Moving Aboard [#8]

We do not own a house or 99.7% of the possessions we owned four weeks ago. But we own a boat.

Holy #@*$! It’s real. It’s official. The Ruby Vi is ours. Here goes everything…

By two o’clock on May 29th, the paperwork had processed, the funds had cleared–gulp–and the Ruby Vi belonged to us. We shook off our new state of poverty, grabbed our cleaning supplies, and headed to the dock to get to work.

Onboard, we endured roughly seven minutes of near-death-by-heat-stroke before Wyatt figured out how to make the air con work.

(For sure the moment, he’s our favorite child.)

So here’s the thing about air con on the boat — it’s absolutely the most awesome thing ever if you’re standing directly in front of a vent. Consequently, the areas within arms reach of said vents are as clean as anything you’ve ever seen.

Three hours, 14 garbage bags, and four pounds of lost water weight later, we decided the Ruby Vi was clean enough for Day 2’s Pennell-izing plan.

Enter all the things.

If we were proud of ourselves for even 30 seconds about the fact that we’d managed to condense our belongings down to a 6×12 UHaul and the bed of John’s truck, we were stupid for every one of those 30 seconds.

Word to the wise — if you wanna move into a tiny space after living in houses for 40+ years, get rid of everything.

Take the clothes you can fit in a carryon, a Yeti for your coffee, another for your water, and your dog(s). Nothing else.

This process would be so much faster if we had less crap. Here’s an abbreviated list of the things we’ve brought such an absurd amount of, it’s already a family joke: hangers, towels, fleece blankets, bath rugs, water bottles, and throw pillows to name a few.

(We will speak nothing of bringing three Nespresso frothers — clearly, that’s just solid forward thinking.)

You know what else? Despite the fact that we gave away at least 25 giant bags of clothes between the four of us, we easily have 300 times more clothing than space for on board. I’m baffled. Packing in Park City, I really thought we were nailing it.

We were not nailing it. We were sucking. Hard.

On a positive note, nothing broke in transit and there are some Annapolis Goodwill shoppers who are gonna enjoy racks worth of new inventory.

So Days 1 and 2 of Moving Aboard are in the books. The list of things to do seems never-ending, but the trash is out, the shelves are clean, and the fleece blanket collection is dwindling,

so we’re unanimously calling our progress a success.