Another step closer

Earlier this week, our household goods which have been in storage in California for the past four years were delivered to our new house in Massachusetts, which represents a tremendous step forward towards our move, psychologically, as well as physically. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but knowing that the house is no longer completely empty, but has goods piled up into a somewhat precarious pyramid in the garage waiting for us to come out and re-discover and catalog all of the precious material items that we haven't needed for the past several years, but couldn't quite bear to part with altogether, somehow moves my brain one giant step further along in our move preparation.

A friend of ours in the area kindly agreed to go receive all the goods (as we're all the way over here on the other side of the ocean, it would have otherwise been pretty difficult to manage), and commented that the boxes all looked very dusty and grungy, which is why she had them placed in the garage instead of trying to direct them towards vaguely the right areas of the house. Considering the goods were supposed to be stored in a "climate controlled environment" is a little irksome, but hey, at this point, I'm glad to have them arrive at all. Truth be told, we have only the fuzziest of notions as to what's actually in those boxes and plastic wrappers. A lot of books. And some power tools. A kitchen table and chairs, and some baby furniture. And my TiVo. Beyond that? I've no clue. I've got the feeling that about half of the boxes will provoke comments along the line of "why the hell were we keeping that?"

I can't wait.

As a next step, the movers on this side of the Atlantic came out to "survey" our goods, and get an idea of how big a container we need to shove all the accumulated crap from the last four years into.

His comment on seeing our bed (one of the few pieces of furniture we brought over from the US on our move was, “Wow. That’s a big bed. Is that a super-sized bed? Like special order?”

Um, no. It’s just a regular American king sized.

“Wow. Over here we’d call that a super-sized bed. I mean, I've never seen a bed like that.”

Ok, stranger-guy in my house. Could we get over your fascination with my bed, yeah?

The only other piece of advice he gave was after poking his head into our closet where I've installed our wine rack. We'll need to be very selective about which wine we wanted to ship, as it would incur some hefty duty fees, he tells us.

Which means that we'll be opening more bottles in the next few weeks, if you'd like to stop by.