I'm Baaaaaaaack

But don't get too excited! I am only coming to y'all from the Marriott in Brussels. God bless them for having internet! Even if it does cost 19.95 EUROS a day!! It is going to be the best 19.95 that I have spent in a long time! I have been DYING at home without internet and not being able to update my blog! And I am certain that everyone has been missing my blog equally as much! :) So, I have mass amounts to tell everyone and I am going to have to back up quite a bit to August 13th, which was the day that our stuff arrived at our new house.

Imagine the little noise that TIVO makes when you rewind!! Since the movers were supposed to be at our house at 8am Deaner dropped me off in Hattenheim on his way to work so that I wouldn't have to worry about leaving to pick him up when the work day was over. Around 9:30am when the movers still hadn't shown up, I started to get a bit nervous and called the moving company. Imagine my surprise when the lady there told me that we had been assigned the delivery time window of 10:00am-12:00pm. Thanks for letting us know ahead of time!! I had NOTHING to do and I had to rotate between sitting on the hard marble floor and on top of the new TV table. It was lovely. When the movers did get there at noon I attempted to speak to them in English. They were having none of that. My German next door neighbor came out to translate for me only to find out that they didn't speak GERMAN either!! WTF? They spoke HUNGARIAN! Basically for the next two hours I stood at the top of the stairs and either pointed for them to put boxes down in the den/dining area OR I held up fingers 1-4 to indicate what bedroom (I put signs on the doors!) to drop the boxes in. I was pretty surprised that it only took a few hours to get all the stuff into the house. By 2:30 or 3:00 I was left alone to begin unpacking the boxes. And what a surprise I was in for!

I have to say upfront that I am fairly impressed because nothing was severly damaged. There does however appear to be a few things "missing". I'll have to get to that later. I was super excited to see all my stuff but I was rather surprised at the methods that the packers in Atlanta used. Here are a few things that I was surprised to see come out of boxes in Germany.I am so glad that the movers packed ALL our Atlanta PHONE BOOKS!! Folks, there at least 7 of them. So, I'll be able to reach anyone I need to in Atlanta! (just teasing, I did throw them away)! Second surprise.....A PILE OF OUR MAIL!! I'm so glad that there weren't any important bills in there since we never would have seen it!! I mean, REALLY?? And all this stuff was wrapped up as if it were highly breakable. Next up....
Food. Sick. And yes, those pasta boxes ARE OPEN. I threw away an entire bag of food. Just wish I had done it Stateside! I don't even want to know the temperatures that tuna fish saw while in a crate on a boat. As if I would ever eat tuna fish in the first place! I also pulled out a load of....DIRTY DISHES. Clearly these had been plucked straight out of the dishwasher, which was NOT clean. From one dishwasher into the next! And one of my personal favorites....the flyers for selling our condo! Now I might have an idea as to why it took us a bit longer to sell! All the advertisement was packed up and sent with us to Germany. I was cracking up for hours unpacking this stuff. We also got a lot of "needless" wrapping. Here are a few examples.The first picture is of a cork screw and the second is of a small metal disk that fits on the bottom of a candle. Yes, they are each wrapped separately in all that paper. I'm not a big environmental freak or anything but that is a lot of paper for completely unnecessary things! I was very excited to see all my kitchen wedding gifts again and I think I had the most fun getting to organize the kitchen.Finally I got the kitchen looking like this...The picture and the clock from the last picture are now hung and looking great. It was such a relief to have our kitchen organized because God knows were ready to start cooking for ourselves again immediately.

It has been REALLY nice living in our new house. I have tons of pictures to post and show y'all all the other progress I have made. I swear, I have been a working MACHINE. I get up in the morning when Deaner leaves for work and I am still working when he comes home in the afternoons. But, it has really paid off. I'm going to go ahead and post this and then I will start working on several other posts to schedule to post. We are having a REALLY rough time with our internet and since I don't see it working for another week or so, I might as well work ahead while we are here in Brussels!! Also, we leave on Wednesday for England for 10 days and I will have a lot more internet time once we get there. I have tons of updates, funny stories and birthday tales (yesterday was my birthday but I have also deemed today my birthday as well! It is a really great trick and everyone should try it!) Stay tuned!