Guess what?

Our sea freight shipment arrived last Wednesday! I'm happily typing up this blog post on my Mac. Everything came in good condition- minus one bowl- so we're really grateful for that. About this time last week we were wondering if it would come at all.

If you've been keeping up with us much, you'll know that this has been quite an ordeal. The shipment actually arrived in London on September 21st, but was detained by customs for an "extra screening" (randomly selected of course, but guess who gets to pay an additional 50 pounds?) Then the kind folks at EuroUSA failed to let us know that they needed some additional paperwork to get that extra screening done, so after 5 days we called them and found this out. It took at least a week to do this "extra screening" (which apparently simply involved putting it through an x-ray since none of the stuff in the boxes shifted from the way we originally packed it). When they got done, they required us to pay a pretty heavy duty. Our stuff was finally released on October 7th, but didn't show up in Oxford until Oct. 26th.

We've learned a lot through this:
1) Bureaucracy in any country is slow. As much as I would like to blame English customs for this, I know that the U.S. government can be similarly inefficient.
2) In our attempt to save some money by shipping our stuff here, we lost money (with a LOT more effort on our part by packing, shipping, and filling out countless pieces of paper). We couldn't really know that on the front end, but we certainly see now.
3) After a month and a half without all our precious clothes, books, kitchen goods, computer, etc., we realized we really can do with less. (OK, I realized this. Brandon always knew.) And after unpacking all these things and finding a place to put them, I started to think, "Why the heck did I think I needed to bring 12 shirts?"

I think for me, this experience has been rough but needed. It's better to learn these lessons now than in a few years- like when we're deciding on a house, or determining how much we need to live on per year.

Nonetheless, it is nice to have a little bit of "home" in our "home", like:

Cool art (props to Kate D.)

Homey pillow

Books galore! and a reminder of sweet friends back home

And of course, some essentials for the kitchen:

4 large jars of PB: 2 crunchy (Brandon) and 2 creamy (Claire)

Thank goodness for pyrex and tupperware! 

You definitely can't find this here.

So there it is. Flat F + some familiar things from the former Eidson household in Auburn.
Welcome home.