Yep, it happened. We found a condo we like better than where we are in Minneapolis and we close at the end of the month.

Cue hysterical screaming.

I hate moving. I hate *packing.* Sarah hates both more than I do.

But we’ve decided we’re doing it, so we have to pay the price by…actually doing it.

We’re planning to give a lot of our current furniture away and get new stuff. We’ve had a lot of these pieces for years, and many of them we acquired the way all young 20-somethings do, off a curb or via the free section of craigslist. Thankfully, we have no shortage of friends in that phase of life who would happily take even our 20 year old Target bookcases because it is more than they have today.

In general, we’ve been working on purging stuff. I don’t expect us to ever become minimalists, but we’re both trying to let go of things that don’t *matter.*

However, I am particularly bad at this.

I’m not really sure I believe in the “love languages” thing, but if I do have one, it is related to gift-giving. Which is to say, I give things with a lot of feeling, but I also receive things with a lot of feeling. If someone gives me something, even as simple as a card, I tend to hold onto it and get increasingly sentimental about it as time goes on. I have cards from coworkers I haven’t spoken to in a decade, little plastic figures you get out of a coin machine at a Denny’s from college friends, and kitschy weird things branded by companies I don’t even remember interacting with. I just…keep things. Because they remind me of people and places and times, and therefore the thing ends up having value because those memories have value.

It makes for me keeping a lot of weird stuff.

Sometimes I have to deliberately and consciously tell myself that I am not throwing away the person I cherish, just the plastic bouncy ball they gave me in jest that one time.

It is definitely possible to be altogether too sentimental, and I know that.

On the plus side, I’ve discovered how much I enjoy making collages, so when it comes to the cards or drawings, I’m finding I can repurpose them and give them new life. So not everything has to go away. It just has to be recycled into something else for me to be sentimental about.

This is the collage I made as part of an art project for CONvergence. I took apart a couple of calendars and I like how it came out. What do you think?

At least it gives me something else to think about when PACKING and MOVING become too much…