Month: September 2018

I’ve been working virtually nonstop for the past week, ever since that big truck pulled up at my doorstep. I’ve always prided myself on being the “fastest unpacker in the West” (now the East), but I’m not going to make my goal of 7 days to be settled. Maybe that sounds unrealistic, but back in the day Josh and I had our house in Monterey unpacked, pictures hung, and the garden tilled and planted in less than a week. Those were the glory days.

But I realized this is the first time we’ve moved when I’ve been working. That’s 5+ hours each day of my peak productivity lost to something else. It’s also the first time we’ve moved where we’re already entrenched in other commitments — instead of sitting at home, friendless and unpacking, we’re teaching Kids’ Church, going to Home Group, having dinner with friends, and juggling our move details with normal life.

And I can barely keep my free labor, my minions, on task because they are surrounded by friends in this neighborhood (thankfully) and are always asking to play Fortnite or go somewhere or … really anything but unpacking is at the top of their list. (To their credit, they have been working nonstop this past weekend and have only complained a little bit.)So I’m going easy on myself and extending my goal to 2 weeks. If I can figure out a solution to our no closets issue (common here, but our last two houses had built in wardrobes so we haven’t had this dire of a storage problem before), I’ll be 90% there. It’s going to involve dropping stupid money at IKEA, which we would have done yesterday except our rental car is too small to hold all the pieces we need.

So today I’ll sit with the mess and prepare to teach 60 kids at AWANA tonight instead. (The living and kitchen areas are pretty good, but the bedrooms are deplorable).

I haven’t forgotten my moving stories — hopefully later this week I’ll grab a few more minutes to write. The boys’ room keeps getting worse. There aren’t even sheets on the bed because I don’t have a dryer yet. Ack.

The princess with her mountain of clothes. This is real life here.

I have had the wildest, most blog-worthy week in a long time, and yet haven’t had a second to write about it. It’s killing me. I still don’t have time to write as it’s almost 10pm and I have to prep for teaching Kids’ Church tomorrow and need to prepare an AWANA lesson for 60 kids on Sunday night when I don’t actually have the materials in hand that I’m supposed to be teaching from. It will work out …

As soon as my masses of stuff arrived I was in no rush to surround myself with the mess. The urgency to get out of the hotel and into the house vanished instantly.

217 boxes of ugh.

Since I need to get back to my lesson planning and also really need to go to bed, I’ll give the summary in photos.

Camille’s room — notice how she put down carpets first thing? Even taking some of mine . . . hmmm. She’s my mini-me. She also has canopy curtains and Christmas lights to wrap around the top. She has big design plans for her room.

Where the boys intend to exist — I bet it still looks like this a week from now. Ack.

What the cat did all day. Wake me when it’s over.

The dog is the easiest and calmest he’s ever been — I think he’s hoping if we don’t notice him, we won’t send him back to the kennel.

Our level Expert movers –they were good! They even put together IKEA furniture that I thought might never fit back together again. Bless them.

And the pain begins when the movers leave. Tackling this mess from 8 until noon is what I’ve been doing all week. Then off to 5 hours of work at school that feels like a vacation in comparison. The transformation is happening though! To be continued . . .

Josh called the power company at 8:03 am and requested that our utilities be turned on today. Since it’s the 15th and the start of our lease, they were able to oblige him (his request the other day was rejected because it was before the start of our lease and he wasn’t “authorized” yet.)

Of course now that the lease has started, you would think we could move into our house, but we’re still in the hotel because the maintenance people need a few days to put the house in a livable state (I’m using that term loosely). And having seen our house again today I’m ready to abandon ship and stay here with my scones and clotted cream and have Josielle and Monalisa take care of me forever and ever.

Because my house is super-gross. There were 3 huge drowned cockroaches in the black water that was remaining in the bottom of one of the toilets. I couldn’t even take photos of it because it’s too gross to ever want to look at again. And there are nasty cigarette butts strewn all over the floor and up the stairs. And I can’t tell if the marble tile floor is actually beige with a brown swirl pattern in it or if it’s white, but covered with dirt. I’m pretty sure it’s dirt.

We went over to the house after breakfast to make sure that the utilities were actually turned on and Josh found the water tank for our house, turned on the water main and heard the underground tank starting to fill. Yes, every house is fed by a system of tanks either on the ground or on the roof and water pumps that get the water from the holding area to various parts of the house.

So, here is the water to my house. A tiled cistern of sorts — there was a bit of grit or sand at the bottom from sitting empty for months, but at least it was bone dry with no stagnant water (this is what 24 hours of perspective has given me. At the time that I took this photo, I could only feel yuck about the whole thing). Then the plumbers showed up to get the water running to the house and one of the guys took his old broom and swished it around in my house water to fish out the red float so the water pump would start running. Oh gross. The broom that touches the street just contaminated my water supply. I’m out! Hotel living for me from now on.

That was all yesterday ^^^ but I didn’t get it published so I should probably continue with today’s update so as to not leave anyone feeling sorry for me. Today was the day they were supposed to clean up the house and they actually did. It’s a miracle. Josh checked on the progress at 10 am and it still looked like a squatter’s flat and someone had been smoking inside again (seriously people?!) but they had a team of guys working and by 3 pm it looked like something I would want to move my rugs into. The previously black toilets were sparkling white, the house smelled new and clean, and they might have even waxed the floors.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think they used a bit of magic on the house. They certainly did the impossible. And just in time because Josh got a message from the movers that they are going to deliver our stuff tomorrow morning.

