Best Invention Since...

We had to bring some banana nut bread from the old house to our new home. Since the bread was home-made and more of a dessert bread than a sandwich bread, we typically cut slices as we ate it. Not wanting to be without a knife, we decided to pack one with the bread.

Convenience and yumminess all in one package

Which made us think, why don't bakeries sell uncut loaves with knives? How convenient would that be? I guess there'd be some liability and it would make the loaf more expensive. Maybe this isn't the best idea since sliced bread. But it's close!

Moving in England

A couple of months ago we received a letter from our letting agent that the landlady did not want to renew our lease, so we had to be out of our home by the end of July. We were a little shocked and dismayed. We contacted the agent to find out the reason, wondering if it was something we said or did. We heard back that the landlady is taking early retirement and wants to move back to Yorkshire from London. With a sigh, we accepted the decision.

House-hunting again was easier than last year, since we had some pretty clear ideas about what we wanted and what we were willing to look at. Wanting plenty of bedrooms narrowed the search considerably. We looked at four or five houses before choosing the one we liked best. Strangely enough, the house is about a three-minute walk from where we had been living and both house numbers are 4. So town is easy to get to on foot and my wife's bus is not much further away.

Old car, new house

Moving our household was a bit of an adventure. We got the keys for our new house on a Friday and turned in our other keys on the following Tuesday. We decided against moving everything ourselves and hired a local company to move the bigger and heavier items. Of course, the company didn't work on weekends, leaving us a few days to move some stuff ourselves (the delicate electronics and other breakables like dishes). Packing everything was quite a challenge too. Luckily, our next door neighbors went through a similar crisis the month before and we were able to use their hand-me-down boxes to move our stuff. Think of it as recycling without the inconvenient reprocessing of materials.

The children were a bit sad to leave the other house. Lucy asked when we would move back. Jacob also asked, because his godparents are coming to visit in August and he was sure they would go there and not to the new house. We let him know that they'll come to this house. He was happy to hear that.

More delightful for Jacob is his upgraded bed. He used to have a simple bed. Now that he has a larger bedroom we decided to move the guest bed (which is a bunk bed) into his room. He sleeps up nearer to the stars now. In fact, I mean this quite literally!

Starry Nap

We've had that canopy since we bought the bed second-hand off Craigslist. We never used it for the guest bed. Now it is a super-fun hideaway. He shows it off to anyone who comes to visit us. Godparents, make sure to react like you are impressed!

The back garden (or "yard" as is said in the States) is a substantial upgrade too. It's all one level with a nice lawn and a swing set and a little summer house.

Our little patch for relaxing

The children love the swings and we've used the patio for dining in fair weather. That is, we used it once for lunch. The summer house at the back will be home to many toys. Also in the picture is the garage. We'll be using that mostly for storage. The back of the garage has a finished room which will be my office. Hopefully I will soon set up the audio recording equipment and get back to Forgotten Tales, my contribution to Forgotten Classics. Also, Sean from Just a Catholic Dad asked for some beer correspondence and he's always asking for mp3 feedback from listeners. This will be a great opportunity for that. Ampleforth Abbey Ale, here I come!

All in all, the move has gone well. Special thanks go to visiting cousin Emily, who has packed up stuff and kept the kids distracted while Mommy and Daddy were doing important paperwork, walk-throughs, etc. She's been a great help and also a great excuse to revisit some of our favorite tourist spots in the area. We'll be taking her to Cambridge, which will be new for us too!

Unpacking Update

Our household goods finally arrived last Monday (five days ago as I write). We've spent a busy week trying to unpack boxes, reorganize rooms, and return disassembled furniture to its original state. It's been fun but exhausting work, leaving no time for blogging.

The good news is everything on the packing list made it. No boxes were lost or smashed to bits or confiscated by customs (I was worried about my copy of Portal 2!). Not quite everything made it. We have an Ikea loft bed that the American movers took partially apart. They did not do a good job of keeping all the fiddly little bits with it. We made a trip to Ikea today to get some additional furniture and the missing screws, dowels, and bolts required to finish the bed. The bed is now complete. Jacob even tested out the ladder and the mattress and all works well.

I was happy to see this listed as number 42 on the packing list:

The ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is...

A bookcase! Full of linens? I guess that makes as much sense as "42" does.

Books are pretty important in my opinion. If they don't have the ultimate answer, they can definitely help in discovering it. This poor bookshelf will be stocked with books once we get some shelves for our linen closet. Ikea was surprisingly unhelpful in that regard.

Worse than Ikea not solving all our problems, we did have one casualty in the move. Jacob's cheap plastic fireman's hat got crunched up in the move. The hat was in the bottom of a box, so I think it just suffered under the burden of supporting other items. My wife said we should write to the moving company to demand $80 for a fireman's hat (as long was we left out the words "plastic" and "child's" in its decription); I said we should demand £80!

I'm not sure it's the authentic style and color (colour?) of locally used hats

Things are slowly coming together. The study/guest room/man room can finally be properly organized now that the loft bed is not scattered in pieces all over the floor. We opened up the boxes of pictures to hang and need to decide where they should go. That's fun work, though not as fun as going through the books and re-alphabetizing them. That takes a while because of all the sampling I do as I go. Soon there will be time for reading again! Truly a happy time for us.

