NYC Life: Stuff Management

This is really em­barass­ing. It’s late Thursday night, and we’re sit­ting in the Amtrak sta­tion after tak­ing the even­ing train from New York to Bo­ston… just hanging out, even though our car is out in the park­ing lot ready for us to get in and head home.

We figured, when we de­cided to have two homes, that keep­ing track of stuff would be a little tricky. For this en­tire ad­ven­ture, we’ve only used the train.. nev­er driv­en down to NYC. It’s just so much nicer not to have to deal with a car down there. So we haul things back and forth in duffel bags, aim­ing to keep the loads light enough to eas­ily take on the train.

Our goal was to quickly get in­to the mode where shift­ing between homes is totally pain­less. Aim to pack and carry and think as little as pos­sible. Just a back­pack with laptop, iPad, snacks for the trip… and Air­Pods. Vi­tal!

Turns out a few things are tricky, though. Shoes. Which shoes did I wear back last time? Is it snow­ing in the city, do I need my boots?

And rain­coats. You might need one there, need one here, and need one in between. So if you aren’t care­ful, you can end up with all your shoes and rain­coats in one place, which is sub­op­tim­al to say the least.

But we’ve ba­sic­ally got it figured out now. We have the right stuff in the right place. We even have backup shoes. The pat­tern is easy and in­grained. Everything is in the right spot, and we have a check­list. Head­ing back to Mas­sachus­sets for the week­end is a mat­ter of just snag­ging my usu­al back­pack with laptop and cables (with a light­weight rain­coat per­mas­tashed in that side pouch), switch­ing to travel sneak­ers, grabbing the keys for the Bo­ston car from their spot where I keep them while we’re in the NYC apart­ment, and head­ing to Penn Sta­tion. It’s routine now.

… ex­cept, ap­par­ently, for the car key part.

Oh well. The keys will be safe in NYC in that spe­cial spot in the closet for the next few days, while we wait for my son to come pick us up at the train sta­tion to­night with our spare car keys. Sigh.

(Yeah, it’s an ad­ven­ture. It’s also more com­plic­ated.)