It’s going to be a long day. It’s going to be a long week, but happy day! Things are moving along. 

The snowball is rolling and picking up mass and speed — the pets are home (and Carter is camping out with them at the house tonight), movers come tomorrow, internet gets hooked up tomorrow, appliances maybe the next day . . . this should be our last week in the hotel. I’ll miss everyone who has made our stay here special, but we’re all going to be happy to be home.

Josh is in a funk this morning because he jumped through every hoop possible to get our utilities turned on yesterday, but he failed. And since today is a holiday (Islamic new year), when he got the text from the utilities company (in Arabic, of course) informing him that “his application failed because he’s not authorized for that address” there was no one to call to vent his frustrations. So he settled for sending an email and What’s App to the landlord’s agent and went to the gym.

He did have some successes yesterday, like opening a bank account. Supposedly I can be added to the account later, but we’ll see. Sometimes the woman/housewife thing makes normal things difficult here. A friend was stuck having to make ATM withdrawals daily to get her money out of the bank because her husband was away on business and the bank didn’t recognize her as an owner on the account.

Josh was also able to negotiate the repairs needed on the house with the maintenance man, including getting a gas line run (which just means drilling a hole through the outside wall and running some tubing through it) and putting in a hookup for a washing machine. I guess the previous tenants had it in the kitchen, but the hookup isn’t there anymore so hopefully it can be installed upstairs in as non-janky a way as possible. They were also going to leave the light switches and outlets open and uncovered, saying that was “normal” until Josh pointed out that the upstairs ones all have plate covers and then they agreed to go find some and cover them.

I know he’s most aggravated that all these details (along with continuing pay/reimbursement issues on the US side) are a distraction from his actual job. The utilities are the the last bit standing in the way of the house being made ready for us to move in — then we have to deal with the movers to see when they can deliver!

Meanwhile I enjoy my perfectly segmented pink grapefruit and my bottomless cappuccinos, feeling a little bit guilty that there is absolutely nothing I can do to help him out, but also really thankful that I don’t have to go deal with all of those people and government offices. The having a vagina thing is both a curse and a blessing. I may not have the authority to go get a bank account on my own, but then I’m also not expected to deal with all of that “official man stuff.” Today, being a woman is a mark in the Win column (in my opinion). If I ever get in a car accident, it won’t be. I’ll take the perks where I can get them.

I was trying to think of another analogy for how things are going and I think I’ve settled on this process being like throwing a boomerang. You send something out and it comes flying back at your head. Except our boomerangs keep coming back on fire.

In anticipation of Josh getting his Emirates ID this week, the landlord requested that we send him 1/2 of the total annual rent in a wire transfer. Josh got on the phone with our bank, set up the wire transfer (for almost 25 thousand dollars) and poof! The money disappeared from our account. Side note: it’s a good thing the landlord only wanted 1/2 up front because that’s all we had after the government decimated our paycheck on September 1st.

I was just starting to enjoy the fact that the wire transfer was the first thing to process perfectly smoothly when Josh got a message from our future landlord’s agent: “We have notice of the transfer, but the bank says the money will not be available until Sept 19. That is too far away. You need to cancel the wire transfer and resend it to our US bank. We will provide the account information so you can do that.”

Say what now? First of all, our lease doesn’t officially start until the 15th. What difference does four days make when you have confirmation that the money is yours?

Second, I can confirm that this chap does not need the money. It’s like Donald Trump asking me to rearrange my life so he can get my rent money a few days faster. Fine, it’s like Donald Trump’s brother. Same. Same.  🙄

Third, does this minion/agent of the VIP know how wire transfers work? Or how money works? The cash is gone from my account and canceling it means waiting for it to come back before I can think about sending it out again, plus wire transfer fees, currency conversion fees, etc. That’s not happening.

My instinct was to reply with an “oh hell no!” but I asked Josh to call our bank first and confirm the details of our transfer. It turns out the money was sitting in the guy’s bank so any delay was on his end, not ours. Second, to cancel meant more fees (of course), plus a minimum of 5 days to get the money back before it could be sent again. The shortest distance between him and that money was to chill and let things be.

So Josh called the agent and told him to bug off — and as soon as Josh resisted, the guy backpedaled and said, “No problem” because he got an update from the bank and would have the money available in just a few days anyway so everything was fine now. Grrrr. Such is the way things go here. Everyone tries to push everything off on someone else as their problem to fix, even when it’s not. What causes the least amount of work and trouble for me? I’m going to do that. Doesn’t make sense? Doesn’t matter.

This happened almost a week ago and I’m still mad about it. People stomping all over my life with no care for the actual people that are at the end of their actions. Sigh. On the bright side, Josh got his Emirates ID today. On the dark side, the leasing agency can’t get the lease done until Wednesday at the earliest. Did I mention Thursday is a national holiday? (Islamic New Year) . . . soon enough we’ll be in our place. Soon enough . . .