A Dear Don Letter

Dear Don,

This is you writing a letter to yourself. I am writing because I want to make sure you have some solid advice from someone you trust should you ever again consider moving house.

I know how you are - and why wouldn't I? - and in a couple of years, you will start to forget what a severe pain in the butt moving house is and you will begin thinking that it wasn't all that bad when you moved from Sydney to Hobart.

But Don, you need to recall these days. You will say to yourself: We outsourced all the hard work - the packing and cleaning - so how hard could it have been? You will have forgotten all the trips to dump out stuff you no longer need and the half dozen trips to the charity bins to leave clothes that probably looked quite good on you when you had a waistline measurement that was not approaching your height. You will forget lugging crap all over the place for days on end.

Ah, I can hear you thinking, but all that junk came from ten years of living there while we were working. Now we're retired and don't have nearly as much. Don, Don, Don, remember who you're talking to.

And you need to always remember one other thing. The love of your life is a pack rat. She saves things that other people don't. And she buys things that other people wouldn't (I didn't have a blue colander! Sure those are a lot of golf shirts, but you will wear them eventually the way you stain everything! We needed a tool dedicated to cleaning prawns and shrimp, and besides it didn't cost that much!)

No, Don, if you decide to move house, you will be making lots more of those trips to the waste station and the charity bins. You and your friends will again spend a week trying to drink enough wine to keep an entire French city happy at lunch - and all just so you don't have to pay to ship it to the new place.

And on the final night before the packers come, with much of your stuff already chucked out or given away, you will sit soaked in grime and sweat, having your first drink 2 1/2 hours after (AFTER) cocktail hour started, and you will remember writing a blog post about the joys of moving.

And that's when you will read this post again, wondering why you didn't remember writing it before the whole cycle started again. Well, it will be too late to do much about it, so have another drink, take a long shower and sleep well because the packers get here at 7:30 tomorrow.

Cheers

Yourself