Today, I’m preparing to pack, the movers arrive on Monday to take everything away and put some of it on a boat that will hopfully arrive in New York in about 2 months.  Unlike the last time I did this, moving to and from Amsterdam, a lot of the stuff will be put into storage. So I’m going round and putting things onto 3 lists, store, ship and take with me know.  But the choices are not that simple.  I’m not shipping my furniture, so the big items go direct to store.   The electrical items likewise get stored as they will not work without voltage changers, so it’s probably best to buy new ones.  I’m not taking all my kitchen stuff – which probably means I can live without it, likewise the paperwork/records/OU study stuff/diving equipment wetc. In reality I should probably get rid of it…and maybe I will when I come back.  Likewise with the books I’m trying to convince myself to leave behind. I don’t really need to ship all 1200 of them, so I need to make choices about which ones I use a lot, which I will read in the next few years and which can wait till I come back (by which time the number would have grown anyway.
Some stuff I’m taking back with me now (travelling with empty suitcases definitely confuses people at airports). Extra cutlery, plates, saucepan, Christmas decorations, winter clothes.  And a final few things I decide that I won’t risk to shipping – some jewellery, a favourite picture, a book of favourite poems I’ve transcribed over the last 25 years.
One last thing I’m doping is taking photos of everything. Â It’s far quicker to photo the titles of the games, CDs, DVDs and books and load them up to Flickr as a storage mechanism then write down everything, just in case. Â It’s a good job that I can set the photos to me only, otherwise people would be subject to 10’s of photos of nothing but book spines.
I can vouch for taking pictures of book spines. When I moved to the UK I sent most of my books through mail bags. It was cheaper than putting them in my suitcases (though that’s how my most treasured ones travelled).
One mail bag was destroyed in the shipment along with two of the packing boxes within it. I lost over a dozen books but thanks to the photos I was able to inventory and repurchase several of them through Amazon. 🙂