My packing progress reached a kind of milestone, today.
I have been doing a sort of "bubble sort" on my apartment. I divide things into piles, and go through piles doing a sort of "keep, give-away, trash, defer decision" classification on each item. Today, I implemented a broad categorization for the two non-trash categories. I have one side of the apartment classified as either "keep and send to the US" or "defer decision", and the other side of the apartment classified as "leave behind". The goal, of course, is that between trips to the post office and trips to the trash zone downstairs, these categories will finally result in only my packed luggage on the "keep" side, and everything else on the "leave" side so that I can have some friends over to help me dispose of it.
I took a picture.
Everything on the left is "leave behind" and everything on the right is "still needs to sort" or "ready to send to US."
This doesn't include some items still in my closets, behind me in the picture. But I feel like the end state is within conception, now – and that's the first time I've felt that. I have 16 days left.
This reminds me a lot of the summer before I came to Korea, in 2007. I really spent all of August packing and sorting and organizing my stuff. And my storage unit in Minneapolis represents the frozen result of that effort. So now I'll have a new similar result – a bunch of boxes waiting for me in Alaska, and some suitcases, and the rest is abandoned.
I guess it's good to tackle this kind of thing once a decade or so. But I'm realizing that this is just phase one. Once back in the US, I'll have to go to Minnesota and repeat the process to get out of that storage unit.
[daily log: walking, 8km; carrying heavy box to post office, 0.5km]