Your stuff owns you.

Most people would say I'm a bit of a weirdo. I don't mention it often, but I truly, deeply miss the days when everything I owned fit in the back of a Mazda 626.

Not only am I excited by the prospect of living out of a suitcase for a couple months while we find our new home in Japan, I'm actually looking forward to having a bunch of our belongings out of our lives completely for a couple years. As I was telling my Dad tonight, I could even see coming to the end of our overseas adventures and just telling the Navy, "All that stuff in storage? Throw it in the river, I don't even remember what it is, much less want it back."



This is not, by any means, all the stuff we have going into storage -- it's not even a third. Nor is it particularly a lot of stuff. AT least double this volume of stuff has been donated or thrown out since we found out we'd be moving to Japan. But it really got me thinking -- if we don't need these things for a couple years, why did we ever need them at all?

There's more than one answer to that question -- the most obvious is that in big houses like the ones we've lived in the past 5 years, there's zero opportunity cost to having triple the number of coffee cups we actually need, appropriate glassware for red wine, white wine and 5 different varieties of beer, a pasta maker, three rubbermaid totes of Christmas decorations we haven't used in years and a box of fortune cookies from our wedding.

There's no logic to this -- if these items are all unnecessary today, then certainly they were spurious yesterday and there's no reason I couldn't have dumped them at the curb before we ever had orders. An overseas move with a strict weight allowance and the possibility of losing 1000 square feet of house at the other end separates the necessary from the clutter very quickly.

As hard as it's been for me to keep a clean home while our house has been on the market the past few weeks, the lack of clutter has really reinforced how much my belongings bring me down.

I think about this all the time, but I really need to write about it some more. Not tonight, though -- the movers will be here early in the morning and the prep still isn't done; there's closets and an attic full of items going to storage, still mocking me. Hopefully the movers work slowly tomorrow.

Party time!

A week or two ago, I realized that our pantry and liquor cabinet were still way too full, considering that were looking at just a few days until movers started arriving and my desire to cook would evaporate. Then I started thinking that for one reason and another, we've been painfully antisocial during this tour -- we've seen some of our good friends once or twice, if at all, during the whole 20 months we've been in Norfolk this time around.

So I decided to solve both problems and throw a "clean out the pantry" party. We put out the word on Facebook and in person to some of Ruth's co-workers, but I didn't really know how many people we'd get. I figured that I'd make whatever I could from ingredients around the house and if we ended up with a bunch of leftovers, then at least we'd be able to eat all week.

I started cooking Friday with a pot of chili. My chili is pretty simple - I used a pound of ground beef this time, because it's what I had around. Then I added onion, mushrooms & garlic. For seasoning I throw in chipotle and ancho chili powders, a ton of paprika, oregano, sage and other random spices. I hit it with a 28oz can of diced tomatos and two 14oz cans of pinto beans and simmer it, covered, until the end of time. At the same time I prepped marinara sauce, which starts the same way - onion, mushroom, garlic. then I season with oregano, basil and some red pepper flakes, throw in all the canned crushed tomato in the house, and simmered for 20-30 minutes.

During the simmering I made pizza dough. If you have any fear of making pizza dough, read this article and you will be cured. I make mine with half whole wheat flour and half bread flour. I put the dough aside to rise, planning to split it and refrigerate it overnight...then I forgot it until the next morning. OOPS. Luckily I had no shortage of flour and yeast.

Then the next morning I got up and right after my run I put a dry rub on two racks of beef ribs and started them on an 8 hour cook in the oven - I didn't have time to mess with the grill, sadly.

Then I re-made the pizza doughs while cooking black beans and rice. The black beans and rice starts out with onion, red pepper, mushroom and garlic, the same seasonings as the chili, then I add two cans of Goya black beans, a cup of rice and two cups of water and simmer it until the rice is cooked.

Right before the party, I picked up our favorite hummus from Azar's on Colley and a veggie tray from the grocery store, I made two dishes of pasta with the marinara sauce and got some more veggies prepped to make veggie pizza later in the evening...

AND I was completely convinced that I would have WAY too much food and a month worth of leftovers.

AMAZINGLY, this was not the case. We had over two dozen people show, and every bit of the food was DEMOLISHED by the time we went to bed. Booze was no problem either, as we enjoyed margaritas and vodka shots all night long -- and I discovered that a houseful of drunk twitter friends at 11:30pm will take any bottle you leave out on the countertop and run away with it.

I wasn't even hungover this morning! It was a wonderful time and a great memory to leave this house with. There may be some pictures to post here later (of the early part of the evening -- in the interest of protecting the not-so-innocent, I won't be posting the pictures from later at night).

Uhhh..how's this thing work again?

Oh, yeah, I have to log on and TYPE INTO IT.

So it's been a crazy few months around here. We're just over a week from having movers invade our house and pack all our stuff into small boxes, which will then be placed into bigger boxes, which will then be sent halfway around the world to our new home. As usual, the blog has been low on the priority list.

We decided early on we'd sell our house, but it's only been on the market about a month. As I spend more and more time keeping our house looking like a museum, I'm discovering that there's a good reason I've been a crappy housekeeper all these years -- being a good housekeeper really, really sucks ass. Instead of looking at the past few weeks of vacuum/sweep/mop/repeat as a curse, I'm thinking of it as training for Japan, where I'm expecting lack of space will require me to become a better housekeeper.

Despite this being our first overseas move, I have none of the usual worries and angst about the movers arriving. This is my fourth change-of-station (plus one cross-town move) in 9 years. Even though this one is overseas, the process has been similar enough to a move in the states that I haven't really been too stressed about it.

I did let myself get far too worried, for a while, about selling the house. We can afford to carry the mortgage on this house for a while, but doing so will put us in a bind financially. I really wanted a contract before we left, but in the past couple weeks I've realized, it just ain't gonna happen. So I've chilled about that -- with any luck, negotiating with buyers from 8000 miles away will make the whole process smoother.

Moving overseas does require a whole new level of organization. I'm going to write more about this process, but last weekend I identified six different "piles of stuff" in our house that are all headed different places: 1. Our usual household goods move; 2. Our non-temporary storage, provided by the Navy because we're going to a duty station off the beaten path; 3. Our "unaccompanied baggage"; a smaller shipment sent overseas faster, of just what we'll need to get by when we move into our new house; 4. The stuff we're carrying on the plane; 5. The stuff we're leaving at my parents' house; and 6. The crap we're pushing out of our lives, either throwing away or giving away.

Amazingly -- perhaps because the house is so clean these days -- this level of organization isn't stressing me out at all.

Theo is still amazing and surprising and a whole lot of fun. His preschool teacher told me just before Christmas that he'd overnight transformed from a baby to a 3-year-old; and it was definitely noticeable. Now he's talking, he has an AMAZING will of his own and he is driven to do anything and everything he can by himself. I have some record of the past few months via twitter and photographs, but not blogging the first part of this year will someday be a regret of mine, I'm sure.

Running has come along fairly well this spring, even though it's been pushed down the priority list. I felt like I'd hit a new level of my training a couple weeks ago when I ran a 21:55 5K race -- beating my old record by over 90 seconds -- but that was followed by some pain in my foot that put me off my running for a week and has made getting started back kinda rough.

So my goals for the near future with the blog are -- 1. Post daily, even if it's just something short that I would ordinarily tweet. Even if the posts suck, there's no other way to keep the momentum going for the days I actually have something to say. 2. Talk more about running and my training. I enjoy it, I enjoy talking about it -- not blogging about it more is probably part of the reason I'm not blogging.

I might fill in this post more later with more details -- oh, who am I kidding, that never happens....