Life as We Now Know It

I promised to continue with the story, but we were so busy living it that it's taken a little longer than I expected. Let's call this a "one-month update."

We moved from the bed and breakfast into our apartment in student family housing, getting laughed at by passersby while we waited for our taxi with our million bags. I really, really wanted to know how to say, "We're not tourists, we're moving here" in Dutch, but instead I just had to grit my teeth and bear it.

The apartment is unsurprisingly small, with an unsurprisingly small shower. (It would have been surprising to me before our trip to Germany, but I knew what to expect this time.) I really feel for Morgan - having long limbs is not really what you want in these showers!

The good: 
Paring down your belongings so that they fit into suitcases means that you actually feel like you have a ton of storage space where before you would have had trouble cramming yourself into twice as much apartment.

Walking. We haven't really been able to eat the way we normally would at home, so knowing that we're getting plenty of exercise has made me feel a whole lot less bad about that.

The bad:
The first two floors of the building are the daycare center. We are on the 4th (American) floor, so we are separated from babies that scream all day by just one floor, which provides no sound insulation at all.

Walking. Trams and buses are great, but it hardly seems worth it for a couple of stops. Still, by the end of a round trip somewhere, my feet have often taken a beating.

The confusing:
Shopping is an endless source of confusion - while supermarkets exist here, they're not necessarily the least expensive or best places to buy most things. So there is the fruit and vegetable market, the butcher's, and the bakery in addition to the grocery store. As with many other places in the world, a drug store (apotheek) here is actually a drug store, not an everything store.

Walking. It takes a while to figure out the rhythm of crossing streets, going around people on sidewalks without doing a dance, etc. I found myself at cross-purposes with people a lot when we first got here.

The scenic:
Everything, really.

Beautiful, beautiful mosquito breeding grounds.

How to Make an International Move (Not a Blueprint)

Morgan and I found out in late April that we would have the opportunity to move to Belgium for 6 months. By late May, we were moved out of our apartment in Denver, off to stay with his mother for a month. By late June we were on a series of planes to our new country.

That sounds pretty orderly, but the road here was certainly not straight.

Here's our how-to on moving:

Two months out:

Start working on the documents needed for your visa right away. Feel proud of yourself for having most of your original documents already at hand. Get fingerprinted ASAP for an FBI background check and send it in with no delay.

Downsize your belongings; make many trips to Goodwill. Sell some stuff on Craigslist.

Investigate the requirements to take your dog with you. Rejoice that there are no quarantine restrictions for Belgium.

Give notice on your apartment.

One month out:

Realize that even with putting some things in storage, you have far too much stuff to take overseas. Have the garage sale to end all garage sales.

Sell things you thought you might keep. Then sell things you were sure you would keep.

Pack everything that remains and put into either "storage" or "going" pile. Realize it's still a lot of stuff. Seriously, where did all of this come from?!

During this whole time, keep communicating with the folks in Belgium about the job, plane tickets and housing situation without really getting all the details needed due to timing, translation issues, or not knowing the right questions to ask.

Fill your storage unit, load up your trailer with everything else and head out to your temporary home for a month.

Work on Dutch lessons.

Two weeks out:

Realize that taking the dog doesn't work for a variety of reasons. Completely freak out about finding a 6-month home for her.

Finally get the plane tickets settled.

Learn that you have to have health insurance for a dependent (like your wife) to submit with your visa application.

Learn that you have to have a completed rental agreement signed to submit with your visa application.

Ten days out:

Celebrate the arrival of two envelopes from the FBI. Have the joy turn to horror when you realize that you're receiving one completed background check and one rejection letter because your fingerprints "are not of a sufficient quality."

Search the internet to find someone to fingerprint you again RIGHT. NOW.

Go to his office and find out he's thoroughly incompetent. Have a near-breakdown.

Go to the police station and have them fingerprint you. Twice. Overnight these to the FBI.

Call the FBI and see if there's anything they can do for you, since they don't expedite paperwork for private citizens; you have to go through an approved channeler for that.

The next day, get fingerprinted yet again. Twice. Send these through a channeler.

Try to maintain enough calm to get through more Dutch lessons.


One week out:

Finally find a home (a good home) for your dog. This would feel like the weight of the world lifted, but your fingerprints are still out there somewhere holding up your visa.

Call the Belgian consulate and ask if you can come in person to get the visas if there's not enough time for mailing. Yes, you can.

Read up on baggage allowances for your flights. Realize that yet again, you have way too much stuff. Make more cuts.

Research luggage. Find out how it's possible to work with a 13-lb carryon limit.

