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

I’ve washed windows, walls, baseboards, mini-blinds, vent covers, and scrubbed showers with Tilex and Magic Erasers, all in preparation for my things to arrive. I had hoped to have at least some things arrive by the end of this month. Seems like maybe I had more time to get the cleaning done that I thought I did.

When we moved from the United Arab Emirates to Cairo, I split our shipment so that some things would arrive by air and other, heavier, less-pressing items would come by sea. I told my husband to do the same this time. He said he told the movers but somehow the message was lost because when I woke up Tuesday morning he’d written to tell me that the reason the quote they gave us was so reasonable was because it was ALL scheduled to travel by sea.

Not. Acceptable.

I was whining about this to a friend of mine who pointed out to me how lucky we’ve been through this whole process overall. I know we have been extremely lucky – finding a job in such a tough economy and getting all the rest of the logistics sorted out so efficiently has been nothing short of a miracle. However, knowing that doesn’t really help in this moment. I have been living adrift for NINE MONTHS. I’m tired of making do and improvising. I want to have my own stuff, in my own place, and start doing my own thing again ASAP. Having our things shipped by sea will delay that possibility by at least another two months.

Yes, I could buy more towels and sheets and dishes and utensils, but what a waste of money – I have all these things coming to me from two different sources, dammit. It’s just getting it all here that is the problem.

In the end, I basically threw a tantrum by email. Though they are many hours ahead of EST, the movers were still in our place and my husband was able to divert most of our kitchen things by air freight along with as many of my quilts as he could find (they had already been packed). He tossed some of my sweaters in his suitcase and called it good. I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with that for now.

I am still working on getting our US time capsule shipped to us as well. At this point, any of my stuff will do…

Normally when we move, I sort things in to keep, sell, and purge. I have a house sale and lighten our load as much as possible before starting to pack. I know what things are easy to replace and what things are sentimental and precious. I know what clothes the kids will get more wear out of and which can be donated.

My husband is a very capable guy, but he has never been left in charge of one of our moves before. He’s never gone through the process of purging and sorting for packing and doesn’t know off the top of his head what things stay and what things go. I created a pretty exhaustive list from my memory of what items are stowed in which cupboards, nooks, and crannies but we’ve still been exchanging frequent one line emails with admonitions to “don’t forget!” and questions about this or that. He’s sold a few of our bigger items, but hasn’t had the time for a proper sale.

There is however another complication.

When we were preparing to move to Egypt, we were told that we needed to create an inventory of all of our things for customs purposes. Basically, the university supplies a letter of guarantee to the government that all of our possessions are personal and therefore tax exempt. The catch? We are supposed to take everything we arrived with back out again.

That doesn’t sound so very bad until you get into the nitty gritty of it. We were told for instance that with things like DVDs, CDs, and expensive or “special” books we needed to list them by title – this was also to protect us from sticky fingered inspectors. Have you got any idea how many books two avid readers and writers can collect?? Because of this stupid rule, we are going to be exporting a set of Wiggles VHS tapes that my children outgrew almost immediately after our arrival in Cairo five years ago!

The books and DVDs I can live with, but how this rule applies to electronics bugs me. Before Egypt we’d lived in the United Arab Emirates for six years. Both countries use 220v electricity and electronics are way cheaper in the UAE than in Egypt so we brought many items we already had along with us when we moved. However, since these items appear on our inventory, now we also have to take them out again – whether they work or not. Even if they do still work, they won’t be much good to me here in the US where the current is 110v. Using them with a converter is an option I suppose but I suspect they will end up being donated to someplace like this for children to tinker with.

Whatever – not much I can do about it now.

In short, I told my husband when in doubt, pack it. I’ll sort it out when it gets here…

Sigh.

My bedroom at my father’s house is a very stressful place right now, surrounded as I am by a mountain of Amazon boxes. I’ve been in denial, but I won’t be able to keep that up. I really need to make a start on packing. And I know that I’ll feel better once I can see the floor again.

I am happy to say I’ve made good progress on my next book while I’ve been here, in spite of falling asleep while writing the other night. I woke up a short time later to four pages of k’s. Overall, I’m going home with about 20K words than I came with – best yet, they don’t weigh a thing

First of all, I’m much more a purger than a pack-rat. Since I have never known what it feels like to have a house as a permanent home, I just don’t tend to keep many things past their useful life. It’s not to say I’m not sentimental, but you tend to get pretty ruthless when it comes down to having to move things from place to place – not everything makes the cut. I’m also an excellent packer. I know not to pack books in large boxes and I like to use towels, blankets, etc as packing material – it all has to get moved anyway and by using soft items for cushioning, I’m also saving on volume. Stuffed animals are excellent buffers for fragile items

I’ve only ever had the luxury of using professional movers a few times in my life – most of the rest of our moves were accomplished under our own steam. The first time was when my family moved from Wisconsin to Louisiana when I was four years old – mostly what I remember about that move is that the moving men had an eighteen wheeler truck and they let me sit up in the cab and play. Also, one of them made my sister a tiny horse saddle for one of the many model horses she had in her collection.