A Shipment From Home

Our "unaccompanied baggage" has finally arrived. We were told back in America that these last minute items would go much faster than our household goods, probably flying over and being available within two weeks of their departure. They left our home back on June 16, which according to most normal math means they would be returned to us in England by the Fourth of July. The shipping company stated that July 13 would be the latest we would receive the shipment.

Luckily, we did not put any July 4 celebrating gear into the shipment, because it finally came last Thursday, i.e. July 28 for those of you reading this blog in the far distant future. I guess the shippers really meant it would be available two weeks after the last date they gave us.

The bloke who delivered our "unaccompanied bags" was a very nice guy with almost too much accent for me to understand. We chatted a bit while he brought the boxes in. Some were slightly crushed but their contents were in fine shape. He was apologetic about it and hoped that our household goods shipment wasn't packed by the same company. I said it wasn't and silently hoped they did a better job.

Lucky at dice, unlucky in shipping

Other boxes were okay and contained some of the games we thought we'd like to play before our household stuff made it. In the box was Zombie Dice and Zombie Fluxx. The guy commented on it and I said that we were into zombies. He said we shared a passion. He owned the whole set of George Romero's zombie movies and we had a long and delightful conversation about it. He liked 28 Days Later but didn't care so much for 28 Weeks Later. More budget did not result in a better movie. Shaun of the Dead is a favorite for both of us and he told me about Simon Pegg's cameo as a zombie in one of Romero's most recent films.

The moving guy already has his zombie apocalypse plan. He has two friends who are doctors, another owns about fifteen shotguns, and another is a weaponsmith who can make extra bullets in a pinch. They have a place up in the Scottish highlands where they can hunker down and wait out the chaos. Plenty of sheep and other wildlife exist up there, so they should be set for food. Or at least meat.

The whole experience of receiving the baggage was pretty good, even if it came ridiculously late. At least we didn't have to schlep that stuff from apartment to hotel to cabin to home. The bad thing was I forgot to tell the mover about this blog, so I've lost another potential reader. Maybe he'll come with the household goods and I can rectify the situation.

Our household goods, i.e. the "slow" shipment, have already arrived in country and are passing through customs. Hopefully they be delivered in the next two weeks. Where have I heard that story before?

Moving to Our Regular Quarters

We will finally be shambling into our new home in England tomorrow. Unfortunately, the internet is not moving in till next week, so posting here may be spotty to non-existent. I'll see if I can mooch off a neighbor, sneak away at night to a wi-fi hotspot, or find some other solution. Hopefully I can write blog posts in the no frills text editor that comes with the laptop and then just cut and paste them into the blog when I can. Wish me luck!

Reasons for Going to England #3--Getting Our Stuff Back

The past month has been very busy with preparations for the move to England. I put a ridiculous amount of effort into getting the visas from the British Embassy in New York City, caused by miscommunications and changes in procedures. And lost biometric data. That's a story for another post, though.

Today, we look at another reason we can't wait to get to England, viz. to get our stuff back. The movers came this Monday to pack up what's going to England by the inexpensive and slow method known as a cargo ship. We won't see our things again until mid to late July. Another set of movers will come next Monday to put the rest of our stuff (except what we take on the plane) in storage. So the house is not completely empty, but about three-quarters empty.

okay, maybe more like four-fifths

To make things run more smoothly, my wife took the children to my sister's house in West Virginia after Sunday Mass. They had a good time out there while I unplugged all the electrical equipment (including  the DVD player, surround sound system, game consoles, antennae, etc., plugged into the TV) and got other stuff ready for the movers. On the way back Monday night, Mommy talked to them a lot about how our stuff would be on it's way to England and we'd see it again once we'd moved. The children were quite attentive to this and seemingly accepting.

Then they got home and walked in the house.

The garage hall bench was missing. Jacob and Lucy said, "Uh-oh, where can we put our shoes?" They came into the family room and saw all that you see in the picture above. "Uh-oh, our toys are gone to England!!" The kitchen drew this response: "No table! We can't eat any more!" My wife hustled them off to bath time to get them ready for bed.

Then came the coup de grace for Jacob's acceptance. Jacob asked, "Did they take Wario?" Jacob has become quite interested in and proficient at playing WarioWare: Smooth Moves on the Wii and has been playing it every day for a week. When Angie said that it was shipped to England, then he broke down in hysterical sobs. "NNNNNOOOOO!!! NOT WARIO!! NNNOOO! I WANT TO PLAY!! NNNNOOOO!!" It was a long while before he calmed down.

Things were better in the morning. Angie and I brought up the spare table from the basement so we could eat breakfast, along with some toys and the library books we had hidden away (can you imagine the late fee if they'd been packed away for England!?! NNNOOO!!!). Jacob and Lucy perked up a bit. Children are a lot more resilient than we give them credit for.

We are definitely looking forward to getting our stuff back in England. And playing Wario on the Wii.