Can we please just get these blog posts about the move over with already?
Yes, I know. At this point in the whole process, I was ready to be done with anything and everything having to do with a move.
But, slight problem, we still had to wait for our furniture. And in the middle of it all, there was this weather phenomenon they are calling "the polar vortex." From what I understand, that's just a fancy way of saying, colder than hell. No wait, bad analogy -- hell is supposed to be hot. Whatever. All I know, is that Minnesota experienced temperatures that rivaled the North Pole, right at the same time we were trying to move in and get settled.
So here we were, in our new/old house, with minimal furniture. We had mattresses, and a table and chairs from storage, and a camping chair. And a giant television. I probably don't have to tell you that there were a lot of arguments about who got to sit in the chair. Although, we do have a fireplace in our new/old house, and laying on a blanket in front of the fireplace was a pretty good alternative to the chair.
Meanwhile, school kept getting cancelled because the temperatures were so cold, it was dangerous to go outside. I was happy that we had air shipped the wii, and that Santa brought Isabelle "Just Dance" for Christmas. But unfortunately, this also meant delays for our container. It was coming from port via rail to Minneapolis, and the sub-zero temperatures meant the rails couldn't operate.
We finally got word that our furniture was here, but because of all of the delays, the company had a difficult time finding a driver to deliver it. They finally did, on a Friday at noon. Of course we had six inches (sorry, I converted to the metric system for a lot of things, but I will forever measure snowfall by inches) of snow the night before, so it was a snow emergency. For my Belgian friends, that means that we had so much snow, the city needs to plow all of the streets. To do this, there are rules about where you can park your car at night, and then different rules for the day. Of course, during the day of a snow emergency, there is no parking on the street in front of our house. And we were about to have a container delivered. Right there. Thankfully, my genius of a husband thought to call the city to ask. Good thing he did too, or we would have had a $500 fine from the city.
I felt physically ill watching this truck pull up to our house on a Friday afternoon. I was there when they packed it. I knew exactly how many boxes were in that container. I knew what our house in Belgium looked like the day before the container came -- stacks of white boxes everywhere. And even though our house here is almost the same square footage as our house in Belgium, the rooms are very different. There was no way, they would be able to unload that truck in four hours without a whole lot of chaos.
Our movers here had never seen anything like it. Every single piece of our furniture had been taken apart and put into a box. Our couch, was in six different pieces. Same for our beds, dressers, dining room table, shelves -- everything. If our movers in Belgium could have taken apart our mattresses, they probably would have.
So I fought hard against the Type A personality that dictates most of my life choices, and opted for plan B. I left. John and I had already agreed that under no circumstances, were the movers going to be allowed to leave until we at least had beds to sleep in that night, and a couch to sit on for the weekend. I knew I was leaving the house in good hands. I picked up the kids from school and we went to my sister-in-law's house for the rest of the afternoon. And hid. And in the end, that choice was probably a better one for my marriage. We got back to the house in the evening and they were still getting the last of the boxes in the house and shoving them into whatever tiny spaces were left.
It took all four of the mover guys to figure out how to put the couch together. And I don't think I've ever been so happy to have a couch before.
In this whole chaotic moving mess, we just keep trying to find the good where we can. And it's usually the little things that have counted for the most.
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