The second time I hired professional movers was when my husband and I moved from Cleveland, Ohio to North Carolina. Normally we’d have hired a U-Haul truck and done it ourselves but once I’d seen the warning on the sun visor in the truck about overheating brakes and possible brake failure on downhill slopes I didn’t much like the idea of driving the truck down through the mountains of West Virginia! That was a terrible move – we ended up camping in an empty rental house because the movers ended up being 10 days late. I called the company nearly every day to complain. When the truck finally did arrive, the movers refused to open the truck and unload our possessions until we had paid them! Several items were damaged as well. I ended up fighting the company and getting several hundred dollars back for delays and damage but I tell everyone I know not to use that particular company (though no one I tell has even heard of them so that probably says something right there!)

Our move to Cairo from the United Arab Emirates was a huge job. We’d been in the UAE long enough to have had two children and accumulate the possessions of a family of four. And it wasn’t as easy as just packing up – every box had to be inventoried in detail so that the university could write the customs authorities in Egypt a letter of guarantee so we would not have to pay duty on our things. In short, everything we bring in, we take out. Being a librarian by education I went a little overboard on the itemizing – I kick myself when I see “Mr. Potato Head” on the list when I could have just written “toys”!

The only bad part of our Cairo move was the aftermath: I ended up rupturing a disk while unpacking all of our many boxes. Six months in bed sounds like a lot of fun until you can’t do otherwise. Ouch.

My back has since recovered and at last check my other disks were in reasonable shape, but I wasn’t anxious to injure myself again. The university would have moved our boxes for free if I packed them, but not our personal furniture. So when the moving company I called about the furniture offered to pack everything, move it, and unpack for what was a mere pittance in the grand scheme, I decided it was worth it. Honestly, the move last week went so much better than I expected. I’ve never let anyone else pack all of my things before and they did a great job all the way around. They moved my stuff, they took a couple of large potted plants to the apartments of friends of mine, they retrieved the TV satellite off the roof, and they installed my washing machine. The whole time they were at it, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop – they were going to tell me that the move was a bigger job than they expected and I owed them more, for instance. In fact, they finished up and left and never even asked me to pay! It wasn’t until the next day that the owner of the company called me and arranged to come over and collect the fee – which was exactly what he had quoted me.

It was totally worth the money and the twenty five tea bags and kilo of sugar the five guy crew consumed in their tea breaks over two days!!

I’m busy nesting now and making the new place our own – and really hoping I don’t have to face packing up and moving for at least a couple of years!

I just hope that in the end, my pottery projects come out as I envision.

On another topic, housing is provided with my husband’s job and a while back we requested to be moved to a larger apartment. I’ve loved the one we are currently in for the nearly four years we lived here, however we’ve outgrown the space and the children really need their own rooms. The housing department called us on Thursday to say they had a place for us and could we move on Tuesday? My initial reaction was um…no! I’ve gotten pretty good at moving, but I’m not THAT good! The movers I called yesterday for a quote on moving our large furniture items gave me such a good quote on moving everything that I decided in the interest of my stress levels and the remaining disks in my back to let them! They also suggested they could move us on Tuesday and since they are also responsible for the packing, Tuesday it is! Fortunately, our new place is only a few blocks away so things don’t have to be packed quite as carefully as they would if we were moving countries, but it’s still a big job.

Bigger still will be the job of cleaning / sorting / unpacking on the other end!

I also wanted to report that I did try a new recipe over the weekend (February – check!) I made shrimp chowder, using a fish chowder recipe from my Jane Brody cookbook. The only things I changed were I substituted shrimp for fish, I omitted the white wine, and I added a can of corn. It was amusing how much the frozen “cooking shrimp” I bought shrunk in the process though – in the end they were so small they could have been sea monkeys! The chowder was a hit – very tasty – and I’ll definitely be making it again.

I suspect the rest of this week we’ll be eating sandwiches and pizza however!

I’ll be going out shortly to do a last few errands, including checking in on the jeweler. Stay tuned on that…

Updated to add: I got my ring back and it looks pretty good. Excuse me if I’m under-enthusiastic, but I need a little time to bond with the ring again after all the aggravation both of the jewelers involved put me through!

It was a busy weekend for me. I caught up on all the laundry and put away all the suitcases. I’m not a neat freak. I just hate having all that stuff lying around even more than actually dealing with it!

The kids are back in school this week which is so so great, but it’s still a bit of a holiday for me. My husband is off work this week which means that things are not *totally* back to normal for me yet. So instead of trying to get to work on my newest story idea in any serious way, I’m going to spend some time gorging myself on my TBR pile. Yes, reading in the daylight hours. Such a luxury for me.

The only other thing I intend to do this week is go and buy a new keyboard for our computer. The N, B, and ? keys have stopped working on ours. I’ve had the letters wear off before, but never had the keys just flat out stop working. We’ve been reduced to typing on our laptop keyboard, which I don’t really enjoy doing for long sessions. It’s amazing how much B and N crop up in a paragraph though.

One gift I received this year was a silver chain with the J keypad from a 1937 Smith-Corona typewriter. It’s very tactile and the J is just as clear now as it was the day it was made. They don’t make keyboards like that anymore…