our sea shipment arrived. sigh.

On Friday, we received our sea shipment. This is always a fairly monumental moment in our life because it means we can resume at least a normal home life even if outside our walls, we live in a very different place. We can fill our space with our things that make somebody else's apartment filled with ugly State Department furniture "our home".

We've been very, very lucky with our shipments. Over the course of 12.5 years, our stuff has been trucked to Washington, DC from SC; to Mexico (I guess by truck?); to Mozambique and back to DC and then to Brazil by ship (and by truck once it got to the port in Brazil); then by truck from Brasilia to Sao Paulo; by ship and truck to SC; and now by ship to Cartagena after which it was trucked to Bogota last week.

In all that movement, I can count on one hand everything that's been broken plus we had a VCR that mysteriously disappeared between DC and Guadalajara. As I said, we've been extraordinarily lucky because there was a lot of room for error.

Our luck changed with this move.

The guys started unloading around 4:15pm on Friday afternoon (after the 11am arrival got pushed back to 2pm which got pushed back to 4:15pm). One of the first boxes they brought in was crushed on the top so we opened it up and found this:

Anyone care for lopsided muffins or a misshapen cheesecake?

Then they started pulling out all these wet boxes. At this point, we have no idea where the water damage happened. It didn't rain in SC when they were loading the boxes into the truck, and the area at the port in Cartagena where the crates cleared customs is covered. Somewhere between A and Z, things got wet.

Fortunately and for whatever reason, the wet hadn't infiltrated too much of the contents even though boxes tore apart in our hands when we tried to pick them up. I use a lot of those big plastic totes, so thankfully, the plastic boxes protected most of the contents. Otherwise, I probably would have lost all my Christmas decorations, Mac's toys and a lot of other stuff.

As it was, we had one box that was completely destroyed and the contents were all moldy. And our older big box tv was moldy. Those items are currently sitting in our storage closet in the garage so I can inventory it for the claims form.
a pocketbook that has seen better days - that's mold all over it.
the wet box that reduced me to tears. Mac got that huge teddy bear as a baby shower present in Mozambique. He was only a little damp so we're going to take him to the cleaners and get him all spiffed up.
the wet tv packaging - thank goodness it wasn't our prized flat screen tv!

the wet box that housed my brand new little table for the sunroom. Fortunately, everything was protected by plastic since it was new.
an example of how much "wet" we're talking about - the photo's dark but the changes in color on the box are where it's wet
my brand-new microwave got a dent in it. I'm sort of scared to use it in case something inside got dented and it explodes!