Musings on the moving process

Oh, what I'd give to have a bunch of little men come and pack everything up and make it all magically appear in Abu Dhabi.

Instead, here I am watching my Excel moving workbook give birth to even more worksheets -- one for the box inventory, one for the list of stores in Abu Dhabi that we'll need to hit upon arrival, one for the pre-move list of things to be done, one for the list of things to bring in the container (and another just like it for the things that are going by air).

There are manila folders for moving expense receipts.  Folders for vital records.  Folders for stuff that's neither expense-related or vital.

There are piles of moving blankets, carefully stacked and balanced -- all 100 of them.

There's a notebook with daily to-do lists of at least ten items on every page, some of which I manage to get done.

A sea of boxes exists in the dining room, carefully parted so that I can open and close the window and blinds without having to sign up for the Cirque du Soleil Acrobat Training Program.

Decisions about what clothing to move by sea, by air, and by checked baggage consume the better part of my mornings.

We ring the property management firm in charge of turning our wreck villa into something habitable by mid-August on a daily basis.  We're told that it "will get done, so stop calling."

The list goes on.

I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for us.  We clearly brought this on ourselves.  You see, there are two types of relocation packages offered by employers -- the Luxury Package and the Adventure Package.  Sure, we could've rented a brand new villa out in the middle of nowhere a lovely new development, arrived with a couple of suitcases, gone on a spending spree at Ikea, and saved ourselves all of this trouble.  Instead, we chose the road less taken.

And discovered that sometimes the 'road less taken' is less taken for a reason.