Lauren

Moving is hard.

Not physically hard (at least, not when you’ve got a lot of strong men in your life), but mentally hard. It can be frustrating, exhausting and emotionally taxing, too.

Last week, we emptied out the storage locker I was renting in London and got most of my furniture up to ze new pad safely. That went swimmingly – no beefs there. Still working on getting the bedroom organized, but it’s coming along. As you can see from this little viddy I took before I moved out of the best bedroom ever in London, I have a lot of bedroom stuff:

This weekend, I came home to collect the rest of my stuff (yes, there’s more!) and… it wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it would be.

I had planned on just grabbing the rest of my wardrobe, some office supplies, art, snowboarding gear (just in case?) and coats.

I figured I could leave the boxes upon boxes of old clothes and toys I wasn’t using in the corner of my parents’ basement like I’ve been doing for years, but my mom had other plans.

To be fair, the stuff in my “corner” of the basement was more like a growing rainbow-coloured blob that was now monopolizing at least a quarter of the room it was in.

It began in 2007 when I went on exchange and left everything that couldn’t come to Sweden in what used to be mine and Brodie’s play room.

It had been a sewing room at one point and then a “home gym”/bowflex storage room, but post-Euro trip it was simply the “Lauren’s junk room” – and my mom was ready to reclaim the space.

“Ready to get to work?” she asked me excitedly, latte in hand after teaching me how to use the new espresso machine (that I will inevitably break anyway).

“Yeah, yeah… let’s do it” I replied, assuming that we’d be down there for about about an hour tossing some junk into boxes while the kitties supervised.

Four hours later, I emerged exhausted and nostalgic with an empty mug and half a truckload worth of clothes designated for the local Goodwill.

My mom was happy as a clam, but I was already grieving my California Raisins All-Star tee and Southpark pajama pants.

The only way I could bring myself to part with a lot of my old things was to take pictures of them for memory’s sake.

Most of these photos, I won’t bore you with by posting on the blog (the stuffed animal collection alone could fill a book… A really weird book.) but a few select outfits were kind of LOLworthy so I set my video camera to photo-mode and posed it out:

I worked at Sport Check for two weeks when I was 16. This was one of so many part-time jobs I held down for about a minute until I found something I liked more. I think I left this job to work at a Fish&Chips restaurant for two shifts before I got hired at another mall store.)

The CKSS gym outfit, I’m not giving away. I’m going to rock that at the yuppie gym I go to in Liberty Village just to be conspicuosly less cool than the Lulu clad, cake faced, fake-boobied girls who walk on the treadmill next to me.

If you think that getup looks big on me now, you should have seen it in Grade 9 when I was only 5′3. Shrimpies unite!

I bought these cool Hawaiian shorts when I was 14 because I was cool like that. My mom was like “Hey, those still fit! Why don’t you keep them?” and I was like “They fit, but they’re totally ghey.” My mom agreed “Yeah, they are pretty ghey.” She never uses words like that, so it was hilarious.

The GAP sweater was my pride and joy in Grade 8. I bought it at Devonshire mall and wore the hell out of it until pretty much the end of highschool (as can be seen by the completely busted sleeve that I refused to let anyone fix because it gave the garment “character”). Time to part ways, old friend.

I fancied myself quite the seamstress back in the day. A stylist and coiffure too. Doesn’t she look lovely?

The miracle McWatch. Purchased at a German McDonald’s in 2001 – lasted (without a battery replacement) until 2004, if I’m not mistaken. Best Deutsche Marks I ever did spend.

My parents just left to go to a wedding. Who gets married on a Sunday night? Doctors or something. Weird, I know. I took some candids of them getting ready.

Then I took a non-creeper style photo in low-res. Next time I come home, I’m bringing one of my real still cameras ’cause this looks like it was taken with a fookin’ logitech webcam in 1997.

Alright, it’s time for me to stop blogcrastinating and get back to this crash course in After Effects.

I’m not going to have time to figure it out on the fly next week when TIFF starts and I’m producing erreday.

Ooooh and speeeeaking of the festival (and related events), I may or may not have some VIP party tickets to give away this week. Okay, I DO.

Get @ me if you’re a good Tweeter and you want to hit a special event at one of the most buzzed about celebrity stomping grounds in Yorkville on Friday. I’ll Tweet about it later, maybe. For now, this is a blogsclusive. You know where to find me

<3 L

PS – I kept the California Raisins shirt. It’s going back into the basement for future “goodbye” photos.