Start trying to fit your possessions into your allowed luggage, mindful both of weight and volume restrictions.

Redefine your definition of "necessary."

A little less than a week out, get your background check back via overnight mail. Celebrate that the last thing is finally here.

Four days out:

Sadly say goodbye to your dog.  Know that she's going to be just fine, though.

Keep repacking your suitcases and weighing them. Watch the "maybe" pile shrink and the "no" pile grow.

Three days out:

Get up in the middle of the night and drive from Northern California to the Belgian Consulate in LA.

Have a moment of panic when it turns out that the only remaining holdup isn't the FBI report you've brought with you, but the one you mailed in earlier in the week. They don't have it. Try not to faint.

Find out you can send a scan, so you just need to nail down some internet access and send that to them. Have drama finding internet access and parking in the same place, but get it sent.

Walk out with the visas in your hot little hands and a sense of triumph in your hearts. The euphoria sustains you through the long drive back home.

Two days and one day out:

Say your goodbyes to everyone.

Donate lots more to the Goodwill. Pack up the rest to be stored. Weigh your suitcases a final time.

Try to sleep. 

The day of travel:

Discover that 3 checked bags, 2 laptop bags, and 2 carryon bags are actually kind of a lot to wrangle.

Give a mental (and maybe physical) fist-pump when your checked bags all come in at least a couple of pounds below the limit.

Make all your flights, in spite of delays and a crazy woman in Frankfurt who had to be dragged off the shuttle by police.

Reclaim your bags (yay, they all made it!), drag them to the train station and onto your train.

Exit train station, find taxi driver. Try to resist the urge to explain that you're not just the world's worst vacation packers when his fellow driver laughs at the guy for drawing the fare with all the heavy bags.

Get to bed and breakfast (home for 3 days), find out your room is up 2 tiny, narrow flights of stairs. You'd re-examine yet again your definition of "necessary," but you really just want to go to sleep, so you lug them upstairs and fall into bed.

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And that's it. I'll continue the story once we get into our apartment (tomorrow!) and check in with the city officials (required within 8 days of our arrival).

Moving ... for at Least a Little While

Life sure does get in the way of blogging. And when you feel like not much of interest is going on, that gets in the way of blogging, too.

But since there's something to report, I'm back. Morgan got an offer of a 6-month research position (June or July through the end of the year), which is awesome. The position is in Ghent, Belgium. Which is also presumably awesome - I can't say with any authority, since I've never been there. Morgan has been to Belgium twice and Ghent once, and he assures me I'll like it. (I admit to being apprehensive about the rainy weather that seems to be much-talked about.)

Overview of Ghent (source)

It's funny how these things work out though. My son will be starting at CU Boulder in the fall, and it gave me a reason to be pleased about being stuck in Denver, finally. Now, we'll be leaving before Jacob gets here and instead of being 30 miles away, we'll be ... well, a whole lot farther - an ocean and eight time zones. It's disappointing timing, but I know this is how things often work; circumstances fling us around and all we can do is see each other when we can.

We already had plans to go to California for Jacob's graduation on May 29 and spend a couple of weeks there, so now the end of May is our target date for paring down our stuff and being ready to go. It's going to be a whirlwind of thrift store donations, Craigslist ads, paperwork-filing, packing and driving to California over the next 30 days.

Why I Shout at My Mother

Or more accurately, why I try not to shout at my mother.

My cell phone rang the other night, and when I saw "Mom" on the display, I sighed. I answered it, though, because the only things worse than answering are listening to a voicemail from her and having to call her back.

She said, "Hi, I wanted to double-check that your address is still the same, on [redacted] street."
"Yes. Yes, it's the same. We moved here in August. It's December."
"Well, I don't know! I lived in apartments for a month sometimes."

I bit back my reflex response of "well, I'm not you." Instead, I thought about the last few years. Prior to this address, I'd been at the same one for nearly 4 years. The one before that, for almost 2 years. Before that, 6 years. Nothing to make you think I'd be so transitory.

But this is exactly the sort of exchange that drives me crazy. When I moved, she wanted to know if my phone number was going to change. "Mom, it's a cell phone. It's not going to change."

"Well, I don't know!"
"It hasn't changed in 10 years, including when I moved from California to Colorado."
"I just wanted to make sure!"

As if I wouldn't tell her. And I would, both a forwarding address and a new phone number, in spite of the fact that I don't get any joy out of hearing from her.

But back around to why I try not to shout at her. You might think that she just sounds irritatingly neurotic, but really what's frustrating about it is that she put herself into this condition. She drank her way there. She was always cautious about things like that - she would repeat a phone number to you and make you say it back to her - but somewhere over the years, alcoholism took its toll and she has a hard time remembering things, or just making logical connections. It's a little like talking to the guy from Memento, if he peppered every other sentence with "I'm over here...."

