Moving is Neither Fun nor Easy - Self.Newsletter - Issue #22

Moving still sucks

I was supposed to move out of my humble abode of 8 long years on Labor Day, 6 September 2021, after having received 60 days notice of a No-Cause Non-Renewal. The market in Vegas being what it is (or was 2-3 months ago, anyway), I believe they wanted to reset the rent on that unit to get renewal increases higher than I was providing them. Anyway, they gave no reason, hence the No-Cause notice, and my moving process began.

Luckily I was able to find a new place within a day, so that gave me high hopes that the thing we all dread would go somewhat smoothly. After all, if finding a new place could be considered the big challenge with many variables, surely packing stuff surrounding me each day would be a piece of cake. Normally, it would have been.

While I did have storage and moving truck resources locked down (future self, remember that a reservation with U-Haul is only advisory, things can change at the last minute and they most definitely did; use a different vendor for such things), in my mind I was moving out in a mode similar to that in which I moved in some eight years earlier. A visual survey suggested my somewhat chaotic organizational creation that was my little live-work residence, especially after the effects of pandemic isolationism on accumulation (in particular small things and the larger boxes than needed that Amazon tends to use), would actually be fine, boxing up nicely by general area with the bulk going into storage and some basics like my bed going to Phoenix for a few weeks in that move-out/move-in gap I had to deal with.

I was very, very wrong.

Over the course of eight years I had accumulated a great many things, mostly small and packable as opposed to larger and in need of, say, a second warm body to grab an end, but still the scope and grandeur of my creation was a most unfortunate surprise to me. In my work-a-day world there is this concept of Technical Debt, which is basically all of the stuff you do now that will come back later to bite you and/or your developers, clients, and customers. I had been accumulating residential debt for eight years, and by 7 September I was deeply in collections.

Long story short, I did move the storage stuff into storage, I left a lot of stuff in the dumpster bays for the unwashed masses to collect in their various dives, and I left a few larger furniture items in the apartment, because in the end I had gone over the egress date by enough so that my stock price was dropping. Not a great situation, and while I’m glad it finally came to an end with my driving the more important stuff down to Phoenix where I am as I write this, there will no doubt be lingering results felt for quite some time. This residential debt is not yet paid all the way down, the question is whether it will go back up in the coming months and years.

I continue to inch away from the big platforms. I deactivated my Instagram account, I’ve not logged in to Facebook for a few months now, I deleted WhatsApp entirely during their privacy policy flap, and I had closed out a few other software bits that I had been paying for in many cases, without a suitable return on investment.

The holdouts for the moment are Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter is not so bad since I tend to avoid the heavy political rants and trolls and the bulk of my own posts lately are either a long-running thread about the late summer 2021 COVID-19 data in Nevada and specifically Clark County (where Las Vegas is located), or the odd post here and there about this and that. I don’t expect engagement and I don’t get any, so for me Twitter is mostly a read-only time waster.

LinkedIn is almost the same thing, except for the fact that what used to be a reasonable professional resource continues its march, doubtless with full support from Microsoft, toward the facebookification that is a source of all of the world’s problems (arguable). I have un-followed more people than I care to count on LinkedIn, mostly because if the content they boost with their engagements (ie they Like something, ala Facebook, and I get to see an overtly political post that I am no into at all mixed in with professional business-related updates that do interest me), but as well some of the stuff they post directly. The troubling thing, just as with Facebook and similar, is the realization that the person you might do business with, or interact with along topics and discussions in your fields of work and interest, is so wildly different and less appealing after they start down that road, that the good parts of any interaction fade into the background. That’s the long way of saying that some in my LinkedIn network poop where they eat, and that’s where we eat, also.

That may seem like a bit of a rant on LinkedIn, but at the end of the day all social media platforms are Trojan Horses that allow all manner of good and bad into our minds as a matter of course. The more time and personal data we give and content (and ads) we take, the better they do, but that doesn’t work the other way around as far as I’m concerned. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, self-publishing is the way to go into the brave new world of internet future, where communities can form around links and each individual can control what they choose to consume and from whom. Otherwise, each new attempt at something different (I recently signed up with Dev.to and Hashnode to check them out, their strengths are likely the vertical community nature of their respective platforms, which lean heavily toward developers and nerdles, rather than the underlying technologies they employ. They still let their users do this or that, I want to see more enabling and encouraging.

I will always have more to say on this topic, in fewer and fewer places most likely.

I hadn’t been consuming so much in the way of YouTube stand-up comedy in recent weeks with the relocation chaos, but here are a couple to check out:

I haven’t read a book in paper or digital form in a while, but I consume audio books like they’re going out of business. I recently and literally checked out these two from the late Anthony Bourdain.

Obviously neither of these is an affiliate link. Both books were really good and interesting, and of course looking back from where we are now, it seems like there were twinges of prolog in each. Everybody writes and says things that can be cherry-picked later in the event of, well, what happened with Bourdain, but regardless they were both actually quite interesting. I listened to each multiple times during my library check-out window, and while the latter book published some 10 years later includes several references to the former as a bit of mea culpa mixed in with what I meant was, they are both interesting not only on their own, but as a comparison of evolved writing style and perspective that comes with time and life experience. Highly recommend both, in publication order.

Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter, and for sharing it with others as you see fit. This is my interim replacement for most social media posting, in the gap between posting original content to OPP (other peoples’ platforms) and to my own.

As always, I maintain an out-of-band profile page at Buy Me a Coffee for two reasons, mainly to provide a place to share links and mini updates to various projects, podcast, and so on, but also to provide a place for the rare coffee tip. That is, any funds that show up there go to caffeination, which is always a good and necessary thing.

Check it out for the latest and greatest updates. Well, one of those.

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash