Monday

I got up four minutes after eight this morning after four hours of sleep. I'm still sick. After spending two days recumbent, it was very difficult to get to sleep early last night. I should have tried harder: between eight and ten am today, movers were to appear with our air-freight from Monterrey. We'd have four large boxes of stuff completely filling the apartment. Since these would be sitting between the couch and the TV, even my illness had a vested interest in dealing with them as soon as possible. The boxes arrived a little before eleven, and we managed to get three of them dumped out before the moving-in process ended so the movers could move the trash back out with them. This moment was important. This was the first time we had the opportunity to discover whatever it was we did during the month of packing-out in México. What things arrived today? Was it the stuff we meant to have here? What were we thinking, making this or that choice? Lastly, once we'd unpacked the final box and unwrapped the final, padded parcels, we had to wonder: did the fact that certain expected things were not present mean they were on the way to Vietnam? Or headed for three years of climate-controlled lockdown? Or dumped into a Latin garbage can? I'm making it seem like it's a bigger issue than it really is. Most of what we expected to see really was here, packed very professionally (the only casualty was a flesh-wound: two of my restaurant-sized spice bottles leaked garlicy paprika out into their box). Also, this place is eight hundred square feet, and we now have at least twice that number of square things to somehow jam into it. We certainly don't need anything else. [Cavin]