"I went to the store and I couldn't believe how expensive the [whatever] was. I'm over here, are you kidding me?"

"The bus in town was late by 20 minutes and I'm over here, 'I'm going to miss my connecting bus!'"

I have no idea if she drinks anymore (she lives in southern California and I haven't seen her in years), but I don't think it would make much difference either way at this point. Her personality, her ability to carry on a conversation, her interest in anything, none of it is coming back. She is what she is now, and yelling at her only makes her respond like a child. She gets meek, and apologizes, and offers to let me get off the phone. She's got to be aware of everything that she's lost, but there's nothing to be done about it now. So I do my best not to yell and instead substitute silence. I'd feel sorry for her if I could feel anything at all.

Correspondence

I just read something on Postcrossing today that was pretty timely for the post I'd already been planning to make: on the radio in Germany, some guy said that the postcard is dead. Postcrossers are now sending him postcards from around the world to show that people do, indeed, still mail them. I don't know if it particularly proves the point, since they will be coming from a specialty site, but I'd have to agree that the postcard is definitely not dead.

My mother-in-law sent us a postcard from her trip to France. My kids sent us postcards from Hawaii. Maybe we don't use them much for general correspondence anymore, but they are still the way to send a little souvenir from a trip. Did you send anyone a postcard from your last vacation? Or pick up a couple to keep for yourself as mementos?

As I said, that happens to tie in with what I was already planning to write about, which is other people's postcards. I've never been terribly interested in them. I know there are plenty of folks who collect old letters or postcards, but it's never really grabbed me. Recently at a couple of estate sales, though, I picked up some used postcards just because I liked the images on the front and in some cases, the stamps. I'm not going to collect them, though; I'm going to repurpose them in some way. Heresy, I'm sure.

But I can preserve them digitally at least.

Here's one sent from Rome:

At first, I didn't even think this was in English.

People's handwriting has changed so much from ... whenever this was. I can't find a year on the postmark. (Edited to say: I see that under the postmark, the author of the card has the date written - Nov. 20, 1938) As I said in the caption above, I didn't think it was written in English, but now I can make out that the last few words are: "is his girl." It just takes practice to read this style of handwriting - I have the same problem when I'm looking at old records on ancestry.com. Maybe eventually I'll be able to decipher this one.

Just for fun, I looked up the address it was going to on Google Street View.

I couldn't find any interior shots for this particular building, but Googling the address and looking at images brought up the interiors of a few apartments on the same block, and they look nice. It occurs to me that it would be interesting to find some sent locally and do a then-and-now comparison of the addresses. So many project ideas, so little time.

And as an aside to the topic, did you know that I blog all the postcards I receive from Postcrossing on my art-and-everything-else blog? Well, now you do.

Inherent Value

Going to estate sales will show you a whole range of ideas about the value of items. Morgan and I were at a sale last weekend where I found a copy of Good Housekeeping magazine. It wasn't priced, so I took it up to the cashier and asked about it. She said, "Four dollars." I just shook my head and set it aside. She said, "It's from 1941." I replied, "Oh, I know." She sort of made a face that suggested she thought I didn't understand the value of an old magazine.

Funny, I left thinking the same thing about her.

I used to work for a record store, and they bought used music and games from people. Doing that, you very quickly learn that there's a disconnect between what people think things are worth and what they actually are worth. In that business, there's an additional disconnect caused by the fact that you're selling them to a middleman, so values are even lower. But I told many people that they were more than welcome to try selling their albums on eBay or wherever. It's all a matter of what's worth more to you - time or money. It's time-consuming to sell your possessions online and try to get the best price for them, and there is risk involved. Selling them to the store results in less money, but it's done, nothing more to think about. People always wanted more money for their vinyl records because they tended to equate "old" with "valuable," or because they attached monetary value to their sentiment.

Them: "It's a Rolling Stones album from the '60s!"
Me: "Do you know how many copies of this album were pressed and sold?"

You know what's worth something? First pressings of the Stones' first albums on Decca. Early punk albums. Your Journey or Boston albums that sold in the millions and were ubiquitous across everyone's record collections? Pretty much worthless and easily found in basements across the country.

I don't know much about vinyl, so the point of that story isn't the medium or the specific example, but rather just to say that that job is where I finally started to get it. Before that, I also thought "if only I had my mom's old Beatles records!" Now I realize that it would be great to have them for sentimental reasons, but I sure wouldn't be retiring on them.

