My goal this week is to do some more unpacking, and to clean off the dining room table. It is a good thing we have a kitchen table because the dining room? Out of control.

I am not a neat freak by any stretch, but this is ridiculous. When things get to this point, I can’t do anything creative – I can barely even think.

If my whole house looked this way, I’d be depressed. I’ve worked pretty hard to make sure that didn’t happen. Just take a look at the cozy corner I created for myself to write and relax.

Honestly, where would you rather spend your time? Can you blame me for preferring to sit in my red chair and dream rather than deal with all the other stuff?

I’ve had two children home sick from school all week. For once, I followed my instincts and took them to the doctor sooner than later and it was a good thing I did because they both had strep throat. They are both on antibiotics now and have a four day weekend over which to fully recover (and catch up on all their homework).

I myself have spent most of the week washing my hands, washing clothes, fetching snacks and drinks for my patients, and continuing to unpack boxes. I can finally see some progress! In spite of the poor condition of many of the boxes, most of the contents made it just fine – with a few notable exceptions. I found a second pottery piece that broke in transit, this time the lovely mask I made. (Right along the hairline, where a crack had developed in the glaze firing) I found a loose handful of change wrapped up in a wad of paper the size of a softball, but the mask only rated a couple of sheets of paper. Sigh.

However, in the spirit of opening myself to the wisdom and power of the Universe, I’ve decided to look for the positive sides of these situations. With regard to the sick children, at least they were both sick at the same time which (I hope) means they will return to school simultaneously as well. And having them both get sick (a fairly rare occurrence) prompted me to finally find a family doctor who was accepting new patients – not that I was able to get in to see him this time, but I’ll be ready for next time.

As for my pottery, I was whining about mentioned it on Facebook, and a friend of mine from Cairo wrote me a message: his MIL lives in a city about 20 minutes away from me and not only is she a garage sale / thrift store fiend (like me!) but she is also a potter. He gave me her email and said she might be able to help me repair my broken pieces. How is that for the Universe providing a solution to a problem?

So why did I pop awake at 3am this morning, the one morning this week when school is closed and I knew I didn’t have to get up? You could say that the Universe was trying to gift me with some quiet time to get a bit of writing done before the usual distractions of the day begin. Or you could just assume the Universe has a sense of humor…

I’m still working on unpacking boxes and so far so good for the most part. It’s amazing how much trash you can manage to stash away in the corners and closets of your home just in case. Having just spent several thousand dollars to ship empty appliance boxes, plastic grocery bags, rag clothes, and expired medications ask me how I know.

I have been working my way through things, box by box. Some things I need to unwrap just to see if they made it okay and am just as quickly putting them back in their boxes for now. Most things made it just fine, however the couple of things I have found that broke so far were very wrenching. One was a large ceramic plate that goes with a beautiful Vietnamese tea set that I bought in the Russian Market in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The other casualty was the large pottery lizard I made myself in Cairo. Why on earth they thought it would be okay to stand it on end on its tail – the most vulnerable part of the entire piece – is a mystery to me. Ironically, another large plate that matched the dishes which were part of our furnished apartment made it just fine, though in fact it ought to have stayed behind. Oh well.

I’ve also had two sick children home this week. When my son told me he didn’t feel well on Monday morning, I was skeptical. He’d been just fine all weekend when it came to birthday parties and a sleepover so it seemed a little convenient that he’d be sick just in time for school. As it turned out, he wasn’t faking. After he had a fever for the second day running and his throat became so sore he found it painful to speak, I took them both to the doctor. The doctor suspects strep throat. I’m hoping that I can nip it in the bud in my daughter’s case, but it looks as if they will be home for the remainder of the week.

While I was at the store waiting for their prescriptions to be filled, I took a spin around and found some raspberries on the discount rack. I love raspberries. I decided to buy these to make a raspberry sauce. Since we still have a few carrot cup-cakes in the freezer from my birthday last week (with frosting in the fridge) I was thinking of sticking the raspberry sauce in the freezer and keeping it for Valentine’s Day when I could make a shortcake to go with it. Having taken a look in my stuffed-to-the-gills freezer I think I’ve gotten way far ahead of myself! Perhaps I should just make some waffles instead.

Anything to get away from boxes for a while…

I deny having every sewed any of my quilt patrons!

It’s a good thing I’m fluent in pigeon English! I do believe this includes “purses”.

And this box contains and African DRUM.

I admit – this one had me stumped.

Apparently “KW” means kitchen ware and “flavors” referred to spices!

I think they could have been more accurate in this label…

They could have labeled it “ducks”!

Then there were things that I bought in Egypt and they were very specific and confident in how to label! This is a small padded bench / seat I bought that is fashioned in the manner of a camel saddle.

