Now I wasn’t in the best place. Suffice it to say I was worn out and exhausted from eight moves (three across an ocean).

This container and its contents (that I had last seen over four months before) had already gone the long way around the world and had taken an extra month. (I think this is because our packer in Moscow managed to cram our belongings into a 20 ft. container [the volume allowance the University gave us], weighing in at 10,000 pounds. However the shipper was paying the packer by the pound while being paid in volume by the University, and their estimated 7,500 pounds came in short. That is a lot of extra cost they didn’t expect to pay, so maybe they made up for it by sending our container on the “milk run” rather than the express route.)

“What is a world milk run?” you ask. With the aid of GPS tracking we got to watch and worry as our belongings went down the West coast of the U.S., through the Panama canal and across the Atlantic. Then transit the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez canal. From there they went down the Red Sea and across the Arabian Sea wrapping around the bottom of India and Sri Lanka before landing in Singapore. After a few days there our container switched ships and proceeded to go the long way around Australia, because why miss anything.

I was just grateful it made it, because around this time a container ship had gotten grounded off the coast of New Zealand and I had watched containers fall off into the ocean and sink within two days, never to be recovered.

We were going first class this time as the University had insisted on it being packed by the mover for biosecurity reasons and would deliver it into the house.

That afternoon my husband came home from work to be confronted with a police barricade at the end of our street, because of a shooting a block away. I had found out about it when greeted with the news by our daughter’s teacher asking if we were going to be moving. Unsettling to say the least. It made for an even busier afternoon with explanations to the police that a moving truck was coming, picking up our daughter from school, etc.

I was in a bit of a panic trying to decide if I should just call the whole thing off and send the lot to storage until I could sort out different housing?

In the end I decided to just trust that everything would be OK.

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