dilemmas thrown up by moving house (absurd division)

Don’t know what a slide rule is for

Getting proved by slide exceptions

Lol

My memory is that when they finished the LoveFilm service we were 'allowed' to keep our last disc (mine was a blu-ray of Farhadi's The Salesman, so not as cool as Dr Who or Ichikawa), so I think you're all gd.

WIRE HANGERS: do i need
i: 64 (inc.8 old-school wooden from family and childhood)
ii: half that
iii: a quarter
iv: an eighth

given that i roll up my T-shirts marie kondo style and as for formal suits and shirts i have like 3 and 3 in toto (i am no jordan peterson-style dandy)

take two wire hangers with you and leave them in a closed wardrobe. you will have 64 again within a few months.

the fancy picnic hampermy grandad was given as a retirement gift when he left ICI plastics division in the mid-1960s

it is wickerwork, the crockery is all china and the cutlery is all stainless steel -- even the plastic is weighty and belongs to a vanished age i.e. i can't tell if it's a faded dingy yellow or a discoloured white

i: on one hand while not especially bulky it is INSANELY heavy and only makes sense if yr idea of a picnic is driving to a lay-by and lifting it directly out of the car-boot, you can't walk more than a few yards with it (the one time i actually took it to a hampstead picnic -- half as a gag -- the ppl i knew failed to turn up so i was there w/a bunch of foax i did NOT know eyeing me w/suspicion as clearly gravely insane
ii: on the other it is a fascinating near-antique-item, included a yellowed plastic combination salt-and-pepper shaker which is butt-ugly but does solve one very minor weight problem
iii: on the third hand it's hardly in pristine condition: back when my grandparents had a car (this is when they were still alive) they did take it to LOTS of lay-by-style picnics w/my little sister and me, my grandma made just the best chicken baps (saltless butter but then you super-salt the actual chicken) to sit and eat as u watched the traffic hurtle past

i will not be chucking this out but i was momentarily baffled to find a decimal halfpenny hiding among a bunch of still active currency: i had forgotten abt their very existence (not legal tender since 1984, viz six years before i even moved into this flat)

they were and some few of them remain very small lol

Picnic hamper - sell the thing! You don't need it, and it's too big to keep. Get whatever you can for it on Ebay/other online retail site of your choice/wherever, and say goodbye with a little Kondo-esque prayer to make you feel better about it.

Ditto 50%+ of everything else you're uncovering. I just humped boxes-worth of stuff up 8 flights of stairs during a recent move, only to decide I should get shot of about a quarter of it after all. Should've done that first really. Don't be me!

How funny, I also have two mid-century picnic hampers that weight a fucking TON and have all the pieces--plaid thermoses, cutlery, bright yellow melamine dishes. One is a wicker basket and the other is packaged in a PLAID BOWLING BAG. I had just pretty much decided to sell both.

Now I'm definitely gonna.

i should take a photo and we can compare!!

of course i have had MONTHS since i decided to move to put all this nonsense up for sale but actually now left it until probably too late to spare the brainspace

also i need to quiz my sister JUST IN CASE she always had her eye on it (she will say "lol ffs get rid u utter clown")

battling with that ever-pushy bit of myself that -- when faced with a battered london A-Z with many lost pages -- thinks "but surely there's a cultural ESSAY in this" (instead of "throw it in the bin u luny")

i am about to enter the "chuck it in whatever box it'll fit in" stage of packing so au revoir all kinds of useful and beloved items for many long months that's for sure

(move is on monday)

good luck mark!

i find the image of a moving house throwing up dilemmas very evocative! ;)

best of luck with the chaotic last stages of the move; you're in the home stretch now

Moving on 3/15 and like 80% of my shit is already boxed up. Turns out I have a lot of books (28 of about 60 boxes so far are books).

good luck housemovers

I just unpacked a few hundred books that had been sitting in our garage since we moved here 15 years ago

I love London & if I was millionaire I’d probably live there!