I was really hoping that this label didn’t mean what I thought it meant.

And yet it did… sigh. I could have lived without seeing all those shopping bags again! (Or the bag of dead tennis balls or the half a dozen flat soccer balls they packed)

Really, I have to find humor in this situation or I’d cry. So much that should have been purged was shipped. And apparently there was one weak link on the packing team who had an aversion to using any sort of packing paper to cushion things. I have found boxes where there is a jumble of things tossed into it, one of which contained my cast iron skillet on top of the rest. A mirror I quite liked was packed in a box of toys for some reason, wrapped in my son’s fleece blanket. It broke. I am putting any associated bad luck on whoever packed it. And why did they box up empty suitcases? Could they not have used them for quilt fabric or clothes??

While I am busy unpacking household things, I left the books to my husband. It may not sound like much, but just take a look at this.

Having hefted the boxes of books into his cave for him to unpack, I am dropping some not so subtle hints that he needs to think about weeding his collection…

It was extremely difficult for me to not be in control. I gave some thought to going back to Egypt to handle it myself but it didn’t make sense logistically or financially. Would I bring the children back with me? If so, then we would have to pay 3x international airfare (ouch!) and they would miss the start of the school year. Did I go alone? Though I had a very kind offer from a friend in Ohio, I wasn’t totally comfortable leaving the children for as long as it would take me to do the packing, mostly because of the distance we’d be separated. There was no way around it: I had to leave it to my husband and the movers to do the job.

It was a trickier job than you might think.

When we initially moved to Egypt from the United Arab Emirates, we had to create an inventory list of our belongings in order to get duty-free status on our shipment. Doesn’t sound like such a big deal until you read the fine print: it was recommended we list things like rare books, CDs, and DVDs by title and all electronics by serial number. Not only that, but we had to promise to take anything listed on our inventory list back out of Egypt when we left – even broken appliances, old computers, and VHS tapes of The Wiggles, which my children have long outgrown.

That’s not to say that we couldn’t have purged a decent amount – anything that was purchased in Egypt could be left there. I used my toaster oven quite frequently, but given the fact that toaster ovens are pretty easy to come by and the one I had in Cairo was 220v, there was certainly no reason to pack it up and ship it to the US. Same goes for the vacuum cleaner that they did ship. The children have grown quite a bit in a year and most of the shoes and clothes we left behind don’t fit anymore so all of that stuff could have gone.

My husband sold our TV and a few other things, but if I had been there on the spot, I could have had a sale and purged or donated so much more. I could have cleaned things before they were packed so I didn’t have to unroll a large carpet and find it filled with crumbs! Or a water bottle at the bottom of a tennis bag that actually still had some water in it and was leaking. I could have packed things more sensibly. But I wasn’t there and anything that we saved on airfare by my not going, we probably spent on shipping stuff that could have been ditched.

For instance, it was difficult for my husband to get parts for his mountain bike in Cairo so he would bring things like tires and gears back in the summertime. He replaced his tires and tubes one year, but kept the old tires just in case. My husband didn’t purge them in time so the movers packed them up and shipped them. They also shipped half a dozen punctured soccer balls and a step-ladder that belonged to the furnished apartment we lived in. Oops! And that’s only what I’ve found so far.

Those things I can kind of understand – I mean, they don’t want to judge what is and isn’t important to someone – but they also shipped an empty shoebox. Really???

Had I been there, I could also have supervised the packing and made sure it was done efficiently. I found a framed piece of papyrus which wasn’t wrapped at all – sandwiched between two lovely hand-embroidered pictures. Amazingly the glass did not break, but if it had, it would have shredded the papyrus and the embroidery.

The shipment is charged by weight but also by volume. There was no reason for dresser drawers, though heavy, to travel empty. Surely they could have bagged up some stuffed animals or pillows to fill them with and saved us a couple of boxes and that much space. Sigh.

Over the years, people kept telling us it was the items we put storage before we went abroad in 1999 that we would end up throwing away. Ironically, I think there is much more trash in this shipment. After all, I purged and packed all the stuff that ended up in storage!

Oh well, I suppose in the long run it is better that the movers erred on the side of shipping too much rather than making decisions to get rid of things that we might have really missed. It is going to take a long time to sort through all this stuff and find the things I really want among all the junk, however. I’ve already put a bag of outgrown, worn out childrens tennis shoes to the curb along with the bike tires. I can only imagine how much more garbage / donations will be generated. Not sure the Egyptian light bulbs that came over will work here and I know the night lights won’t!

I also see a garage sale and some more furniture projects in my future…

Tomorrow is my birthday and getting my site back up and running is a great gift. Another good present? 150 boxes to open.

