It’s just stuff. We say that daily as we begin to pare down our belongings to the bare minimum. But it’s SO MUCH STUFF! Not just furniture and other items that we can sell or pass on, but utensils and books and toys and creations and reminders and so many other things. But I am getting ahead of myself.

With the big family gathering behind us, we have made good on our promise to finally weed through the stuff. Much of it we have posted online to sell. Some we haven’t had to do that as we’ve found friends and neighbors who were interested. We much prefer the latter because the former is fraught with lunacy!

We have had luck in the past with Craigslist, back when that was the premier (and sometimes only) way to sell things to strangers. Now social media is king and so everything goes to a Facebook group or FB marketplace now. This new approach should be preferred to Craigslist where everything takes place through protected email contact which can seriously lengthen the time it takes to finalized things. When posting things on Facebook groups to sell, people have an immediate mechanism to annoy you: FB Messenger. And with this ease of contact comes the increased desire of some of the baser sort to take advantage. Or just be weird. It’s not just spam, it’s scams and they come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

The first things I posted on FB were things that didn’t sell at our disastrous yard sale. I immediately got contacted by several people who seemed interested. In fact, their messages said things like “I want to buy this. Please text me at xxxxxxx.” Excellent – I was going to move things quickly! Because I am in Rochester, I didn’t want to text from a VA cell phone number which is my main number. I have a Google Voice number with a Rochester area code for my consulting practice so I decided to text them using that. And then things got weird. I was told that my phone number wasn’t a valid number. Wait, what? Yes it is, I just texted you on it. Well could I send them a different cell number? Um, no. There’s nothing wrong with this number. Well could I send them a family member’s cell number? Huh? That’s when I started searching for FB marketplace scams and you’ll be surprised to know that I was being targeted for one.

The reason they want you to call or text from a cell number is that they then use that number to sign up for a Google Voice account in your name. From there they can use the number that they control but is associated with your actual cell number to start imitating you on-line. The reason they told me that my number wasn’t valid is because you can’t use a Google Voice number to sign up for a Google voice number. Without knowing it, I had protected myself from the scam. Yet they persist. For every one of the more than two dozen postings I have done, I have had at least 6 of these fake inquiries. In fact, they are now getting lazy. They don’t bother to make real FB profiles, choose real names (Alex Alex?) or even type in the phone number they want you to text. They are apparently sharing a screen shot of a typed request using a (716) area code. Geesh. How lazy can you get! (PSA: if your item is a bigger ticket sale like a couch or dining room table, they will tell you they need to send their brother to pick it up and will send you the money by Zelle. Don’t do it – the Zelle connection is fake and people have had their bank accounts emptied.)

But back to the reason for having so many FB marketplace posts: too much stuff! We have been successful in shedding most of the big furniture items. So much so that we have no couch to sit on – had to bring the patio furniture inside! – and our living room is now an indoor flea market where all the items we are still trying to sell are located. Some of them have online listings; others do not. (How does one list a Himalayan salt block? Is it food? A cooking utensil? We have one if anyone wants it!)

And we are being RUTHLESS with what needs to go. People have made Maria Kondo jokes, Swedish death cleaning remarks, and other quips for levity but there is a pretty simple rule we are beginning to live by: is it worth paying international shipping charges for? And do you want to report it to His Majesty’s Customs and Revenue Service? Because yes folks, we need to list EVERYTHING we are bringing both for the insurance contract with the shipping company and to make sure we don’t have to pay duty on the things we already own. I have to count books, socks, head phones, “religious decor”, etc. Thank goodness we aren’t bringing everything! So even thought that little tchotchke is cute and might look nice on a book shelf that we might have someday in the house we haven’t bought yet, unless is has serious sentimental value, it’s not going. If I can’t figure out where to put it on the form, it’s not going. If we won’t use it the minute it comes out of the box, it’s not going.

And so 30+ years worth of shared experiences, quiet moments, embarrassing stories, and the physical manifestations of them are now being judged as we dismantle our US life. Luckily we plan to have a long life after this – in the UK or elsewhere – to continue to add to the memories and the laughs. I just hope we can do it without accumulating SO. MUCH. STUFF.

It took far longer to recover from Covid than I had hoped but luckily things got back to normal in time for the most important thing on the calendar: the visit from the far-flung adult children! The eldest and girlfriend flew in from Portland OR on a Saturday night and then promptly took off for a short getaway to Montreal. They returned on Wednesday in time for the youngest to arrive on Thursday night from Boston and for a few days we had a completely full house: two kids, two girlfriends, one crazy dog and lots of plans!

Part of what was on the agenda was our final family gathering in this country to celebrate our 33rd anniversary. It was so wonderful to have everyone here even if just for a little while. We had a lovely night out with dinner and cocktails then stayed up way too late weeding through baby pictures and other memorabilia. The less fun part of the agenda was the packing up of stuff that the adult children were claiming as their own as we prepared for the mass fire sale of household goods that needs to occur before we can hit the road.

So the pair with two free bags on Southwest cleaned out many of my appliances (did you know that KitchenAid stand mixers weigh 25 pounds?!) along with childhood toys, sheets, towels, and 3 boxes of other items. The boxes got pretty demolished in transit but we think everything made it okay. The youngest Cannon stayed through the weekend but drove away with MUCH more stuff: family heirloom furniture, dishes, glassware, my bicycle, most of the plants. The 10 foot Uhaul wasn’t stuffed to the brim but it was pretty full.

As we closed up the truck and got ready for her to hit the road, my work visa was delivered. It takes up a full page in my passport and shows that I am approved to enter the country as a Skilled Worker as of November 14. Given that we have tentatively planned to buy plane tix for the 15th, things couldn’t have worked out better. But now the last things that we were waiting for to make thing truly real have happened. No more “wait until after the kids leave” or “wait until after we have the visa sorted”. Now it’s really time to get things going.

So if you are in the Rochester area, you will notice that there are more than a dozen items on FB marketplace. This of course means that I am getting spam messages at the rate of about 10 per hour. Sometimes, though, they are genuine and we get to see our stuff being passed along to someone else who will appreciate it. This morning we had just such and experience: a young couple (okay, younger than us…) who just moved here from the west coast into a house a few blocks away came by to look at our dining room table. It’s solid cherry with multiple leafs and 8 chairs and can seat 10-12 people. We’ve had it for 15 years but it’s time for someone else to take it. And one of the couple is the youngest of 7 and is hoping to be able to host the family Thanksgiving now that they have a house and not an apartment. I LOVE the idea that they’ll use the table the way that we did.

I also love the fact that they have no furniture and were very happy to buy the coffee tables and end tables from the living room and family room, the master bedroom furniture, a chair and mirror from the living room and the doggie gate that I hadn’t even thought to sell. So that decreased the number of FB and Craigslist ads and helps to really jump start the cleaning out process.

Which is a good thing because we are out of excuses and the clock is ticking!