Last fall I clicked on a new option available in the blogger template: Monetize. Nothing materialized from it, other than ads in my sidebar and below my most recent entry ... ads that would periodically change and sometimes reflect something of the content of my most recent post. When I wrote about copious choices in the dish soap aisle at the grocery store, a friend reported that an ad, including no less than seven dish soap brands popped up. I'm not sure I'll continue with the monetization... To date, I learned today, I've earned $14 which is yet unclaimed as I need to share my tax info with google to collect my payment.
Presently, and for the last little while, there has been an ad for a storage company. The words 'Pack Rat' blaze across our homepage, and make me cringe. I am in the midst of sorting 'stuff'. I've been in this midst for months. On the China side, we organized 'stuff', on the US side we are now 'processing' the same stuff. All of our major thing are unwrapped, placed and in use. We are left with the untidy and unwanted bits at the bottom of boxes I can hardly stand seeing anymore.
Am I a pack rat? That’s the sense google is getting.
This is part of the weariness of a huge move. There are jokes abounding in the expat community about boxes that never really get unpacked. They sit in store rooms, and basements, garages and attics ... tidily contained in the same moving container, cardboard or box they were packed into several years and moves earlier. I am tempted to take those last bits, those dreaded dregs and stick them away, or better yet dump them!
When we were sitting in our empty near house, waiting for our shipment … When we had five chairs and a dining room table, three mattresses, and still lived out of suitcases (because, despite being in our home, we didn't have dressers) … When we had only a loveseat in the living room and a TV on the floor (and I think we all were thinking the dog’s bed was looking better and better each time we crammed five bums onto the seat and arms of the tired, dingy slip covered Ektorp we had kept in our basement) I came across a quote in a magazine that I tore out and hung on the fridge.
It’s a Finnish proverb.
It reads:
“Happiness is a place between too little, and too much”
With this move, and throughout this repatriation process, we are trying to find that middle place.
