Transition
Today I ended a part of my nomadic life. I didn't renew my post office box and instead closed it and setup mail forwarding. Not much of importance has been arriving at my post office box since I moved into Gilman Manor, but it is still kind of monumental. I got the post office back in July of 1999. At that point I was moving at least once a year if not more. I got tired of having to switch addresses each time I moved so I just sent everything to my post office box.
In July of 1999 I had been at my sixth place in Boston for about six months. The Mail Boxes Etc. in the student center was forced to switch their mail boxes to some nasty PMB (personal mail box) format as per the US Postal service. (As an aside Jan 8th rates go up to 39 cents). Instead of having to change my address to accommodate the new PMB format I instead got a post office box at the location a few blocks away on Mass Ave.
Fast forward five years six months and another six moves and you arrive at today's transition moment. Yes, in the ten years and three months that I've lived in Boston I've managed to live in twelve different locations. The shortest time I spent living anywhere (besides two weeks spent sleeping on a friends futon because I had no place to live) was three months. The couch bit was due to the Northeastern housing crunch and a failed international co-op. My record, and where I was living, prior to moving into Gilman Manor was three years.
Given the original intent of hating to change addresses since I moved so frequently I guess turned out to be a good idea. At my latest count I've now interacted with 40 companies and organizations to get addresses changed. Granted some of those were minor, but man it is still more than I thought. Well not really, I originally guessed I'd have to issue 100 change of addresses. Ignoring that I'm glad, barring the unforeseen, it will hopefully be a long time before I need to consider anything like that again.