Stuff
I am sitting here surrounded by stuff. In fact I had to shove it out
of the way to be able to sit and type on my mac book. Normally having all this
in my personal space would really annoy me.
Today though, the stuff that is strewn about the saloon of Easy
Tiger is ok. That’s because it is all our stuff.
For the past 8 months we have lived with other peoples stuff that we
were very careful and respectful of. Now that we are back on board Easy Tiger
with our own stuff we don’t have to give a “stuff” about it.
Have you noticed how strange stuff is? People have garages, spare
rooms and storage units full of stuff. Even after our huge downsizing, going
from a family of four to two people living on a boat, we have a sea container
full of stuff that we just can’t seem to part with.
This stuff seems to be able to breed, grow and multiply better than
rabbits.
When we left for the trip home to WA, we flew out with one bag of
luggage each. A month later we moved into a house sit, with those two bags and
a couple of boxes of stuff.
Three months later we moved out of that house to another with four
bags and three quite big boxes of stuff, to the second house sit job.
Three months later we had two car-loads of stuff.
We needed to cull our stuff before it took over and smothered us. What
to do with all this stuff?
There was no other alternative. We would have to go through our sea
container load of stuff and do some culling.
We were dreading having to do it, but on the last day we had available,
we finally got round to opening up our time capsule. We spent a day unloading, then
reloading and restacking our sea container. By the end of it we were well
satisfied we had sorted our stuff. We
had a car-load for the rubbish tip and some bags for the charity bins. We had made a bit more space in the sea
container. Unfortunately we had the car half loaded with stuff we wanted to
take back to the boat.
We had decided to drive our car back to the Gold Coast, where Easy
Tiger has been stored, while we have been back in Western Australia. The
advantage of taking our car was we would have wheels to get around in while we
were on the East Coast of Australia. We didn’t dream that we would be using it
as a storage unit!
The day before our departure, I stacked, packed and squashed the
huge pile of stuff we wanted to take with us into the car. Several times I got
down to two or three items left and had to start over again, as they just
didn’t seem to fit.
After another five days driving, we arrived at Boatworks in Coomera at
a bit over 8pm. Exhausted after spending 16 hours driving.
Since then two and a half days have gone by. What have we been
doing? Sorting stuff. Every cupboard on Easy Tiger had to be emptied cleaned
out and the repacked with new (or just different) stuff. So the stuff brought
with us in the car had to fnd a home on Easy Tiger. The stuff on Easy Tiger had
to find a place. Where was the best place for that stuff? In the car.
Our 5 seater car is now merely a mobile storage unit.
It does finally feel good that we have our stuff together and
sorted. I am not sure when next the
motivation will strike. I hope it’s not soon though, because I am stuffed.
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| Our mobile storage unit packed and ready |
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| Leanne at the wheel on our road trip |