On to another medium: books. I love books. But I also buy old books, cut out their insides, and fill them with blank paper for use as journals and sketchbooks. Let's talk realistically about old books - while it's quite romantic to imagine that every one of them could find its home with someone who appreciates it, it's simply not true. Lots and lots of books fade into obscurity and would never have their covers cracked again, many with good reason. Who today is going to miss a copy of Mystery in Old Quebec? Sure, someone out there might, but I highly doubt that was the last copy in the world. (Indeed, there are currently 9 copies available just on Amazon starting at $2.51 - feel free to save one.)

Finally, back to the magazines. I have gone to enough estate sales to know that there is no shortage of people who saved every copy of magazines to which they subscribed. So that copy of Good Housekeeping from 1941? I'm sure it's not the only one. To a collector, who wants to put it into a plastic bag and store it, it might be worth $4. But assuming you're going to run across that person at an estate sale on a cold day in Denver is a bit of a stretch, and a risk. Acting like I'm some sort of Philistine for not realizing the value of a relic from 1941 (71 years ago!) just increases the likelihood that you will end up selling those magazines like the ones at a sale we visited last weekend, where there were shelves and shelves full of magazines. They had previously gone for 50 cents each. They were now being sold 10 magazines for $1.50. I picked up 20 of various publications and years.

Some of these are from the 1930s, they must be worth a fortune!

I'm going to cut them up for collages and similar work, but before I perform this treacherous act, I'm scanning them first. Isn't technology wonderful? I can then keep them in their entirety, but I don't have to become a hoarder. Digital storage space is cheap. I will be posting ads and other interesting bits from them on Flickr, so keep an eye out there (I've just started, but there is much more to come, so check back).

Oh and at the sale I mentioned at the beginning of the post? We spent that $4 on a much-needed and seemingly brand-new tea kettle.

Clearly worthless, as it's not old.

Braaaains!

Last Saturday was the annual Zombie Crawl in downtown Denver. This was our second year going. It's quite a scene; people in this town really seem to love their zombies. I'm not going to post any really gruesome ones here, so even if horror isn't your thing, you can read pretty safely. (Also, I'm just gonna tell you now there might be a reason to get all the way to the bottom of the post.)

Checking his No-Facebook.

One intersection on the 16th Street Mall gets closed down and most of the people congregate in that area, although there's certainly no lack of zombies for blocks around. Many people go all-out with their costumes, some go the lazy "I smeared blood on myself, I'm a zombie" route, and others just seem confused.

I believe the mime convention is next weekend.

You may also have noticed her mismatched footwear. 

I love child zombies, and there were quite a few out. The family that eats brains together, stays together, I guess. 

Even zombie children don't always get their way.

No festival is complete without music from a band of the undead. Whoever they were, they weren't half-bad, either. The singer had a sort of Tom Waits thing going without sounding like he was imitating Tom Waits.

I have no picture to illustrate this story (and that's a real shame), but here goes anyway. We brought Penny down with us. She's okay in crowds, although she doesn't like it when dogs sneak up on her, so sometimes she's a little embarrassing with the growling and barking at them. She was really good on this particular day, not with the dogs, but with the number of people (especially children) who petted her suddenly. Sometimes she interacted with them; most of the time she just ignored them while they patted her head. We had been standing in one place on the sidewalk, leaning against a wall, for a while and she got comfortable enough to settle in and lay down. Not long after, a trio of cops on bicycles squeezed past us. The first one was close but not that bad. The second one encroached on Penny's space (I thought his pedal was going to hit her in the head). She jumped up and nipped his ankle. I think she got him, although it happened fast and so I could only say for sure that I saw his pant leg stretched in her teeth. The third cop paused for a second and looked at Penny, but went on without comment. I know he deserved it, Penny, but you just can't go around biting the cops!

And now, as a reward for scrolling all the way to the bottom, it's time for Who Wore It Better? Blood-Spatter Edition.

Exhibit 1: Accessorized with blood, a fox mask, ripped stockings, and a hook.

Someone's having a bad day

Exhibit 2: Accessorized with bolero jacket, wrist corsage, '80s hair, and a gay prom date.

Yes, me. 

It's sort of an odd feeling to see someone wearing your prom dress as a costume. I mean, okay, the prom was in 1989 so that's practically vintage (the shortest amount of time I'll accept as "vintage" is 25 years, so we're not quite there yet), but still. When did so much time pass? Oh, who am I kidding: my initial reaction was to laugh, not to ponder the nature of time.

I have a bunch more pictures of zombies that I didn't include here - you can see them on Flickr.