But one of best things for me in recent years was moving to a very different city, Portsmouth. Your twitter timeline & friendship circle isn’t the country. It often isn’t even the community they think they represent.

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) March 2, 2023

a couple of hours after frying the bacon for today's bacon sandwich -- the last in this flat -- my ancient griddle pan decisively gave up the ghost (wobbly handle just broke off)

thank you and well done my good and faithful servant 😪🙏🏼

like the cosmos marking the occasion

just spent 30 mins hunting for a shoe increasingly convinced i had somehow packed it randomly and singly who knows where or else loaded it (again singly) into the washing machine

of course it was kicked under a chair as usual but

shoe elves

The move is in progress! I have left NJ, where I lived pretty much the whole first 50 years of my life, and am now in Montana. Our possessions are en route, and our car will be here tomorrow. Picking up the keys to the new apartment this afternoon, but I'm in a hotel for a week just to make the transition smooth and easy.

hey we're almost neighbors, by West Coast standards! (I'm in Western Oregon)

good luck with the move! my current absurd status is being surrounded by 349857139847 ill-labeled boxes wondering which one item x is in and how long it will be before i find it

it was almost certainly into a box semi-full of something quite different at the last minute so the label will be no help at all

("books" thx you lazy fvck)

but i am in my new home and hometown and hugely enjoying it

Almost all of our boxes are unpacked in Savannah. Garage is a wreck though. Hanging art, which is fun.

The move is in progress! I have left NJ, where I lived pretty much the whole first 50 years of my life, and am now in Montana. Our possessions are en route, and our car will be here tomorrow. Picking up the keys to the new apartment this afternoon, but I'm in a hotel for a week just to make the transition smooth and easy.

update: i found the things i was hunting for (the various leads and additional appliances that make my TV work): they were in a big semi-see-thru container with all my plugs and plugboards which i had put on one side bcz it was full of plugs and plugboards and doesn't need unpacking (= good place to store plugs and plugboards)

How will you see jazz shows in Montana?

By booking them! (Not 100% joking; the state has a pretty robust program of arts grants, and Burning Ambulance is a fully legal LLC, so I'm gonna have a friend with a lot of grant-writing experience help me put a proposal together.)

i have a question if i may. worried it might be a bit personal.

why move out of london?
why now?
how did you choose where to live?

(i am wondering what my own end-game is. a rented one bed flat isn't sustainable long term and buying isn't an option. i've also done almost literally nothing in the last 3 years that have required me to be in london, can count the number of times i've been on public transport on my fingers)

(that specifically to mark s i hadn't noticed the revive)

(there was another thread about where you would live ideally. maybe that's a better place for this. currently watching lemington spa art deco railway station refurbish and it's making me slightly envious)

( If you could pack up and move your whole life, where would you go? )

In answer to yr questions

i and ii: London became expensive and I got old… obviously during lockdown I was barely going out and seeing people anyway, and I realised that (a) I am reasonably comfortable with my own solo company most of the day; except for a tiny number of v short projects I haven't worked in an office since 2014 and didn't really miss it and (b) the work I do now (editorial consultancy on books rather than subbing magazines) I can basically do from anywhere that has the internet.

So why not move somewhere much cheaper and carry on as I am into retirement…

How did I choose where? First of all I was like, I can go anywhere! But that was much too much choice and my brain froze up. And then -- based almost on random searching* -- I realised I very much liked the idea of a town by the sea, with old stone quaysides. I know a few ppl in Plymouth; I did some work here a few years back and enjoyed the visit. It's only a few hours from London and the train journey isn't complicated (the way trains to most of Wales are complicated, for example; another early possibility). It's a city with a university but it's not fancy…

*was it random or was it meant to be? i happening on milford haven via GiS, a place I haven't thought abt since the 2 or 3 weeks we did OIL in geography when i was like 10. It's not far from where my sister sometimes goes on holiday, plus I think I was browsing pictures of stack rock fort and being deliberately unrealistic: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/stack-rock-fort

https://i0.wp.com/thewanderingquinn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Stackrock-Fort.jpg

thanks