One year ago today H and I had everything we owned for sale on Craigslist. Well, nearly everything. H was keeping a surfboard, her comforter, and her car while I was also keeping my car, paintings, books, and sewing machine. Everything else, from my king sized bed to our toaster oven had been for sale for three weeks. The problem was, as so many of you may know from working with Craigslisters, people would email being interested in items and then we would never hear from them again. Also, we had a very tight deadline of being out of our apartment by Christmas Eve, when our family was requesting our presence in Wyoming.
This is how, on an inspirational moment at work at DD&A, I realized that if we were going to make this deadline with time to clean we needed help. So Free Fridays was born as a way to get everything out of our house as quickly as possible, since two of us carrying loads eight blocks to the local Goodwill would be massively time consuming (and it was, we had to ditch quite a few items and dash… Sorry Goodwill!!!). So I trekked home from work in Monterey on Thursday, December 22nd 2011 and together H, Bryn and I tapped out our Free Fridays post for Craigslist. We tried to make it as charming as possible in order to attract as many clever Craigslisters as we could (everyone wants their belongings to go to a good, clever home, right?). The emails began trickling in immediately.
By the time I was two hours into my last day of work before the holidays on Friday the 23rd, so many people were emailing I could no longer keep up. It was a deluge of emails! I was also trying to get the office in some semblance of order for the next few days as no one was going to be coming in for a week. Thankfully H took over responding to emails, but unfortunately she also had a full day planned meeting the last few of her professors and friends to say goodbye. Luckily, we got a call from the boss shortly after lunch sending us home early for the holidays so I rushed back up to Santa Cruz to begin the giveaway.
I laid everything out on the few remaining pieces of furniture, in the floor, on the kitchen counters; I responded to more emails that had come in during my drive home; and then waited for my phone to start ringing to open our security gate. We disagree about the details because the evening was such a random chaos, but our first people to show up were a cluster of creepy boys who started picking things up like they were saving for the end of the world. We were concerned that this was going to be all we had to look forward to. Then the phone started going off.
The next few hours were a blur of random activity. We had an adorable Mexican family who were collecting tableware for their Christmas party the next day; the lady who did Peace Corps in Panama and brought her son over to look through our kitchen supplies and gave us chocolate; scientists who collected our toaster oven; a couple who chatted with us, gave us sweets, and ended up with our old, broken computers; the awesome guy who went grocery shopping in our kitchen and took our ridiculously heavy mirror home on his bike; and a bunch of other people who were simply satisfied to look through our stuff and take what they needed/wanted. We were horrible about trying to convince everyone that they really wanted more than they had in their hands, literally trying to push our belongings into people’s already full arms…
The last items to go were the feather couch and ottoman combo. These pesky items had been a bit of a challenge to get into the apartment in the first place, since we were located on the third floor and the angles involved got the couch jammed into the doorway (after much deliberation F and I had needed to saw a little out of the back of the couch to get it in the door). Going out was proving to be just as challenging. Good news is, the two awesome Santa Cruzers who came to pick them up were young and strong. We pushed and pried that couch out of the building and then struggled under the intense weight of the ottoman. As a celebration we made the guys drink wine in our empty apartment with us, and then we all went out to Saturn Cafe.
We decided to join their unloading party at their house, in case they needed more help. We ended up at an awesome Victorian, filled with a space ship, glass mason jars, and an organ (which they even let me play!). It was a very Santa Cruz night for sure…
We got up on Christmas Eve with a quick surf session for H and then we only had two trips to the Goodwill left, abandoning only one item to the street corner to find its own home. We cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned. I was coughing up my lungs from mixing bleach and ammonia on the bathroom. H took one more surf session in (I had entered crazy cleaning mode at this point, scrubbing walls and doorways) and when she returned she took the cleaning supplies out of my hands and we piled into her over-stuffed yellow car. We made a quick stop at the UCSC, got Greek food, and then took turns driving and sleeping the next 18 hours on very little sleep and a little hippy crack.
There was some weird radio music, some face slapping to stay awake, sunrise over the salt flats in Utah, all to be greeted in Wyoming by worried family (we had packed H’s phone and mine’s battery was dead) and a bloody nose (elevation plus arid equals blood apparently) upon arrival on Christmas day.
Thank you Santa Cruz for your strange moments, bizarrely amazing people, and epically awesome farewell! We miss you, and all your crazy ways!
H
G
R:
Rule #2: Don't Die. 