The First Shipment

The first group of movers is here right now.

They are packing our "unaccompanied baggage," a set of stuff no more than 1000 lbs. that is intended to get to our destination quickly, in about three weeks. The rest of our stuff will be in transit up to two months.

It works a little differently for us. Because I don't have a job lined up post-Navy, right now we don't have a home to ourselves in Colorado. We will be living with my wife's parents until we get our feet back under us. That means we aren't packing anything from our kitchen, no linens, nothing to start a household. What we are packing is all the clothes we might need from now until August 2010. That includes summer clothes, winter clothes, half my uniforms. We have to save some summer clothes for us to continue wearing here in the tropics.

The rest of our household goods depart in 10 days and are going straight to storage. With me detaching from the Navy I'm entitled to store them at government expense until August 2010. Hopefully by then I'll have a job again and we'll have our own place to put it in.

Luckily, most of the childrens' winter clothes will be waiting for them when we arrive on the mainland.

We did pack our bread machine and our bread recipe book. The wife and I both love using the bread machine, and the kids love eating the products. On Guam we've been very limited to the breads we can make from the recipe book. The most exotic flour we've found here is white whole wheat flour. That showed up in the grocery store once and my wife snatched up a 5 lb. bag. We haven't seen it again since. 

There's no rye flour, no cracked whole wheat, no wheat berries, no graham flour. We bake all our own bread in the machine now since it is so easy. Only takes 20 minutes of prep time and the machine does the rest. Since we eat sandwiches almost every day, it's good to know exactly what we're eating.

My wife went to investigate the sweaters we mistakenly left in the hot, humid and cat-ridden garage for the past three years. We only left them there overnight and we swore we would find a place for them in our climate-controlled but limited storage house. That overnight was almost three years ago. The good news is that they smell a little musty, but otherwise have no signs of mold or cat pee. I'm taking them to the drycleaner today in the hopes that they will survive.