Tuesday

Today was day two of unpacking all of our stuff. Some history: when I arrived in México, at the end of April 2005, Sunshine had already been living there almost three months without this shipment having been delivered; it arrived at our house three days after I did. I hardly remember that house without our stuff in it. It was a huge, two-story place we couldn't possibly fill. We did not yet have enough shelf space for all our books. Currently, I have grown satisfied with this apartment unadorned, and there's scarcely room for the one hundred large boxes those seven men delivered yesterday. There is only one long interior wall down the length of this apartment to accommodate all our shelving units. It's the drawback of that penthouse apartment I've always dreamed of: all our exterior walls are breathtaking picture windows, but useless space for other things like pictures and furniture like bookcases. And holy wow did the Mexican moving company do a thorough job: we'd unraveled only four of those bookcases before the kitchen was filled to the top of the fridge with brown paper and cardboard. The whole experience of these two days has been tantamount to those little plastic puzzles* where the solver must slide eight colored squares, one at a time, into a shifting blank space, in the proper sequence to arrange a picture. I moved that last square today and the revelation is a letdown: there are no longer boxes, but personal effects, piled haphazardly in every room; a string of mismatched bookcases leads down the whole apartment, sharing lone interior wall-space with every stick of furniture we own. Oh, and for the record: our handy Mexican box-cutters were actually in the second-to-last box I hacked open with a kitchen knife today. [Cavin]