Moving and unpacking

Moving is hard.  I have to pat my self in the back for doing a kick-ass job at separating our things in the four different categories that we had slated: storage, boat, air and luggage.  I can honestly say that our air shipment had every single thing I needed to survive for the two months that took our boat to get here.  Except for my cheese grater.  That was my only downfall.  We finally moved right before leaving for Vienna and on November 30th, we got our boxes.  It was crazy.  62 boxes in total delivered by two guys in a span of 3 hours.  They system worked like this, One guy would call out the box number and I was supposed to check it off against the inventory list and then tell them where to put it.  Some of the boxes were really easy "kitchen", "books", "bedding".  Then came the hard ones: "miscellaneous", "costco stuff", "things in closet".  I created my own system asking him, "is it heavy?" if it was, I sent him to the farthest room of the house, cause there was no way I would be able to carry that by myself later.  After all 62 were checked off, (though we sort of cheated because there were 3 #47s, 2 unlabeled boxes and about 8 unchecked numbers --which were probably might fault, because I was really distracted by the whole thing and not doing a good job of tallying) we called it a night. I think he and I were equally sick of each other and I was so worn out that I didn't even care if I was missing stuff.

Then came the hard part. Unpacking.  Phil is a firm believer that he won't be able to sleep at night if he knows there is a hot mess right outside his door.  I tried to convince him that it was inhuman to try to unpack everything on one night. I won this battle.

It took about 5 days to unpack every single box.  We kept a running list of things that were missing, and as we unpacked, we checked them off with a little cry of joy.

Every time we found a box with more clothes there was a groan of "MORE CLOTHES??!!"  Both of us definitely have a problem. I could not believe the amount of boxes we had of just clothes.  But since this place is so big, I have my own little dressing room and closet, a la Cher Horowitz from Clueless.  But Phil and I have promised each other not to buy ANY clothes in the two years we are here.  We've been really good so far, so I am really determined to go through with it.

Then there was the whole: "WHY THE HECK IS THIS HERE!" which is what I was screaming when I found a dust rag and some old magazines and such.

We are down to missing two items: my old yoga mat that was never used and cumin powder.  I choose to think that I just never packed them, and not that we are missing a box full of treasures that we have memory lapses about.  I could just imagine one day in the future we'll be like "where is the wedding album?"---  probably with the yoga mat out in Timbuktu.

Also, since we didn't know what sort of furniture and things we were getting, we definitely brought extra things.

This is the stuff that shall remain unpacked for the entire two years.  They'll be sitting quietly in the guest room until it's time to go back.