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After our little rainy spell a couple of weeks ago the weather shifted. In the middle of the day, it can be hot—you know those days when you keep switching sides of the street to be either in the sun, if you are too cool, or in the shade, if you are too warm. You see people on the streets in t-shirts and shorts, and others in jackets and boots, depending on when they left the house. In order to be truly comfortable for a large chunk of the day, you need to start out in a sweater or sweatshirt and then be able to peel down to something lighter.
To me, this is perfect weather. I like it to be a bit chilly in the mornings and evenings, and to feel the heat of the sun penetrate my shirt in the afternoons. The only trouble is that our clothing options do not offer us the flexibility the climate currently calls for.
We have met families here who came only with the 2 suitcases per person the airline allows you—and you have to pay for the second one, although somehow Alec got the baggage guy at the airport to waive the fee. For the whole year. They seem to be doing fine with whatever they brought in those suitcases. I’m trying to think…. Do these families consist of abnormally small people who can get double the amount of clothing items into a suitcase that I can? Not really. I wish I could give them a medal, or a certificate to hang on the wall. I would not be eligible for such an award, and I am just fine with that. (I should also mention that we met a family who shipped ALL of their furniture here—and they are only here for a year. It always helps to know that there is someone more extreme than you are).
The fact that we did not fit everything we would need into eight suitcases meant that we had to figure out a way to get our other necessaries here. We enlisted our friend Ann Sullivan, professional organizer extraordinaire, who has helped some of her clients with international moves, to give us some advice. She gave us the names of two firms, and we got them both to come to our place in Brooklyn and give us estimates. As per Ann’s instructions, we had put color coded stickers on everything—blue for things we definitely needed, and green for those we would take if it didn’t cost too much more to do so. Note to self: you almost definitely will not need the green sticker items next time you do this. We had to choose whether to ship by air or by sea—an air shipment would arrive in one week but cost about double the sea shipment, which would take 4 to 6 weeks, or so we were told. Our space would also be much more limited by the air option, which seemed like a negative at the time. If we chose the sea option, we could bring all of the blue AND green stickered items.
We chose the sea option. The shipment went out on July 21st, and with a 4 – 6 week window, we figured the worst case scenario would get our boxes here sometime around the second week of September. We could definitely survive on 8 suitcases worth of stuff until then.
In the end, we shipped 21 boxes. That’s right—21 boxes. I’m almost too embarrassed to write it, and even if I tell you that the packing guys put loads of padding around everything and that it surely all could have fit in 15 boxes, this is still something that I am not proud of. It seemed so minimal at the time.
It was not long after we were here that I started to wonder what the hell was in those boxes anyway and what we would do with it once it got here. I was not walking around wishing I had this thing or that thing. We filled in a few gaps here and there—some kitchen items, art supplies for the kids. But not much. Certainly not 21 boxes worth of filling in.
Until now. For the last several weeks I have felt like one of those people the New York Times profiled a couple of months ago who committed to wearing only 6 items from their closets for 30 days. Clearly, I have more than 6 items here, but the weather has begun to pose a challenge. I have one medium weight sweater/jacket, and it’s bright yellow, so people notice when I wear it. I wear it one day to one office and another day to the other. My black cotton cardigan is constantly in rotation. I wear the same pair of jeans three or four times a week. A couple of days ago, Alec told me I would be seeing a lot of Norman the Lumpfish over the next few weeks. Norman the Lumpfish is a drawing featured on one of Alec’s two long-sleeved t-shirts that are here. And let me tell you, there’s not much sexier than Alec in his Norman the Lumpfish shirt.
It has been 11 weeks since the shipment and still no boxes. We were alerted when they made it through customs in the UK at the end of August, and assumed that their arrival would be imminent. Wrong. Of course at that point the responsibility for the goods shifted from the US company we had dealt with in NY to the UK company that would get our things from the UK to Spain. As I’m sure you know well from your own experiences dealing with far-away customer service types, when you get to this point in a transaction, there is a lot of finger pointing. The US folks told us they no longer had any control over what happened. But when we reminded them that we were paying them, and that they had created the relationship with the UK folks, they realized that perhaps they should get involved. Not that it really helped. The UK folks first went AWOL and did not respond to our messages. Then they acted shocked when we told them we’d been assured our things would be here within 6 weeks: “I have no idea who could have told you that! Impossible!”
On Thursday, one day before October 1, we received word that our boxes will be here on October 13. The kids are eager for their toys, and I will be grateful to have a few more weather-appropriate clothing items. As for the remaining 19 boxes? I’ll let you know what I find when I open them.
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