too much baggage

I was talking to my mom the other day, and she reminded me that in the last month, I have really done alot. I have managed to:

• Successfully defend my Ph.D. dissertation, make all the necessary corrections and graduate
• Get rid of the bulk of my possessions, pack most of them in my car and drive across the country.
• Unpack the car, then repack stuff to go to Burning Man
• Spend a little over a week at Burning Man, along with great people and lots of wind and dust
• Unpack from Burning Man
• Get a post-doc job in Belgium
• Get a storage unit for the stuff I won't take with me overseas
• Dealt with the chilly reception at chez hamsterdad

And I can say that the most overwhelming feeling I have after all of this is that I am damn tired of packing and unpacking my stuff from cars.

Today I got the last (my god I hope it really is the last one) box of crap that I sent myself from PA, and I am trying to sort through stuff to see what stays and what goes into deep storage.

One may think that it would be relatively simple, just take the boxes of stuff and put them back in my car and put them in the storage unit. But one would not be considering that I was finishing my dissertation at the same time that I needed to be packing. Also, one would not be considering that I have more than one friend that wanted to spend time with me before I left. In the end, my packing time was squeezed into a crazy 36 hour period between turning in the final draft of my dissertation and turning in my keys to my landlord.

So, instead of lots of nicely labeled, organized boxes of stuff from each room of the apartment, I have many unlabled boxes and bins of stuff that may or may not need to come with me to Belgium.

And several of the boxes in which my books were mailed lost all of their structural integrity during their cross-continental journey. The books are all fine, but now they need to be put into new boxes for storage.

So the best piece of advice I can give to anyone planning to move right after they defend their dissertation is DON'T. If you have to, hire someone to do it all for you. Or, plan way ahead, like spend a half an hour every day packing starting about 4 months before the projected move date. Or, just burn the place down and collect the insurance to buy all new stuff wherever you go.