VIII. Menos Muchas Cajas y Dos Meses Más

Miscellaneous items headed for

Goodwill. Post-it, like those scattered

throughout our apartment, here identifies 

the box by its Spanish name, “caja".

Many Boxes Fewer and Two More Months

At o’dark hundred this morning, by careful insomniacal calculation, with all the pillow crumpling and obsessive repetitiveness that implies, I figured that Pragmatic Spouse and I have delivered 27 boxes of our unwanted household items to the neighborhood Goodwill over the past two weeks. These are not, however, your hefty dehumidifier-sized boxes, but rather those smallish 12X750ml cajas de vino you can sometimes pick up at Trader Joe’s—empty, sadly, of their Purple Moon, Green Fin, Bogle, or the willfully provocative Ménage à Trois.

All that is in addition to many misbegotten objects too big for the boxes, miscellaneous items I’ve foisted off on my hard-working former colleagues, and couch and coffee table dispatched to Daughter #2 for her sophisticated new digs. And then there are multiple piles mostly of my making, as well as much of our furniture, that are awaiting the daughters’ further selection. 

Plus what’s gone in the dumpster. All gone, or almost there; we've been minimalizing.

As far as the other two categories (store or ship) that guide our sorting, looking around our apartment’s office and bedroom now, I count three similarly sized TJ boxes, five Rubbermaid Roughneck 18-gallon totes, and one large handmade cedar chest—all full of items we’ve elected to keep.

The majority, by far, of these containers, along with bed and a few favored pieces of furniture, and car, and items to be named later, will be parked at a nearby Money Saver Mini-Storage at least until next spring. 

Considering the length of our projected stay, only relatively few—packable—things will be excess baggaged aboard our Alaska and AeroMexico flight.

All items that will likely not be included in our furnished casa, and that we will absolutely need sometime over the next year, and that will actually be more difficult and expensive to buy than ship—a very modest amount of clothing, couple of appliances and some kitchen gear, plus a few cherished, identity-confirming objects—will wing their way south via Pay-Through-Your-Nose Dispatch.

It always appears like not too much more remains to be sorted, but the project also seems infinitely expandable, and the storage locker down by the laundry room has yet to encounter my gimlet gaze. All of this activity, of course, is in preparation for our move to Mexico which is now exactly eight weeks away.