Details, details

What to bring? How much do I want to carry anyway??

Apparently the government will cover the costs of moving up to 300 pounds of 'household effects', as well as the cost of my flight over. (The same for my eventual return to the US.) I'm not intending to move 'household effects', tho...just clothes, eventually kitchen gear, art stuff, laptop, Kindle (which is how I'm not moving my usual tonnage of books, thank you very much Michael!) that sort of thing. I want to stay relatively mobile - after all, wherever I live will be tight quarters, and I'd like to move from being a renter to being a house-sitter eventually. (That was suggested by a nice lady I met while I visited in September - I hadn't thought of that as a possibility.)

Also - I'd prefer not to have a car, which means moving via taxi or the vehicles of friends, another reason not to over-accumulate.

My goal is to bring 1 large, checked-in suitcase or duffel, and 1 carry on.

My first residence is furnished and supplied with most of one's requirements for running a household, so I need clothes and shoes, my laptop etal, my art supplies and probably not much else. Later, when I move, I likely will need to provide linens, towels, kitchen gear, even if the place I rent is 'fully furnished'. And, of course, my nest is important to me - I want some of my own things around, and not just cope with rental furniture, weird color draperies and featherweight pots and pans.

So - I am trying to sort thru clothes, shoes, etal - what to bring with me to start with, what I'd bring with me (or request be brought by visitors) later on, what to keep/store here, for winter weather, for summer weather, for professional wear, for putzing around town, for being messy with my paints and clay and such at 'home'.

Of course I am trying to think ahead - I want to do a much better job of losing weight and getting fit, which will mean more exercise (since my diet is pretty good), which means appropriate attire for that. I'm not really sure what sort of cultural life there is, but I do know there are festivals and music events, I hope to be quite active in the arts community, and my not-at-work interests include some community efforts. I'm told attire is relatively conservative. (Suits me - I am hardly one to wear the bikini top to a restaurant anyway. Frankly, I'm not one to wear a bikini at the beach, either. Burkha, maybe!)

Shouldn't be this tough - after all, I am accustomed to packing, and quite lightly, for my trips, and have been known to pack for 2 weeks in a daypack. The only reason I had a carry-on case for my last trip to Italy was to accommodate the bottles of olive oil I knew I was bringing back. Those who have traveled with me know I get fussy about even checking luggage - I just don't expect it to show up at the other end, besides it taking longer to wait around for it than my antsy, lets-get-started! enthusiasm tolerates.

But I have covered the bed with piles of clothes, built inevitably around black as the key color - after a day of messing with it, I am down to 3 knee-length black shirts, 1 loden skirt, 4 long skirts, 6 dresses, easily 9 pairs of black slacks, another 9 pairs of not-black slacks, a dozen sweaters, perhaps 3 dozen long, elbow-length and short sleeve/sleeveless blouses/tops, 15 blazers/jackets, a dozen scarves, 8 pairs of shoes, 1 long raincoat, 2 'sport' raincoats, 3 fleece jackets....clearly I am nowhere close to ready with this!

On the positive side, I do have space-saver bags into which I will pack, then suck all the air out and be able to take 3 or 4 times more in the same volume bag. (On the down side - those bags do nothing about the weight of the stuff squished down inside of them. And I do have to put it all somewhere once in Bermuda!)

Arg!