I’ve had a lovely first couple of days in Dushanbe. Even the jet lag hasn’t been too rough, although I have slept 10 and 12 hours the past two nights respectively. Well, I’ve always been a big sleeper. But before I get too much into the here and now, I wanted post a few pics of my moving process. This may or may not be interesting to anyone but me, but too bad, this is my damn blog and I’ll post whatever I please. So there. Harumph.
My living room during the move
I decided to use PODS for my storage, which is the one where they bring the storage unit to you.
A street view of my "Pod" during packing
I had a 12-foot long “Pod,” which was definitely bigger than I needed, so I got everything I wanted in there and then had lots more room. So, of course, I stored stuff I didn’t even much want. Later, I discovered I had things I wanted to keep and had neglected to put in the “Pod,” but c’est la vie.
Inside my "Pod"
One of the major projects that I completed as part of the move was to transfer all of my CD’s and DVD’s out of their original boxes and in to CD holder magazines. This led to lots of jewel box recycling.
Ditching my CD jewel boxes, among other things, during the move
Once the “Pod” was packed up, or I had put everything in there that I knew about, the vehicle I nicknamed the “Podmobile” came to pick it up. The “Podmobile” was driven by Dale, a man with an aptitude for maneuvering the tricky hydraulics needed to hoist and transport the “Pod.” He also tipped me off on some supposedly fantastic catfish fishing spots in Central Asia.
The "Podmobile" jacking up my full "Pod"
So with my “Pod” safely in the hands of Dale and the “Podmobile,” I was left to contemplate the fact that I still, weirdly, had a lot of crap in my condo to be tossed or stored somewhere. Luckily, I quickly lost my compunctions about throwing away supposedly cherished artifacts of my life in Cambridge, and whatever I couldn’t bear to part with got heaved into garbage bags that were unceremoniously piled into my basement.
The last couple days of packing were a whirlwind. You gather a lot of stuff after seven years living in a place, and that is only magnified when you own that place. At the end of the day, however, everything got packed or discarded and I made my flight on Tuesday night at 10. Well, almost everything. I neglected to bin some leftovers in the fridge, as I mentioned previously, and I expect they are on the far side of edible at this point. Even if someone was inclined to eat another person’s leftovers. Which people usually aren’t inclined to do. I wrote a mea culpa e-mail to my tenants today apologizing for the leftovers, both food and otherwise in my apartment, and I hope they don’t mind too much. Or maybe they really like week-old pork loin, in which case, all is good.
You wish you had a 12 foot long pod.