Here we go. Leaving our once-cozy little apartment on Pine Street. The rental car is packed with all the things you see in the photo below. A combination of stuff we’ll need on the way to Austin (camping equipment, etc), stuff we’ll be leaving in Austin (important documents, clothes), and stuff we’ll be taking with us on our travels.

The last of our stuff

Our first stop is LA, to visit with relatives and friends. After that it’s Tucson to visit Saguaro National Park. We’ll be meeting up with my Dad in El Paso on Thursday night, so that we can drop off the rental car and drive with him to Big Bend National Park, and then on to Austin for a week. Stephanie and I will be updating our assorted statuses as we go, when we can. But very likely my blog will fall behind real life.

Map of our route from San Francisco to Austin

My parents asked me last night when does the “trip” begin for us? Was it last Friday, after our last day at work, or is it when we set foot on the boat…? Without getting too philosophical, I said “neither”. The trip begins now.

I always forget how hard moving is, even though I’ve recorded my past travails in great detail. Perhaps forgetting is a survival skill, because if I ever truly anticipated the full physical, emotional, and mental effort involved, I’d never move again!

This time was no exception, even considering a massive furniture sell-off and a full week to pack and prepare. The unusual thing was that we’re not really moving. We’re just storing our things while we make our way around the world. In order to do so, we reserved a 5×5′ climate controlled storage unit in Santa Rosa: climate controlled to protect our things from the heat and cold, in Santa Rosa for cost savings (cheaper than San Francisco) and proximity to friends we can stay with when we return.

Continue reading…

This week is our last in San Francisco—after four years as city-dwellers. It also marks the end of five years of California living since I moved to Santa Rosa from North Carolina. For Stephanie it’s been nine since she moved from France. On Sunday we’ll be picking up a rental car to begin our journey across the country (to catch a boat in Philly). I’m sure we’ll be back, I’m just not sure when or for how long.

Which means this week we pack. We’ve already spent the last several weeks selling most of our furniture, (in truth I’ve been getting rid of stuff since January), so the hope is that we’ll be leaving with much less than we came with (or accumulated over the years). Then on Friday we’ll be taking everything that’s left up to a 5×5′ storage unit in Santa Rosa where it will remain for the next year or so.

What’s important enough to keep? Books—a lot of which are cookbooks. We still have CDs—need to rip some for the trip. Pottery and objets d’art. All of our kitchen stuff. A select few pieces of small furniture. Clothes—some of which we’ll be leaving with my parents in Austin (so we have something to wear when we return). And that’s pretty much it.

It’s a little funny thinking we won’t be seeing any of our stuff for a year or more. But it’s also kind of refreshing, like we’re creating a personal time capsule. Complete with inventory in Google Docs!

This was my humble submission for A Moment in Time, the New York Times’ Lens Blog’s collaborative project to collect photos from people all over the world taken on May 2nd at 15:00 UTC.

Unfortunately for me that meant 8am on a Sunday morning, so I dutifully set my alarm for 7:55. Of course that also meant I wasn’t out doing anything particularly eye-opening. Instead I was just beginning to open my eyes. So I tiptoed around the apartment, camera in hand, paying particular attention to the morning light coming through the closed blinds. And I settled on that.

It’s so easy these days to get stuff without even thinking about it. That’s Amazon’s whole value proposition. How to go from thinking about something to buying it in mere seconds.

But getting rid of stuff is another matter altogether.

My dad mentioned that some people are trying to get to the point where they only own 2,000 things. And others are even more extreme, trying to get down to 500 or less. I’m assuming he got this from that show about hoarders they’ve been watching. Then he laughs and says, “Your mom and I are probably more in the 100,000 range”.

It kind of stuck with me because I’d never really thought about assigning a number to quantify how much stuff I have. Or should have. (And what exactly is a discrete “thing” anyway?)

I tend to hang on to stuff that might be useful in the future. The problem is, I can’t keep all that stuff in my head. Even in our small apartment, I forget what little doodads I might have squirreled away, which means that when I need something, I’ll just go out and buy it—only realizing later that I already had something that fit the bill.

Stephanie and I almost always have some paper grocery bags by the door filled with odds and ends for Goodwill. Predominantly clothes, but occasionally housewares. It’s like our household is constantly molting. You’d think at some point we’d just be down to nothing, but it almost never makes a dent. And it’s not like we’re constantly shopping either. Stuff just accumulates.

