Yesterday and today we (well, our excellent team of movers) packed up our little life in Tbilisi for our move home. This is now our fourth PCS/overseas move, and while some aspects get much easier – we have our air shipment down – other things stay the same level of weird and difficult.
It’s always surreal to go from your perfectly organized house, to a mess of sorted piles, to a mountain of boxes, to a nearly completely empty house. As I’m writing this our team is loading boxes into crates and Sean and I are trying to stay out of the way while feeling useless. We aren’t allowed to pack ourselves because it won’t be covered by insurance if something breaks in transit. I never feel like more of a jerk than when I have to stand around and watch other people pack our stuff.
Along those lines, you never realize how much weird shit you have in your house until you go to move. Yep, I’d like you to pack all 100+ canning jars, please. I promise they usually have stuff in them. Yes, that entire basket is packed with cat toys and they play with probably 0.01% of them. Yes, I have a lot of nail polish and it’s all packed in fancy little carrying cases. I know it’s a problem. And don’t even get me started on the hot dog toaster. Amazon sent that to me by mistake, ok?!
One of my favorite moments from this move is when the guys packing the weight bench – which somehow weaseled its way into our shipment YET AGAIN – put all the plates on the bar and then tried to lift it. I think it was right around 200 lbs. and I was concerned someone was going to hurt themselves. Luckily everyone came out unscathed but it hurt my back just watching them.
This move, we got the dogs out of the house so they wouldn’t be barking their heads off for hours two days straight. Plus we have a relatively small house so there’s no good place to sequester them. Last night, Dots and Nona had fun exploring their new (temporary) surroundings.
I also love when labels on boxes get slightly lost in translation. Like for instance:
Metal cell=dog crate. And not pictured: specker=speaker.
Really, as long as it all shows up in once piece I don’t care how it’s labeled.
And so passes another two years, another overseas move, and another packout. We have about 1.5 weeks left in Tbilisi, and I fully intend to make the most out of our very limited time left in this beautiful city.
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