Wide Open Spaces

Our household belongings have been picked up from the Port of Oakland. We had word from the shipping company that they picked up our container on Thursday. Their first slot for delivery is Monday, so we prepared ourselves for two days of camping and left our furnished apartment yesterday (Saturday). One of the aspects of apartment living that we really wouldn't get along with in the long term is the distance between the front door of the apartment and the car. The apartment was set in some quite lush surroundings with heavy planting, and the main living areas faced onto courtyards and walkways with trees and shrubs. Very nice... except when you have to carry a car-load of shopping from the allocated parking space behind the building. After six weeks, Becky was getting annoyed by this. So, the three full carloads that it took to get all of our stuff from the apartment to the house was a labor of love. We're getting less tolerant of inconvenience and difficulty... which I think is because we can see the end of it on the horizon. Still, by the end of Saturday, we'd moved everything from the apartment to the house, and drove away from the apartment complex for the last time. The immediate emotions on leaving the apartment were neither sadness nor relief. Of course, it's a step along the way, but the immediate concerns of moving ourselves from one place to another were the focus. We're sleeping on an airbed that Becky's mum bought for when she visited the apartment; Lucy has her travel cot - which she's always been very happy in; we've got a 13" portable TV which we bought for $80 so the Comcast engineer would have something to plug the cable TV equipment into, and Becky borrowed some kitchen equipment, cutlery and crockery from her grandma. So, we're all set. Today we did a bit of shopping for bits and bobs that we're going to need (like some two-pin to three-pin grounding adapters so that we can plug grounded equipment into some of the sockets. eek!), but other than that, we're just waiting for the container to arrive at 9:00am tomorrow. The main thing we're missing at the moment is a set of remote-control cars to race around the wide-open spaces that will soon fill with our furniture and clutter. Vroom!