Movers

We got two pieces of really great news on Wednesday.

The first is that our permanent residence visas came through, after being under consideration for eight months. That's good! I needed that for work. But it also opens up a large task list of items we couldn't do without those visas. For example, we now have to go get Australian drivers licenses by some deadline, and apply for universal health insurance by another. Stick those things on the to-do-eventually-by the deadline list.

The second piece of news is that a slot opened up, and the movers could come on Friday, at the end of the week, so we could spend an entire weekend unpacking and organizing! Yes! We get all our stuff back after just six months!

I took the day off work Friday. We left the temporary house at 6am to get to the train to arrive by 7am. The movers came at 7:30. And then for the next 15 hours or so I stood around unloading boxes. I figured out how to get all our kitchen items condensed into a kitchen roughly 2/3 the size of our previous kitchen. It all fit. It wasn't clear that everything would fit, but it did. It all fit.

2700 of these boxes fit into our kitchen cupboards.

After the movers were gone, we decided to shift all the furniture around in the living room seven more times. And put the extra chest of drawers in Jonathan's room. Then move another bookcase. Then switch around the living room again....

One version of the living room. This one was too blurry so we swapped it.

This morning, I woke up to a beautiful view at the new apartment!

And then more unpacking. We found a lot of broken stuff today. We've been heaping curses on our packers from the US all day. And taking photos of stuff we'll claim under insurance. The guys were total morons. Who puts a glass frame, unwrapped, into a box and then heaps heavy stuff on top of it? And then ships it across the ocean?

One of the Australian movers yesterday said that the stuff they get from the US is always really badly packed. US movers do a terrible job.

"I hear it's because they don't get enough training," he said. "What do they get, only six months of training before becoming movers?"

Um, actually, our movers were three totally random guys. Two of them were students picking up an extra summer job. We had thought that the more senior guy would have done better, but he was the one who left all the fine china in its unpadded storage containers, and just stuck it in the box as it was. Yet he wrapped every single cheap everyday drinking glass in two layers of packing paper. Lucky lucky lucky for us none of the expensive dishes broke! But I cannot recommend these packers. I think they needed an extra year or two of training.

One more quick photo. 

That large leggy spot that you see above the door hinge is a spider the size of my fist. She was hiding in the laundry room in the temporary rental this afternoon, when we returned to pick up a load of things. She was clearly waiting behind the laundry room door until the perfect time to run across the hall and climb up on the toilet seat, to stay there until the darkest part of the night when someone stumbled in, fumbling for the light switch, reaching to lift up the seat... and ...

AAAAAAaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

"Why don't you squish it?" asked Jonathan.

Because you don't kill something that size by squishing it. Maybe you stab it with a knife?

The spider won. We decided to leave that house to the spider, and we're back in the new place again this evening.