Yes, our last and final shipment from Egypt finally arrived! What you see above is ONE of TWO piles of boxes, each of roughly equal size. My sewing / work room is crammed so full that you can’t really walk in there. I’d have taken a picture but I could get far enough back from the first row of boxes!

I can’t wait to start opening everything to see what treasure is there. Also, what trash. I already disposed of about 5 pairs of old tennis shoes that the children outgrew while we were away. I’ll bet there are plenty of clothes like that too. There might even be things that weren’t meant to be packed up – like the step-ladder that belonged to the furnished university apartment we occupied in Cairo. Oops! (See what happens when I’m not around to supervise things?)

Don’t worry, my day won’t be nothing but toil. I am going to make my own carrot cake with my favorite recipe, but I’m already planning where hubby and the kids will take me to dinner

When I first move into a house, I have to give it a thorough cleaning. However it may degenerate after that initial cleaning is beside the point because at least by then it is my dirt (I’m sure all the former tenants of my homes have felt the same, ha ha). I know that I’m totally settled in and comfortable in a new place when I’m willing to walk around barefoot.

Not that I actually go barefoot that often, but it’s the idea of it. When we lived in Cairo, I made everyone take their shoes off at the door to try and keep from tracking so much dirt and muck off the streets into the house. People are constantly spitting and sometimes worse out in the open, so it just pays not to wear your shoes in the house. I typically would switch my outside shoes for flip-flops in the house. I don’t like walking on grit and the floors seemed always to be covered in sand.

When we moved into our house in Michigan, I wore flip-flops around because the house wasn’t clean. I washed the walls, had the carpets professionally cleaned, and was just about approaching the point when I might have gone barefoot when the weather turned cold and I switched to slippers. After yesterday, I not only don’t wish to go barefoot, but I don’t even want to take a shower. I may in fact switch to wearing workboots.

I saw a mouse in my kitchen.

It was early in the morning and I had just gotten up to make the children’s lunches for school. All the lights in the kitchen were out so I flipped them on and made my tea and booted up my computer. I had completed packing lunches and was sitting and looking at my email when I thought I saw a flash of movement from the corner of my eye. I turned to look and saw nothing so returned to my email. A few moments later I heard an odd noise. I looked up and saw the mouse sitting on the back burner of my stove eating something.

Never have I wished more for a remote control gas stove so I could have fried his little furry butt!

I saw the mouse clearly from across the room. I couldn’t see its body because it was behind a lunch bag, but its head seemed pretty big and it didn’t seem particularly worried about my presence as I stood up and walked around to the stairwell to call my husband upstairs. I opened the front door, somehow thinking that I would shoo it out of the kitchen and that maybe it would be scared enough to just run outside.

My husband came upstairs and he looked in the kitchen to see the mouse licking a smudge of peanut butter off a piece of paper I had just pulled off a fresh jar in the process of making lunches. When the mouse noticed my husband, he dove behind the stove. My husband pulled the stove out at my direction, me still hoping to scare it out. Not even banging the stove with a broom handle produced results so the mouse was either hunkered down or gone. I did the only thing that I could do and went straight to the store and bought some “mouse chow”, aka rodentcide on my receipt. I put some behind the stove and under the sink, but concentrated mostly on the garage which is probably where the furry beast got in.

What am I, the Pied Piper? The mechanic just pulled a second wad of mouse nest out of the AC vents in my car, which I had chosen to believe was a leftover from the country mouse I spotted in my engine as I was leaving Minnesota this summer. I’m really hoping that it is the cold weather that brought the mouse inside because I haven’t seen any evidence whatsoever of gnawing or droppings. Maybe my banging on the stove with the broom will have given it the message that it isn’t welcome!?

There’s no way I’m going barefoot now – though it’s not as if I plan to step on a mouse either!!!

Things sort of feel like they are settling down a little – there were a couple of days this week when I thought about what I needed to get done and the answer was not much. Kind of a nice feeling. I know it won’t last though – I did get a message from the moving company to say that they have located our shipment. It is in NJ and as soon as it is released from customs, it will travel overland to Michigan and eventually to our house. So this is just a little lull before the house is full of boxes again and I am whirling around trying to find a home for everything.

In preparation for the shipment being delivered, I am trying to get done refinishing the last of the dressers so that the room where I’m currently working on it – my so-called sewing room (Ha! Where NO sewing has been going on!) – can be more available for overflow. In spite of the fact that I don’t really know what I’m doing, the dresser is coming along nicely. I will post pictures as soon as I am finished.

