Breaking Up is Hard To Do

Don't take your love away from me

Don't you leave my heart in misery

If you go, then I'll be blue

'Cause breaking up is hard to do

- Neil Sedaka & Howard Greenfield

It's amazing how much stuff we can accumulate. For years before I started med school, I was able to move everything I owned in the back of a pick-up in only one trip. I did acquire a few more things during my four years of med school, and we picked up a huge amount of stuff when Little Highstead was born. At least it seemed like a huge amount of stuff to me at the time.

When we moved to Washington DC for my surgery residency, we put everything in a Ryder truck and headed out on the highway. Our destination was a cardboard box, with a tarpaulin over it, in a ravine in Silver Spring, MD. Said "cardboard box" was about 950 sqft with a (poorly) finished basement. The house was small, but we weren't tripping over stuff and it was relatively easy to keep clean.

Two years later, we packed up to move to our Iowa Palace in Iowa City for three years of emergency medicine training. For this move, we hired 4 day laborers and loaded our stuff onto a tractor trailer. I think we took up about 25% of the total space. The Iowa Palace was about 1600 sqft with another (poorly) finished basement. The amount of space in this house felt enormous to us at the time. If we wanted to find someone, we used the intercom (it really did have an intercom system but in the 3 years we were there I could never figure out how to use it). One of the great features of this house was the garage. A place to keep our cars, and endless shelves on which to store "stuff". I had room for some of my tools and a workbench with enough space for small to medium sized projects.

(That white blanket in the picture was probably the main reason we moved to the beach.)

The next move was to Myrtle Beach, SC into a 3400 sqft "Executive style home" (whatever the hell that means). For that move, we hired a team to come in and pack for us. Everything was stuffed into a large moving van. I think they had to shove things in like salary men on the Tokyo subway just to close the doors.

We now live in a seriously big house. I know some of you live in a bigger house, but this place is ginormous for 3 people ... 3400 sqft, 5 bedrooms, 4.5 baths. I'm sure there are rooms I have never seen. Someone could live in one wing and I wouldn't have a clue. In fact, I think there might be someone doing exactly that (liquor disappears in this house much faster than I can account for).

3600 sqft of home, and we probably only use 2000

Every single room in this house has so much stuff in it, I'm tripping over it. The master bedroom has a walk-in closet ...

Master walk-in ... stuffed to overflowing

The closet had those ubiquitous wire racks, and the racks on Kari's side kept crashing down. In the middle of the night *CRASH* ... clothes strewn all over the floor. I would frantically go digging through the pile looking for survivors. I "fixed" it by anchoring into the walls, and the anchors would pull out and the whole thing would crash down again. I finally built permanent shelves and built-in drawers, shoe racks, and boot racks (my side still isn't done ... more on that later).

In addition to the shelves, hanging racks, and built-ins, Kari also has a dresser. Despite this, every horizontal surface in our room, including the floor, has layers of clothes stacked on it. And this is true throughout the house. I used to joke that if we bought a table, or desk, it would be buried in a week. And then it happened ... we bought Little H a writing desk on which to do her homework. If I remember correctly, it's made of wood, but I can't see it to confirm ... it looks like a beaver lodge floating in the middle of her room (I know there's a desk under there somewhere). We also bought her a travel chest for summer camp. She uses it for camp for 2 weeks every summer, otherwise it sits at the end of a bed in the spare bedroom and is used as a piling station for stuff.

We are methodically going through every room as we get ready to leave for New Zealand. We are purging things from drawers, shelves, closets in an attempt to make the place livable for the various guests staying in our house over the next year. Note to guests: be careful opening closets or you might get the Fred Flinstone bowling ball effect.

I also just spent 5 days ... five entire +8-hour days getting the garage cleaned out and straightened up. That mess is why my side of the closet has not been completed after two years ... I couldn't get to my tools.

Love to see it so clean ... and almost empty

I'm making space to get at least one car in the garage and to make it so guests can access beach accessories, bicycles, and tools as needed. As we purge our house of extraneous stuff, I don't find parting with it difficult at all. Kari has had a much more difficult time with it. 

For comparison, I grew up in a 1600 sqft house (also with a poorly finished basement ... I'm starting to see a theme here). I have 3 brothers, so there were 6 of us in that house and I never saw any of them. I still can't remember exactly what they look like. There are pictures of us in that house, so we all had to be there at the same time at least once or twice.

There was plenty of room for all of us and all of our stuff. As far as I can recall, we weren't climbing over each other. There was a visible floor and never a mess. I'm sure my mother will back me up on that, right Mom?

Smokin' ...

Small Steps and Giant Leaps

"Funny how fallin' feels like flyin' for a little while ... "

- Stephen Bruton/Gary Nicholson

View from Te Mata Peak

Like most of us, my life has been a series of small steps, one foot in front of the other, moving along a journey bounded by hopes and expectations. I have been fortunate, though, to have had many chances and opportunities to jump off the cliff and try to fly. There is no denying that has been a privilege of my upbringing and circumstances, particularly knowing that there was some semblance of a (threadbare) safety net to catch my fall. There have been times when it was scary nonetheless.

For the most part, I have landed on my feet, a little bumped and bruised for my efforts, but essentially intact. Occasionally, I have ended up much the same as Wile E. Coyote but without the ACME company and a bottomless line of credit to back me up.

It's been a little scarier since tying two more people to the same parachute, knowing that it might not open, but I have been lucky that at least one of them wants to jump with me. The other one (Little H), doesn't have much choice! She goes kicking and screaming at first, then usually wants to go again.

And that brings us to this blog ... and the next leap.

A few years ago, most likely in jest, Kari said to me "Why don't we go work in New Zealand." This wasn't just out of the blue. We get phone calls and emails on a daily basis trying to entice us to go work in such exotic locations as Nebraska, or trying to get us back to the frozen hinterlands of Iowa. Every now and then, the solicitation (never with much detail) is for somewhere outside of the United States. For a while, there were frequent invitations for New Zealand.

I probably shocked her a little when I said "Let's go." Her reply was something along the lines of "What, seriously?" and so the seeds of a plan were born.

Sunset on the Coromandel

We took a vacation to New Zealand to check it out and on our return started working in earnest to get back there. As happens to the best laid plans, there were a few bumps and curves along the way, not the least of which was losing my work contract and having to start my own company to keep us going.

After a few attempts and false starts, we are finally taking the leap. We are hurriedly trying to get our Stateside lives in some kind of order, because in about one month's time, we will be leaving everything familiar behind to live and work for a year in New Zealand.

This blog is also a bit of a leap. I'm not much of a sharer, and certainly never considered myself much of a writer. I will lean on Kari to add a few posts, and if the Little Highstead has something to say, I will try to help her to do so.

Up, up, and away ...