I have a real problem getting rid of stuff of value. Old electronics. Special equipment in good condition. Unusual or rare items. I sold a handmade lamp base on eBay a while ago and with the cost of packing and shipping, it ended up costing me to get rid of it. It would have been cheaper just to Goodwill it. At the same time, it makes me happy knowing that someone who actually wants it now has it.

Putting things on Craigslist is easier, and dealing with people locally removes shipping from the equation, but still it’s a lot of work, writing the ad, taking and uploading a picture, doing the back and forth with people over email, setting up a place and time to meet. Half the time I don’t even get a response. Or people express interest and then bail.

All this work just getting rid of stuff, and it’s no wonder people become hoarders. It’s so much easier to just do nothing. To stack and squirrel, rather than filter and pitch.

That said, I want to get rid of stuff. A lot of stuff. It’s my new mantra.

Friday

• Had a beer after work with Flora and Stephanie
• Had dinner with Casey and Stephanie at Pomelo

Saturday

• Mailed a letter to France
• Picked up cream to make butter and milk to make cheese
• Inoculated the cream with a culture
• Cooked bacon, eggs, and toast for breakfast
• Did the dishes
• Took a rare two hour long nap
• Walked to a bookstore on Market
• Cabbed home
• Made a camera wrist “strap” out of 550 paracord
• Cooked a potato, carmelized onion, and zucchini gratin
• Watched Miracle on 34th Street (Stephanie’s first time)
• Ordered an AC adapter for my old camera
• Posted Three months on a shampoo bar

Sunday

• Churned the cream to make cultured butter
• Did the dishes
• Sorted through old high school and college papers
• Took six bags of paper out to the recycling bins
• Made popcorn with some of my homemade cultured butter
• Watched The Lost Boys (for the first time)
• Roasted some peppers and corn
• Made an orzo pasta with the peppers, corn, and some goat milk ricotta I’d made in the process of making halloumi last weekend
• Did the dishes
• Wrote this list

Now you’re all caught up.

I’ve been washing my hair with a shampoo bar for three months now. I’d given up bar soaps for body wash years ago, but even before then, I never knew it was possible to shampoo with a bar. Shampoo was always, and has always been (or so I thought) liquid. I’ve been on a “real soap” kick as of late, thanks to Dr. Bronner’s, so out of curiosity, I ordered three sample bars from Chagrin Valley Soap and Craft: Chamomile & Citrus, Rosemary Lavender, and Lavender & Spice.

I was kind of surprised they didn’t come with instructions. I mean, how is one supposed to shampoo with a shampoo bar? At first I just rubbed the bar directly on my hair, but that tended to create uneven lather and a lot of hairs stuck to the bar. Now I just rub it between my hands and then work the lather into my hair. Even though it doesn’t always look like a lot of soap in my hands, it usually lathers up quite nicely. Each of the sample-sized bars (pictured above) lasted about a month and a half of daily use.

The only downside (compared to traditional shampoo+conditioner) comes when I’m washing the shampoo out of my hair. As soon as it’s gone, my fingers stick to my hair, kind of like skin against wet rubber. So rather than running my whole hand through my hair, I just comb the tips of my fingers through. It makes me wonder if any of their other samples are less “sticky”? On the upside, I found my hair easier to style outside of the shower—more willing to hold whatever shapes I twisted it into.

Not long after we started making cheese, Stephanie began talking about getting a separate fridge to age harder cheeses. In most cases they need to be stored at a fairly controlled 50-60°F, sometimes for a period of months.

Anyone who’s been in our kitchen should be laughing. It’s not big. In fact every bit of available space is used for something—without it feeling packed. And I’m not sure I wanted a “dorm fridge” any where else in our small apartment. Or at all. Mostly I didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves. I hate buying things just because I’m excited about something new, and then I end up never using it.

One night I thought back to those weird thermoelectric “peltier” coolers that you find at places like Brookstone. Most of them are small, which is good, energy-efficient, which is also good, and they’re supposed to be whisper quiet, which is super good. Turns out they have a corner on the wine refrigerator market because they just don’t get that cold—which is perfect for wine. And as it happens, cheese.

They are a little more expensive than your average dorm fridge, but I’m willing to pay for silence. In the end we found someone on Craigslist who was selling the exact 16-bottle model we were looking at, unused and at a discount, because it didn’t quite fit in their apartment. As you can see, it fits in ours. Score!

And by my calculations, even if we stop making cheese, we probably won’t stop drinking wine.

As in, my physical domicile.

Some Popular Posts

• How to find an apartment in San Francisco
• I'd need a wide-angle lens to capture this apartment
• A look inside the apartment, finally!
• Paper wall art
• The great San Francisco apartment hunt ends!