I mentioned in my last post how Nora Roberts reportedly writes a new novel every 45 days. A quote that I like that has also been attributed to her is that you can’t edit a blank page. In the spirit of this, and because for the last week or so the story I abandoned a year ago has been on my mind, I got back to work today. I had some good feedback on it when it was fresher which got me enthusiastic about looking at it again. Having just read it again, I’m not sure if I like it or if it’s boring. That’s the trouble with trying to judge your own work. Ugh. Guess I will forge ahead though – maybe it will get better!

I have at least nearly finished up all of my Christmas shopping, aside from stocking stuffers. My shipment better arrive soon – our stockings are in it!

It all started when I found this dresser at a garage sale for $10.

The beast weighed a ton and somewhere along the way someone had spray painted it silver, but I liked the curve of the drawers and I decided it was worth $10.

I might have even been able to live with the silver paint if it hadn’t been so badly done in the first place and so chipped up in the second. Take a look at these dribble marks:

I thought – mistakenly as it turned out – that it would be easier to remove the spray paint than regular paint. It would go on in thinner coats, right?

HA! Perhaps that might have been true in theory, but whether it was down to the metallic nature of the color or the person who did the job, removing this paint was a bit like trying to remove old, baked-on duct tape. A goopy, sticky mess.

Under all that messy paint was a layer of what was once probably a decent honey-oak veneer (over chipboard). Unfortunately, the veneer on the body of the dresser was in better shape than the veneer on the drawer fronts so I couldn’t just stop and leave it there.

You might wonder why I went to so much trouble for a cheap dresser I got at a garage sale that wasn’t actually solid wood anyway.

Check out this furniture maker stamp inside the top drawer. I don’t know that maker specifically but the font would suggest that the dresser is c.1960-70s. Though much of the body of the dresser is chip-board it is also solid. The drawers alone have more wood in them than most of the new dressers I’ve seen for $$$ in stores.

I had half a gallon of white paint left from the first dresser I restored so I decided to go with that. The paint job seemed to go on and on, but in in the end, I think it looks pretty good. I didn’t even need to buy new knobs.

There are already a few scuff marks on the white paint where the drawers slide on that middle bar and on each other, but I am going to just call that my contribution to the shabby chic idea. (And I still have a small jar of paint leftover for touch-ups if necessary!)

Not bad for $10 and a lot of elbow grease.

I started by looking through the many boxes labeled “Memorabilia” from our time capsule so I could get them out of the way before our air shipment from Cairo arrived. That was amusing.

Yes, I used to care enough about wearing makeup that I had a mirror which I could set to “daytime” and “evening” lighting. I also found a cordless curling iron and two unopened BUTANE canisters for it! 1) I don’t remember owning or using such an item (though I did have a corded curling iron I used every day); 2) storing the butane canisters was a very bad idea and I’m lucky that they didn’t combust at some point; 3) a butane curling iron seems like a very bad idea – just add hair spray and POOF!

I also found this. What is it though??

I took pottery lessons way back when and according to the stamp on the bottom, I made it. I was looking at it, wondering if I had planned to display a marble at some point, and in the process of writing this post I remembered: I made it to replace the base of a glass salt shaker that had been knocked over and broken by a cat. Since it is loose and I ran across the loose shaker top, I suppose it didn’t fit!

Our air shipment arrived this week, bright and early Tuesday morning. Fourteen boxes in all, most of which looked as if they’d been run over by a truck before being delivered. It’s amazing that none of our glassware broke, but I am still glad that the box mislabeled “sewing machine” wasn’t actually my Bernina. It was my jewelry box!

Since I was not in Cairo to (micro)manage what got packed and shipped, there were some things that showed up by air that could have come a slower method – or not at all!

Hmmm… I am guessing that I was planning to make A LOT of Christmas cookies at some point. I usually bought the sugar and brought it back because you could not find it in Cairo – unless you had a friend that worked at the Embassy. I guess I better get busy this year. I am now in possession of TWO cookie guns too so no more excuses!

Apparently I also planned to make a lot of muffins! Actually, I used to stockpile these – you couldn’t always find decent muffin papers in Cairo so when I did, I snapped them up. With what I’ve bought since I’ve been in our new house I could probably make muffins and cupcakes for a couple of years and not run out!

(Note to self: make cupcakes for soccer game tomorrow!)

What surprised me most about seeing all these things is how sad it all made me. I’m glad to have my things in one place, but my – how time marches on. One group of items is from a life I put on “hold” while I went abroad. In the time we were away my husband’s mother, uncle, and grandmother died, as did my own mother and grandmother. So many memories of them surfaced as I found old letters, photos, and objects that reminded me of them. The arrival of our air shipment contains the items of a life cut-short. We never planned to stay in Egypt forever, but we never had a chance to say a proper goodbye to Egypt and all of the people who we saw on a day to day basis either.

The only thing I can try to do now is weave the strands of my lives together and hope that the new pattern is pleasing and strong…