday we got the trailer and put most of our stuff in it.  I'm lucky that my husband is a packing ninja and can fit a lot of things into a small area (that's what she said).  Today is being spent finishing up and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.

Poor Cypress is totally flabbergasted by the happenings in our home.  She looks at us like a person who's defaulted on their mortgage and whose things are being repossessed.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that we're leaving and what that means.  It deserves its own post so I'll hold out for that.

I hope you've all had a great week so far and happy Friday!