Situation Normal

The reemergence of Thomas the Tank Engine and our craft box can only mean things are normalizing.

Boxing Day

 

It's been a long few days, made longer by a heat wave (seriously??). Our two lug-headed movers, Tony and Simon, arrived late and worked impossibly slowly, until at last they were busting with complaints and the house was busting with boxes, enough that the back entrance was blocked and the rooms were barely penetrable. Do watch the video above to see how a truck is un-crated....they actually use crowbars!

Two days later, we have emptied all but a few clothing boxes, hung the art and hired a second mover to haul away a small house full of furniture to storage.

Somehow everything arrived, but not without incident. Anything worth breaking has a missing foot (the sofa included...oi!). One lamp shade was beautifully mangled (nearly a work of art), thanks to the "spastic tea party" of a packing job, so say the goons who unpacked: boxes marked fragile were used to support a wrought-iron garden table, the glass top of which wasn't wrapped and broke. The most notable fracture is my cherished dining room table, which lost a big hunk of wood on the underside. Still, considering all the things that can go wrong with an overseas move, we got off easy (think: crate floating in the open sea, never to be seen again).

We owe many thanks to The Bean, for the helping hands and sanity check when needed most.

Seas of brown paper

The mangled lamp shade

Just a few of the broken legs

Boxes were us

Helping the dopey movers with a lengthy item list

The spastic tea party inside the truck

It is now, officially, home-sweet-home in Cambridge. Please stop by for a cuppa. We're ready!

Just the 411

Delivery has been made! A day-long affair involving two of the slowest Brits ever. The house is stuffed to the gills and we await the "Man with the Van" on Wednesday to haul the excess to storage. So now, we celebrate with champagne, delivery curry (we can't reach the stove, I just hope we can find forks) and buckle down for tomorrow's unpacking onslaught. Three cheers for feeling 'at home!'

Bugging Out

Pink please

We spent time Friday undoing the bit of order we'd achieved at home - dumping closets out, throwing clothes out of the dressers, emptying drawers so that the nice people at RAF Alconbury could reclaim our hideously ugly loaner furniture (I can only describe the aesthetic as "early American cruise ship"). All of this is in preparation for the GLORIOUS arrival of our shipment from America, which comes to us tomorrow. Words can not describe the collective excitement to be reunited with comfortable sofas and rugs to dampen the echo-chamber that is our dwelling. Of course we have entirely too much stuff, much, much too much stuff. I think Monday's exercise will be much like stuffing rosy-cheeked performers into a clown car. But that, my friends, is what storage is for.

So, rather than sleep on hardwood floors, we have decamped to Marlow and the home of The Bean, who has done nothing but endeavor to make us fat and happy: a Cinderella DVD for our little princess and a mani,  a massive pub lunch for Paul at the Royal Standard England, a pedicure and a late-night stitch and bitch session for the girls (just like old times back in 1997 when we used to drink gobs of wine and noodle over patterns - wild girls, we were). We remain ever grateful, plotting to return the favor one day.

We leave here tomorrow at 5 a.m. to beat the movers back to Cambridge. Consulting bookies in Vegas to establish the over-under on breakage.

So Cozy, So Crazy

Trust me, every fashionable soft-boiled egg is wearing one this season...a cozy. That's according to British knitting sensation Debbie Bliss, who included this pattern in her newest book "Knitter's Year," an early birthday present to myself. And of course, I'll have to knit a few more so that a whole family of eggs can be warm, lest we have to share one little chapeau. My embroidery skills leave a lot to be desired, you can see my bunny looks rather like a mustachioed bat.

My next project, a teapot cozy, to round out that cozy feeling. I've selected another Bliss pattern (at right), this one in moss and eggplant. The Bean will be knitting along to clad her own pot in wool.

I assure you that in the UK this behavior is not so seemingly psychotic.

KaBOOM!

What is the sound of one hand clapping? Don't really care, but I can tell you what a PC sounds like when it explodes. It's loud and there is much smoke. Thus was the fate of our 6-year-old desktop, which I plugged in at Harry's behest (I've been using my new laptop), and BOOM! It now resides in the trash.

Seems there's a wee little button on the back that, if you're informed, is supposed to be switched over when you plug into a 220 outlet. Ahem....Didn't know that.

But why stop there? I cracked the glass on my iPhone and today discovered a nail in Mrs. Tweedy's sidewall.

Best to go back to bed.

The Normandy "Experience"

This week we visited the last of the eight hangers at the Imperial War Museum called "surface warfare." Not just an amazing collection of tanks and missiles, but warfare sets complete with a running stream, ultra-realistic foxholes and mannequins, one of which made Harry jump a mile when we walked through a landing craft en route to the beaches of Normandy and stumbled into a bloodied soldier (my photos don't do it justice). Lemme tell you, after being blanketed by bombs, they don't sugarcoat war (which I appreciate). Still, Harry is not much for emotional gravity (as pictured above).

Visiting offered a great snapshot on the male and female brain, hardwired as it is: Harry ogled the tanks, Charlotte skipped through a war-torn Korea singing to herself about princesses.

Because I'm still so impressed, I leave you with a photo of our museum lunch: a "jacket" potato (baked) with white cheddar cheese shredded on top and a side salad with no dressing. There was not a burger, hotdog or nasty caramel dipping stick to be found.