Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Green Camp and the Great Purge of 2013

This week the kids are off at Green Camp.  In many, many ways Green Camp has been the highlight of our time in Malawi.  It is, I am almost certain, one of the things the kids will remember long into the future.  This week they will be celebrating all things nature, as well as preparing for the upcoming Earth Day celebration at Four Seasons. They will have a busy, fun-filled week, and I am happy for them.

In the meantime I am alone in the house, completely alone for the first time in months.  The house is eerily quiet.  For the moment I am enjoying a blessedly quiet cup of tea, but in just a few minutes I will be even busier than the kids.  This summer is pack out.  That means packing everything we own and preparing it to go to our next post in Muscat, Oman.

The movers will show up sometime in June and everything we own will swathed in miles of paper and bubble wrap, sealed in mountains of boxes, and loaded onto trucks.  If everything works the way it is supposed to we will see our stuff again in about 4, maybe 5 months at our new house in Oman.

That does't sound too bad does it?  It sort of sounds like the packers will do all at the hard stuff. Of course there is a catch.  There is always a catch.  The trick is that everything we own must weigh less than 7200 pounds.  Everything including clothes, toys, books, towels, any furniture we own, dust collectors, pots, pans, cutting boards, and everything else  that turns an echoing house into a functioning home must weigh less than 7200 pounds.

This week I will be going through every closet, box, cabinet, and drawer purging our house of all that is needless weight.  FUN!  More fun than you can imagine.  It is both totally necessary and totally incompatible with homeschooling, so it must be accomplished this week.  While the kids are at camp.  So much for my dreams of hours of reading, lazing about enjoying the quiet.

I will be posting the weeded out weight each day.  I know you are thrilled to know how much trash, junk and broken toys I manage throw away each day.  There you have it, the oh so glamorous life of the foreign service spouse.  Jealous?

7 comments:

Nomads By Nature said...

Fun times!! Especially if you add a bit of Long Island to that tea ;)

Monica said...

i sooooooooooo wish i could help you weed out. purging makes me happy (only when it's not food). and i am laughing at nomads comment. ;o) that could only help! xoxo

Shannon said...

Nomads I have reached the part of the day where I can finally have a bit of Long Island with my tea, but I think I am going to go for Pimms instead. Same effect though.

Monica I wish you could be here too. You are so much better at this stuff than I am, which is probably why your rug in my bedroom in Malawi. It's heading back to Texas this summer though.

Kate Husband said...

We are in the midst of the same work here. We have acquired so much here (including a treadmill), we are trying to shed 2700 pounds. Ugh. Weeks in, we have shed only 460! Oh well.

Shannon said...

Kate I am making just about as much progress, 3 days in and I am down maybe 60 pounds. HUGE SIGH!

Connie said...

We were only a little bit over weight coming into Kuwait last year, and I have actually dumped huge piles of stuff since and we still have more than a year left, but I also feel that urge to purge. I guess that not making the weight coming in here ... not that it really cost that much ... has still got me obsessed with trimming things up. Good luck!

Jody said...

It was so wonderful to meet you and your family today. I hope you saw some rhino! I can't believe I didn't know you had a blog - I'll look forward to reading about your adventures here. Your link in my comments leads me to a high school reunion page - strange!