In the midst of the holidays, all of stuff (household goods) finally arrived. This last batch of things came from a storage unit near Camp LeJune in North Carolina. We haven's seen these things since early 2004 when we moved to Japan....so just about 5 years.
Over the last three weeks, we have been trying to dig ourselves out of the mess of forgotten things; much of which is unwanted, and most of which is unneeded. For instance, we discovered that we no less than eight coolers (igloo brand etc....). What on earth are we going to do with eight coolers! Then there are the multiple boxes of cloth diapers, new parent books and maternity clothes. We also discovered that many of our things were very badly damaged: For instance, we had two grills: one for charcoal (broken) and one that used gas (totally destroyed...I didn't even recognize what it was when I first saw it). Loosing the grills was unwelcome. Every family man needs a good grill! I also came across all of my power tools; this was indeed a welcome site, as everything seemed to be in good order. However, it was bitter sweet, as none of these things will work here as all of the power runs on 220 vs 110... oh well, maybe the next continent we move to. Then there are the many boxes of books. Holly illiterate cow! We have so many useless books it is ridiculous. Things like: The 1993 'instruction manual to the TI-82 calculator', 'Programming in C++ the exciting new field', 'The pocket guide to Swahili' (no kidding we have a book on Swahili!!!), 'America's Conflict Free Future' (written in 1999...not the best job of predicting the immediate future), 'The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam' by R. S. McNamara (why would we have any book written by this moron!?!),...the list goes on and on. I opened one box of books to discover that all of it's contents had in fact turned to petrified wood! Evidently these particular books had just plain given up their collective will to live.
Then comes the tough part. Rheagan and I unearthed all of our old drawings, paintings, renderings, & models. This brought back wave after wave of carefully tucked away goals, desires and dreams. In a way, this was like opening Pandora's Box, as I now can't shake all my little schemes of Architectural conquest.... more on this another time.
We also unearthed box upon box of old photographs/albums. This slowed the whole unpacking process way down...as we naturally had to hem and haw over every single photograph. This in turn made us feel guilty for not writing more Christmas cards more quickly and more often.... {please insert the most convincing and sincere excuse that you can think of here}
Posted by paul at January 11, 2009 02:05 PM