Monday, August 2, 2010

Our stuff has landed

The container holding our furniture was taken off a ship on Thursday last week, cleared customs on Friday, was driven down Chennai roads in the dead of night (the only time a 40 foot container can use the roads), and unloaded at our house on Saturday. I woke up at 6:00 AM and made us walk down to see the truck. We thought it might be at the end of our lane but they had to park it on the main road. We walked down and practically jumped up and down and hugged each other when we saw it.
The movers had to unload from this big truck to a smaller truck to get it to our house. No damage except a few broken glasses, some missing underwear and soap, and a puncture in the air bladder on my side of our Sleep Number bed. But Mr R got a new piece ordered to be shipped ASAP and we've lined up a co-worker who kindly agreed to bring it from the US next weekend. As I told Mom, I've shifted into shameless mode and have asked everyone who has visited from work to bring me at least one thing since I got here. And I will continue to do it.

Speaking of which, a co-worker arrived today with our TV signal converter (cross your fingers that it works), ant traps (don't get me started), and Crystal Lite packs (desperate man's substitute for diet pop, since the only diet you can get here is plain Diet Coke). Plus a huge bag of peanut M&M's that likely will not see the weekend.

Here's the part where I start to wonder if being in India is already changing me: we have *a lot* of stuff. Here's a photo of some of it before we started unpacking.

Mind you, when the packers wrap everything in layers and layers of paper then stuff it in boxes with more paper it takes up more space. But I was washing all our dishes as I unpacked them (did they fumigate the container? I don't want to take chances) and we have *a lot* of dishes. There are only two of us. But I think we have 16 cereal bowls. And that's just in our regular set. We also have lots of forks and spoons, utensils I'm pretty sure I only used once, and pitchers that haven't seen the light of day until they were moved to India. As I was washing all these things by hand I realized a big reason for this quantity is that, with just the two of us and a big dishwasher, we needed to be able to eat two dishes at a time for a week until we filled the dishwasher. But as I was washing the dishes by hand I was enjoying the time to slow down and look at each piece (and wash off the dried on gunk left on from the last trip through the diswasher) and watch dragonflies out the window, and I wonder if I could live without a dishwasher when I return home.

We've lived for so many weeks with the clothes in our suitcases and a few towels and dishes that it was shocking to see all the stuff we packed. And I wonder what I was thinking with some of the stuff we packed. Comforters? No way can we use them, not even the light summer one. My Snuggie? I loved it in Michigan (don't laugh) but there is no way I can use something that heavy here.

On the other hand, I was delighted to see some of the supplies we bought which we can't get or are really expensive here. Shampoo, cereal, pretzels, toilet paper.

One more observation. I always wanted to be the sort of person who has nice matched sets and doesn't keep mismatched pieces. But I'm not. And on Saturday I realized why. How could I not keep the bowls the girls brought from Disney World for us? The plate I stole from a cafe in Rome when the waiter was really snotty to Mom and me? The 3 champagne glasses I got as a gift but the 4th one broke? The Pokemon jelly jar glasses we collected because we thought they were funny and the Curious George Mr R's mom sent us from across the country?

No, wait, one more observation about having stuff. You know how you get a huge bottle of Suave shampoo for a dollar and you pour too much into your hand but you don't really care? Or how you put a huge gob of toothpaste on your toothbrush and most of it falls into the sink but it doesn't matter? When you pay a bunch of money for a tiny bottle of conditioner, or you have to make your toothpaste (or Coment or Pine Sol) last as long as you possibly can (since you only have what you carried) you get a lot less cavalier about how you use it. Every drop is precious. Maybe we would waste less if everything came in smaller packages. Maybe Costco isn't really doing us the favor we thought it was by letting us to shopping so infrequently.

So on the one hand we have too much stuff. But on the other hand I'm really really glad it's here!

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