Well ... One Thing Lead to Another ....

Been busy 'moving in' today. Cannot believe Gary could accumulate that much stuff. I remember some dishes, a chair, some souvenirs and a Manfrotto tripod that I am totally stealing from him. But ... there must have been 15 more boxes than I remember when the boxes arrived on the Australia side (I was there) and we moved stuff in over there.

Spent the entire day schlepping stuff around, trying to fit clothes in closets, toiletries in overstuffed cupboards, and for me - at the end just taking boxes and piling them in my closet to do later.

The guy that packed was a complete and total idiot (or seriously evil) and did the dumbest things. All Gary really cared about - seriously - was his racing bike - so he had done some pre-packing on it.

At the end, it was discovered that 'Box #29' was missing. It was a table top for the desk Gary was using - just a 6' table from Ikea. Where could it be? We and the movers looked everywhere.

Finally ...

Gary opens up the box with his very nice, very 'in perfect condition even after getting hit by a bus since Gary protected its fall with his body', very EXPENSIVE racing bike and finds that the guy packing had TAKEN OFF ALL HIS PADDING OFF THE BIKE and PUT THE TABLE TOP IN WITH IT ...

UNPROTECTED.

Yeah ...

A totally unprotected bike, sitting right next to a very heavy, very large slab of wood - shoved in the same box - AFTER the table top had already been assigned a box number - NOT the bike box number by the way. WHY, WHY, WHY did he do it?

Oh, yeah -

that went well.

It has been a while since I have seen my husband so mad. Paint chips, gouges, bent, broken racing bike.

On an up note:

The table top seems fine! (Kidding - it has problems too, but we really don't care ...)

So - he was not a happy camper from the start today and we just kept finding surprise after surprise. It was as if the guy packing had it in for Gary - and he is the nicest guy on the planet (Gary) ... so why? Like - the BBQ grill STEEL leg parts - with all their black, sharp, pointy corners packed UNPROTECTED, UNWRAPPED, in with our beautiful wooden pieces for an Ikea chair. Yeah - stuff like that - weird and so ... frustrating.

I photographed all the damage - surprisingly very little for what was done to our stuff - and we will let the moving company figure it out ....

So - we have a 6' Ikea table.

OK - it is going in my craft room.

Gary takes it up.

No problem, we forget about it.

A computer gets unpacked, but Gary has been using his laptop (64 bit) and a port with a monitor and didn't know if he wanted to go to my Norwegian hand-me-down he was using in Australia.

We go ... for some reason to the craft room and sit down and were talking. I realize that my programmable sewing machine that makes all sorts of embroidery stuff - like Jessie's Disney Princess quilt - had some software that would let me take a design and make it into stitches to program into my sewing machine - but I got a new computer with Vista and discovered that the software didn't work with a Vista Operating System so it was toast. Shrugged my shoulders and have done very little with the sewing machine since.

Well - now we had a table, a computer, a printer all without a home.

Gary mentions that we could put the table where it belonged (oh, we were up there putting the legs on the table - Gary had found the hardware and was putting everything together - that is why we ended up in my craft room in the first place) if we:

1) emptied out the shelf bottom of all the crap I had stored in it.
2) emptied the shelves that go on top of the bottom of the shelves, but wasn't, was just on the floor

3) cleared off the sewing table
4) moved the shelve bottom cupboard over to the shelf position.
5) lifted the shelves up on top of the shelf cupboard.
6) move the one matching 6' Ikea table already up there out from the wall
7) shoved the new table into the corner

and

voilà

we would have a corner table for my sewing machine, serger and computer.



NO PROBLEM! Gary said it would take about 15 minutes - but he totally underestimated how much crap I can stash in my craft room. I don't know how long it took to empty everything, but it looks like about as much stuff as would have fit in all the boxes we had in our great room today (see - shelves properly sitting atop their cupboard):

But - I have my corner desk!

And in, oh, maybe 3 or 4 months I will be in the mood to put all the crap away. Especially since that is how long it is going to take me to clean out my closet ...