Monday

I said we'd turned a corner in the unpacking and moving-in process last Tuesday.¹ Today, I'd like to amend that. I spent my day rushing to finish everything. By today, all the books have been logged into our Library Thing,² they've all been sorted and shelved. I have checked-off all the movies, arranged all the furniture, etc. It's all done. Except this is only the first half, of course; what might be aptly compared to the eye of the storm, or the creamy vanilla center. A problem with complex stories is there isn't enough room to relate them--actually, the reverse: I keep these entries short to spare the world. In this case, it's the litany of depressing explanation surrounding the following facts I'm sparing you: we drove home from México; we spent ten months between posts; our air shipment was too heavy; our car was tightly packed; Sunshine's employers ship freight post-to-post; I expected to have my bachelor stuff shipped as a benefit of marriage. In a perfect world our stay in the US would have been one season, our air shipment would have covered it, our freight would have gone from México to Vietnam, and my stuff would have come out of mom's garage. As it is: we needed four seasons' worth of effects, we paid four bucks per pound extra airmail and put a thousand pounds in the car. Ten months of purchasing later, Sunshine's employers refused us extra freight shipping and I used my marriage benefit for the DC things. My old stuff is still in boxes in a NC garage, and we're still waiting for the second half of everything else to arrive in our apartment. So the faster I get these last things done, the more creamy eye before starting over again. [Cavin]