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and let’s not let that monster back out again. We are good. As I like to say over and over again, “It will all work out. God will provide,” but September has been a month that I wouldn’t want to repeat anytime soon. I’ve been quiet because life has been stressful, and while I usually find something humorous in the unusual things that happen here, this most recent episode of crazy wore me out and just thinking about rehashing it in words made me tired. So I’ve been quiet. I think I’m finally up to tackling it, but I’m going to do this in the shortest way possible. We are all moved into our house. We have unpacked everything and except for hanging photos on the walls, my work is done. The administrative side of our move is almost complete. We have residence visas, copies of our Emirates IDs (will have them in hand next week), and everything was almost settled with the landlord, we paid the first half of our annual rent, BUT when we sent the second half we ended up wiring it to a fraudulent account so that money went “bye-bye” into the pockets of unknown scammers who are much more savvy than the typical Nigerian prince.

Basically an unknown person hacked into either our landlord’s account or ours (though I suspect theirs, because of the nature of their business with collecting large sums of money) and inserted themself into the conversation using the landlord’s email address and our real estate agent’s email address and then had the payment information changed so the money went to their account instead of our landlord’s. The craziest part is Josh had been in conversation with the landlord throughout the process and Josh even met with him in person and questioned the alternate account and the guy never said, “I have no idea what you are talking about. What alternate account?” But culturally, it’s important to save face so maybe admitting that he didn’t know what Josh was talking about would have been shameful? Who knows. Crazytown.

Anyway, Josh was really frustrated that he got scammed, until he looked back and could see how it unfolded and saw that he did everything he could, including involving our real estate agent, and no one picked up on the fraud until it was too late. But we will be fine. We have emergency fund money that will cover it if we can’t save up the amount between now and 6 months from now when the other 1/2 of the rent will be due. That’s the concession they are making — waiting for payment. Minimally that’s what they should do since their urgency and lack of communication is what caused this problem in the first place, but whatever. I’m at peace and know God will provide. He’s already provided and I’m thankful that this is a problem that money can solve, unlike a health crisis that we couldn’t spend our way out of.

**Yes, we have been round and round (well Josh has) with the other parties involved and no one is willing to share any part of the responsibility or risk any sort of legal liability by admitting any fault so we’re left holding the bag. Which is what we expected, but it has taken some time to figure out where everyone was landing.  

Meanwhile I’m goal oriented and have made a game out of seeing how much I can not spend to see how long it takes me to hit $25k. I actually think we’re going to come out ahead in the long run by living with less. So far I’m up to $10,800 that we’ve opted to not consume. We decided we won’t buy a second car, which also means no money spent on a residential parking permit and registration/insurance (about $9k total). No couch for the house — we’ll make do with our Bahraini bench and dining room chairs if needed and we are improvising clothes storage for our house instead of IKEA wardrobes. That’s at least 2k . . . cha ching! We’ll be back in the black before we know it. And those are all things we had picked out to purchase, but have now cancelled. I’m not putting a $4k diamond ring on the list because I would never actually buy that, but I had 5,215 AED worth of stuff in my IKEA cart that I discarded. And I don’t need it after all — my house looks a bit like a college dorm room with extra awesome carpets, but whatever.
One bin for each: T-shirts, pants, pjs, skirts, long sleeves, and dresses. She really does have too many clothes. And she needs to pick up her room. :sigh:
And there’s my room — clothes on a bookshelf and in bins on the floor. Josh has the one wardrobe in the house to use for his suits and clothes because I can’t be bothered to hang things up anyway. Don’t feel sorry for me because I’m kind of loving the bin thing. Look at that carpet though . . . true love.

So that’s where I’ve been. I can’t believe that Josh started his job in Texas only 2 months ago. It feels like 2 lifetimes ago. It’s no wonder we’re tired. I’m praying that things will settle down so we can catch our breath. And so I can tell normal crazy stories (like the one about getting my washing machine installed) and not ones about bank fraud.

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.