End of tour: The state of the pantry

With less than four months to go until we head home, I've been taking stock of what remains of our consumables and trying to use up what's left.  As always, there are things that we didn't bring enough of, and things of which we brought way too much.  So I find myself having conversations like this with our kids:

Sorry, no more hot fudge sauce.  Why don't you top your ice cream with some yummy homemade sweet chili sauce instead?

We're out of ketchup, but this Trader Joe's Yellow Curry Sauce will be delicious on your fries!

As our whole wheat rotini stash dwindles, I find myself thinking of creative ways to use up rice vermicelli (a little of that stuff goes a long way and I have LOTS).  I also have, like, a case of rice vinegar and about three cases of light coconut milk.  We could eat curried rice noodles every day for the next two months.  We've been making smoothies just about every day using frozen fruit and coconut milk so I think we will be able to use that up.  But five bags of shredded coconut?  I guess I should start making macaroons (not to be confused with macarons, which I should also get cracking on,  to use up all the almond meal in my freezer).

62 cans of coconut milk
18 cans of refried black beans
13 bottles of rice vinegar
12 boxes of quinoa

11 packages of rice noodles

10 jars of almond butter

7 bottles each of TJ red and yellow curry sauces

6 jars of coconut oil
6 pounds of sushi rice
5 packages of shredded coconut

5 pounds of brown rice rotini

5 bottles of vanilla extract

4 bottles of Trader Joe's goddess dressing
4 bottles of maple syrup

4 pounds of almond meal

3 bottles of tamari

3 pounds of whole wheat rotini

2 pounds of red lentils
2 liters of fish sauce (why I thought I needed to buy that stuff in liters escapes me at the moment).
2 5-lb sacks of whole wheat flour

And a partridge in a pear tree.

Quinoa burgers, anyone?

What's left on your pantry shelves at the end of a consumables tour?

163

Is how many boxes the movers hauled out of here this afternoon.

Transition

When I was 12 years old, my family moved to Tel Aviv from northern Virginia.  My friends and I wrote each other long letters in balloony handwriting where the "i"s were dotted with hearts or stars or bubbles, analyzing for pages whether that it meant anything that the crush of the week had dropped his pencil in front of our lockers.  Though the letters took at least a month to arrive, at first I had so many pen-pals that I was getting at least one per week.  I kept them in a cardboard box under the sink in my bathroom until the day the pipes burst.  My second box did not fill up as quickly.  By the end of the three-year tour, I only had one pen-pal left.

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Today on the playground, when talking about the transfer season and my impending pack-out, someone commented "well, you're a professional."  She was referring to the fact that I've been doing this - moving - since I was a year old.  And she was assuming that I was "good" at it by now. 


This is my 18th move.  If I were going to get "good" at it, I would have done it by now.  And in some ways, maybe I have.  I know that I want the house to be somewhat organized when the movers arrive.  I know that I don't want them carefully wrapping empty CD cases in endless layers of packing paper - so I prepack the house, as much as I can, before packing day.  And I know that I am not the type of person who can just blow through the house in 24 hours and take care of everything.  So I start a month in advance, an hour or so a day.  It's manageable.

When it comes to maintaining friendships, though, I have learned that it is not entirely under my control.  I email.  I call.  I start out with five pen-pals.  I end up, if I'm lucky, with one.  I know that, in most cases, it is nothing personal.  It's just how things are.

But it never gets easier.  The week or two before a move, I find myself withdrawing.  Even right now, on this gorgeous 75-degree day, I am holed up in my sewing room which, as you saw in the last post, is piled high with boxes.  I think that's because it's easier to be here, among the things that I will have with me in the future, than outside with the things I am leaving behind.  I know, it's really weird.

I've enjoyed my time here so much that it almost feels easier to say goodbye to Moscow and my friends now, before I've even left, so that the actual leaving is less difficult.  Our nanny, who has become family, told me that she would come the morning of our flight to see us off.  I am not going to tell her no, but I am honestly dreading this.  Those types of goodbye are too stark, too final, too real.  I prefer to just see you one day, and not see you the next.  I don't want to cry on the plane.  I want to look forward, not backward.

So, no, I'm not good at it.  But I have built a coping mechanism.

What's yours?

12:33 a.m.

And I am awake.  Tossing and turning in bed because, well, we are moving our entire lives in days that you can count on less than two hands.

And because I fully recognize how ridiculous it is that I spent three hours today sewing a blouse, when I should have been packing a suitcase.

And because I've started thinking about making plans with Stateside friends and have realized that the months of time that I thought I had, isn't, on second thought, exactly long enough to see everybody and do everything and buy everything that I need/want to see and do and buy.

And because I nursed a caffeinated frappe (thanks, Magic Bullet that also needs to go back into its box) until nearly 3 p.m.  Someday this caffeine hypersensitivity has to go away, right?

Anyway, I ended up getting out of bed with the intent of boxing up the sewing machine, seductive mechanical temptress that she is.

And I did.  She cried a little on the way in, but I held firm.  And kept going.  And now the sewing room/guest room/office/crap room looks like this:

And it occurs to me that my moves always seem to start and end like this: in a desperately-trying-to-be-organized-and-yet-still-vaguely-messy-and-pathetic stack of way more bins than I thought we needed full of the many things that we want/need to be happy.  And the lighting is always terrible.  And it's always the middle of the night.

I should be packing ...

... but that is too stressful and also kind of sad, so instead ...


I made these ...

and these:

and this:

The movers come in a week.

Things that follow us around or, the Detritus of Life

Tonight Jeremy and I were organizing our CD and DVD collection in preparation for the move.  We don't have much time left here in Moscow and the giant stress-clock in my head is tick, tick, ticking away.  My stress dreams, which usually involve a college class I'm about to fail, now revolve around closets full of heirlooms that the movers forgot to pack and which can't be mailed or taken on the plane.

We got rid of a few items - movies that we will never watch and kids' CDs received as gifts that I can't stand to listen to. Most of the rest, even the 90 percent that we never watched or listened to during this tour, were carefully packed in a bin to ship to Georgia.

Among those are a number of CD-RWs with no labels on them.  Are they blank?  Did I record something on them and neglect to label them?  I don't have a clue.  It was just going to be too much work to figure out and I had other things to do.  But I couldn't throw them away, lest they have something important on them. So into the pack-out bin they went. 

And I'm pretty sure that is exactly what happened in the last pack-out.

Maybe in Georgia I'll finally figure out what's on them.