Moving To The Cloud, Bird by Bird

On my “To Do” list is a rather daunting goal: “Move Into The Cloud by EOY 2012.”  What I mean by that is to “dematerialize” my life as much as possible: to get rid of tangible personal property (of the sort stored in the garage!); to move family albums and other memorabilia online; to detach myself from the requirements of being in one particular geographic location; to abstract my work so that it is more location-independent.

This overall goal involves several major projects, some of which take a long time to finish:

• Get Rid Of US Mail —  I don’t want to have to check my mailbox for time-sensitive matters.  You can get most, but not all bills to be delivered online.  Items ordered online can be shipped where-ever you want.  But there are a few items that linger.  I’m investigating mail forwarding services so that when I am ready I can stop going to my mailbox at 507 Mariani.
   
• Get Rid of “Stuff” — We are slowly but surely getting rid of stuff we don’t need.  Craigslist and eBay work for the easy-to-sell items.  Donating, gifting and trashing will take care of the rest.  I’d like to get back to where I was just after college, when everything I owned fit in my car.  ;)
   
• Make Subscriptions Location Independent — I’ve already started this by “cutting the cable” to my DirecTV subscription and relying on internet only for video entertainment.  (So far, so good with this; I like what we’ve able to do so far, and it will only get better.)   We cut landline phone for VOIP and mobile only phone lines.  Same with fax, using Faxaway fax-to-email service.
   
• Ducks In A Row — we are largely finished with moving  business, asset, tax, investment, and other records to electronic form, along with completing the estate planning reviews suitable for empty nesters.  This takes a surprisingly long time, mostly because people who record titles to stock, real estate and other property  don’t respond quickly to requests, e.g., to move ownership titles from individual names to revocable trusts meant to avoid probate.
   
• Moving Family Albums and Memorabilia Online — this will take a lot of time … scanning pix and old videos is relatively fast, but that’s not all I want to do: I want to annotate, to tell the stories about some of the pictures … to use this exercise to document some of the events, relationships or ideas from earlier in my life.  It may add some biographical stories for my granddaughters, should they care.

There are several sub-tasks and interim objectives to achieve and, taken as a whole, this project is overwhelming.  The only way to do it is “bird by bird” … or like eating an elephant, one bite at a time.  For those of you who subscribe to this blog and get chronological updates, some of the posts will seem wildly out of date and unconnected, like the next one I’ll do.  But, trust me, I’ll try to tie them together later on and provide some navigation that would make some sense.  In the meantime, I’m going to just do each one as they come, in whatever order.