The Storm Before The Calm

Our stuff arrived on Monday. At 9:00am a 40' sea container, which we'd last seen on the back of a lorry outside our house in the UK on 2nd August, arrived outside our rental house here. It was slightly odd to think that the same container had been floating across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, up the Pacific coast, and into the Port of Oakland. We watched as they broke the seal which had been installed in the UK. For the next half hour, I marked numbers off a tick-list as the 246 individually numbered and itemised cardboard boxes and other oddly shaped items were unloaded from the container onto our driveway (it's a good job it wasn't raining... but then, this is California). Then there was 3 hours of hard work, as the 6 people in the unpacking crew started unwrapping the furniture, bringing it into the house and (where necessary) rebuilding it. Before we knew it, legs were back on tables, feet were back on sofas, and two beds and a cot had been rebuilt from their temporary 'flat pack' existence. Becky and I pitched in where we could, but a lot of our effort was taken up looking after Lucy, and directing boxes and pieces of furniture into appropriate rooms. More than once, a question of 'Where shall I put this?' from the unpacking crew was greeted with a shrug and 'Wherever looks good to you.' from one of us. They thought this was funny. After a lunch break, boxes of what can only be described as 'stuff' started coming in, and the relative calm of a mostly empty house became a mini maze of a few clear walkways through piles of half organised collections of familiar things. By the end of Monday, everything had been unpacked - although almost nothing had been put away - and all the major pieces of furniture were in the right rooms, and mostly in their final positions. It's good to see a lot of our stuff again. Becky's mum and brother arrived later on Monday to help out. Throughout Tuesday, they've been hard at work making sense of the explosion of random belongings that had been cluttering every flat surface. When I got home from work this afternoon the house was unrecognisable from the mess that I'd left in the morning, but much more recognisable as our home. There's something very comforting in being surrounded by familiar things. It's amazing how much progress they made in so little time. Fantastic. So, in two days we've been rapidly transported from a feeling of temporary accommodation, to a genuine sense of being at home. It's quite a relief.