Random Belongings Make Their Way To Juneau

Over the years I have collected many random things that I decorated my house with down in Tennessee. 

Moving personal belongings from anywhere in the Lower 48 to Juneau Alaska is no small undertaking.  The logistics, I found out after doing much research, in getting personal belongings to a town that is separated from the rest of the United States by another country, and that is only accessible by either ferry or airline just adds another complicated layer to the undertaking.

Once you really understand just how complicted and expensive it can be, you start mentally going through all of your belongings and identifying exactly what is important to you (and which you therefore want to keep), and what you can bear to give away, sell or donate.

That mental inventory doesn't just happen once.  It happens over and over again until you make your final move.  And my Mountain Boy and I have come up with a series of game plans over the past months - everything from driving through Canada, to taking a ferry with both trucks and a trailer, to taking a ferry with just what we can carry in the trucks, to mailing as much as we can to Juneau, to getting a storage unit, to just selling everything we own and starting over.

If we were both 24 we could probably have done the latter.  In fact, intellectually it makes the most sense to sell everything (probably including at least one of our trucks), and just haul the dog and whatever we can fit in the back of the other truck.

But that's the thing - we're not 24 anymore.  And over the years my Mountain Boy and I have had very different, but also in many ways, parallel stories.  Stories of loss.  Of personal sacrifice.  Of putting our own needs aside for others.  Sometimes of hardship.  Sometimes of great hardship.  And of starting life over again and again.

At the risk of sounding corny as hell, maybe those parallels in our life experience are why it appears (after all these years of getting it wrong) that we may have finally found our soul mate in each other.

And at this stage we will give up a lot - but neither one of us wants to give up everything .  Not yet again.

So long story short............LC sent some boxes up to me, until I realized that there isn't a whole lot of room in this house for..........stuff.  So I asked him to stop sending boxes to me.  He will sell much of what is left, and give some of it to Son #1 who lives in Nashville with his wife.  Some of it will come to Juneau in the back of two trucks (mostly outdoor gear, tools and our beloved barking-mutt who goes ballistic when she sees a cat, so who the heck knows how she will respond if she ever sees a bear??). 

And some of it will go into a storage unit in a small town in Minnesota of all places (close to my Mountain Boys' brother).  I know how messy that all sounds.  But messy has been the running theme ever since Juneau Alaska first hit our radar last September. 

Our potential home buyer in Tennessee is still around, and the sale is possibly-maybe moving ahead.  Still no definate answer.  But I actually FEEL that something is going to be resolved with our house soon.  Maybe that is just wishful thinking but I hope not.

The pictures in this blog entry are of some of the completely random items that my Mountain Boy has sent to me over the past few weeks.  There's no rhyme or reason to what he sent - he just grabbed boxes that I had packed before I left and took them to the post office, with him literally having no idea what he was sending up to me. 

The hiking sign (above) was given to me by one of my colleagues down in Tennessee my last day of work there.  I had coveted that sign for 2 years, and asked him at least every couple of months to give it to me.  He stapled a photocopy of it to my office wall one day, taunting me with the sign as he loved to do.  I, in return, layed out 100 rubber ducks that covered every flat surface in his tiny office.  He, in return, taped every item in my office down (pen to day planner, stapler to desk).  And I in return taped the lock on his door with half a roll of tape.  It took him 30 minutes of cutting through all the tape before he could get back into his office.......so him giving me that stupid metal hiking sign (that I am certain the little criminal stole from somewhere) means a lot to me. 

A metal bowl that I bought at a yard sale for a dollar.  I had been filling the bowl with finds from multiple hiking trips for over a year, but why on earth I actually put all those nuts and shells in a bag and packed them in a box I can't tell you. But here they are now in Juneau.....

Another one of my colleagues down in Tennessee gave me this ugly and heavy cast iron cat.  She found it in a field while working one day and I admired it.  Months later I was given it as a Christmas gift.  It is pretty darned ugly, but I love it.  And I am deeply touched by the fact that she remembered how much I liked it and offered it as a gift to me.

Deer antlers from the one and only deer that Son #2 shot when he was about 15 years old.

A wooden box bought at a yard sale for a couple of dollars. Now that I think about it, I don't own anything that I paid big money for......everthing else in the pictures I took below were all cheap yard sale finds

These are the snow shoes that I borrowed from a colleague up here in Juneau.  They are the same ones that I was planning on buying from LL Bean.  I loved them.  There were a couple of other people this past weekend who were snow-shoeing also, but their snowshoes had straps that looked a lot more complicated to set up than what these were.   Very easy to use (short, compact, lightweight, and easy clip attachments).

My Tennessee yard-sale brown bears fit very well in my rustic cabin Out The Road in Juneau AK