105 days

We finally received our stuff!  After packing it up and sending it on it's way on August 2nd, it arrived 105 days later, last Tuesday.  I was optimistically thinking it would take only 60...

A few thoughts:

-I love my bed!!!!  Can't express that enough.  We've been sleeping on a government loaner bed that is smaller than a double, and nothing more than on old mattress on a metal frame.  Our king size bed feels even bigger now in comparison.  As soon as it was set up, I laid on it horizontally for a few minutes, just because I could.    No limbs hanging off the edges.

-Movers are dumb.  They tried to push the 100-yr-old 500-lb piano on its 100-yr-old tiny antique wheels down the sidewalk.  Long gashes in the side walk are proof of the dumb idea.  Luckily at that point the moving company boss had arrived and started yelling at them to not be lazy and actually pick it up.  (Who'd have thought??)  They didn't measure anything to see if the piano could get to our second floor apartment, they just started dragging, pushing, and shoving.  After getting to the second landing they determined it was impossible.  But not before making some minor dents in the wall and scraping the corners of the piano pretty badly.  The last solution was to put it in the basement storage room, where again, they tried to just push it across the floor and cracked my landlord's cement.  They threatened that if I tried to put it in their warehouse instead of the basement it would be exposed to extreme temperatures and potential flooding, so I guess things could be worse than storing it in the basement for three years.  (?!)

-My kitchen has no storage space.  I've unpacked about 2 boxes of kitchen stuff, and I already have stuff sitting homeless on my counter.  No place to put it.  Only 12 more boxes to go!  I may have to get creative.

(Our table on left, government loaner on right)

-The rest of the house has no storage space.  It's big... way bigger than our last apartment.  But there aren't any closets.  So the bedding, extra clothes, DVD's, linens, towels, games, etc is just sitting here.  Not sure how I'll handle that yet.  Probably a lot of plastic stacking drawers lining the wall of our extra bedroom.  Germans sure do build funny houses.

-Our kitchen table fills up approximately 1/6 of our dining room.  Need more furniture!!

Office-to-be

-The mess I had in Ohio is still my mess in Germany.  I don't know if I was just hoping that those unorganized-never-opened-drawers-full-of-random-stuff would organize themselves in transit, but I kind of shudder whenever I come across one.  Fixing that is going on my to-do list.

-Moving in is much less stressful than moving out.  The movers were gone by noon, and we could start to do our own thing.  It's relaxing knowing everything is now in our possession, and regardless of how much damage they may have done to the corners of my dressers, I'm not still wondering if our stuff fell off the boat somewhere in the Atlantic.  (Can you imagine?? I've heard horror stories of that happening. Or the moving truck catching on fire as its sitting in front of the house...)  And since we've been living in our apartment already for almost 2 months, there's nothing really urgent to unpack or clean, so we can take our time.  I have plenty of paper plates and cups to last us until I can find a place to put the real dishes in the kitchen.  (We have already graduated to real silverware... there's a drawer for that!)