Look! Newly released snap­shots from the next Hoard­ers episode!!

Just kid­ding. This is our apart­ment, pre-packout. Specif­i­cally, the day before the pack­ers came, when we decided that pil­ing every­thing we wanted to pack in one room, despite it seem­ing to be the antithe­sis of pack­ing our things up, worked really well.

There is actu­ally some strat­egy to the mad­ness that you see above. We were method­i­cally sep­a­rat­ing our goods accord­ing to how we wanted the movers to pack our things, so each room got assigned a des­ig­nated ship­ment, more or less. Here’s what you need to know:

Our UAB (Unac­com­pa­nied Air Bag­gage) is a lim­ited num­ber of pounds that gets to be sent with us home (to the Bay Area) and then onward onto DC (where the Diplo­Man will be going through train­ing). These items were con­fined to the din­ing room table. Well, it was only the table at first, and then it spilled out onto the chairs and against the wall next to the table…

Our HHE (House­Hold Effects) is most of our belong­ings, and is our ship­ment with a max limit of 7,500 lbs. that will be shipped and stored some­where in Sin­ga­pore. These items will sit patiently in a dark, dank, musty stor­age space and then sent to Tan­za­nia by sea once we arrive in May of next year. This is all the boxes that you see in the last three pic­tures of the post…and more, because that didn’t include a few stray boxes in the kitchen and our bed­room. In other words, we won’t see a lot of our stuff for a year!!!

Vocab­u­lary words aside, our movers were bril­liant. I think we actu­ally hired human machines that wrapped, packed, folded, taped, stuffed, unscrewed, and dis­man­tled as we directed them to.

Some of you read­ing this are, like we are, going through pack­out, or have in the past. So you can empathize. Oth­ers will get to expe­ri­ence this in the future, so maybe you can sym­pa­thize. But I guess most of you won’t have to deal with mov­ing all your belong­ings and hav­ing a smidgen go with you back to the states while the other por­tion goes to a far-away mys­tery stor­age area. In that case, you can prob­a­bly stop read­ing here, and I’m sorry if this post has been com­pletely pointless.

This expe­ri­ence, this adven­ture, like with every adven­ture, has its advan­tages. I hope those of you that have packed out have seen the bright side of things, because oth­er­wise it can be pretty easy to drown your­self in a fortress of newsprint and bub­ble wrap. What advan­tages, you might ask? Well, for exam­ple, pack­out is the per­fect rea­son to clean out your closet and get rid of that feather boa you col­lected on New Years’ Eve (but keep the feather flap­per head­band, of course). Pack­out is the per­fect time to unload all your crappy booze that was unloaded unto you when oth­ers left post. And dur­ing pack­out, you also get to record how much stuff you have as gross weight, which can become a fun game. Our grand total was a mere 3,500 lbs, in case you were won­der­ing, far under our esti­mated 4,500 lbs. Well under the 7,500lb max limit the State Depart­ment offers, so we get to col­lect lots more junk in the future, hooray!

After two long days of pack­ing and wrap­ping and tire­some hours of instruct­ing other peo­ple to do stuff (that was meant to be wryly sar­cas­tic, but it turned out to be sadly true) the Dipo­Man and I sat down in a newly emp­tied liv­ing room and made a short list. A list of how to go through this process eas­ier, and bet­ter. Now, this list is mostly for us, but I’m also going to share it with you, because if it will help you with your move, then all the bet­ter. Because seri­ously, in the end, this pack­out process is a good amount of stress with a lit­tle fun and a lot of relief, and really just a drawn out way to say good­bye to a place that I call home and peo­ple I call friends.

The Diplo­Man and Jessie’s Pack­out Pointers.

*orig­i­nal notes in black, added com­men­tary in ital­i­cized red.

Things that are good to know:

• Reduced reduce reduce, then reduce again
• Items going UAB should be sep­a­rated into three piles accord­ing to neces­sity– and weighed between each to deter­mine how much more can go in:
  1. Things that MUST go (then weigh)
  2. Things that really should go (weigh it again)
  3. Things that we would like for them to go (weigh to reach max UAB weight, if not already)
• Hir­ing help just to fold clothes is a GREAT idea Our a-yi came for three full days (we were able to snag another day from a friend) and really, mostly folded clothes to be packed. It was the best idea we (the Diplo­Man) had through­out this entire process.
• Clearly sep­a­rate and check wel­come kit The wel­come kit is a small kit of plates, uten­sils, sheets, etc. that we are pro­vided when we move in, to enable us to sur­vive on fried eggs and but­tered bread until we receive our belong­ings. It also serves, on the flip side, to allow us to live out our last few days in Guangzhou with a bit of san­ity. If you’re like us, you’ll have packed a plate or knife or two from the wel­come kit into the HHE. It’s not a big deal, but it just means you’ll have to deal with get­ting rid of an iron­i­cally dull chefs knife when you get to your next post, and that you’ll be cut­ting your veg­eta­bles with a steak knife between pack­out and your leave date.
• Pack carry ons and checked bags first
• 250 of UAB is two boxes, not quite maxed out Typ­i­cally one per­son would receive 250 lbs, and per­sons after that an addi­tional 200 lbs each. But because my med­ical clear­ance is still pend­ing, we had to suf­fice with a 250 lb ship­ment. 250 lbs is not a lot between two peo­ple. Espe­cially if you have to antic­i­pate spend­ing three sea­sons on the East Coast and you like to have din­ner par­ties. And your sig­nif­i­cant other HAS to pack his three-piece suits for “work”. Looks like we’ll be lay­er­ing dur­ing the cold sea­son and we’ll be com­ing over to your house instead. But at least I’ll have arm candy as my date.
• Post-its for jbone are use­ful jbone, the DiploMan’s wildly un-romantic pet­name for me.
• Set aside UAB first, and in order of necessity.
• Jessie does a great job label­ing boxes Thank you. And yeah, if you don’t label things your­self, you’ll have a lot of boxes labeled “liv­ing room” and a lot of boxes labeled “books”. Be spe­cific, and you’ll thank your­self later. In a year.
• Be in the room that is being packed up, and label each box yourself
• Yarn does not go into UAB ‘really’ This hap­pened after an attempt where one of us thought that twine should be packed into our “should go” to DC pile. The other one of us con­de­scend­ingly (albeit unin­ten­tion­ally) remarked, “Really? You think YARN should go with us, really?!”. I mean, it wasn’t even yarn. But it’s okay, that was in the heat of the moment. We’ve since called a truce.
• Remem­ber to pack exten­sion cords Our home is now a grave­yard of var­i­ous exten­sion cords, both 110w and 220w capable.
• “Just as bad as it is a liar” This is the iPad voice record­ing feature’s tran­scrip­tion of ‘Jessie is bad at leav­ing things in the dryer’. I orig­i­nally didn’t want that full state­ment writ­ten down, but admit­tedly, I kept leav­ing things in the dryer.

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