setting up, settling in, phase 1

The downside of having been very busy getting set up and figuring out our new surroundings is that we've been fairly lax about updating everybody else on the developments. Rest assured that we've been copiously documenting the process! By way of catching up, here's what has happened since the last detailed moving update.

First, we put lots of things in boxes. Lots of things. And we labelled them nicely and took them to the post office, where we hoped they would be treated lovingly and delivered to us in our new home. By the time all this was going down we had sold the car, and so the deliveries and last minute updates were largely done using our new zipcar membership, with some help from Myriam when she came up to aid the effort. Here are a couple shots from one of the multiple mailings (the handlers at the post office really loved us).

Joey, rocking out with a trunk full of boxed books:


Mailing in action:


On our last night in Santa Barbara, our dear neighbors took us out for a scrumptious Italian meal, as a bon voyage. Here we are with Rachel and James.



Then, 18 hours, too little sleep and too much excitement later, we got ourselves and our 19 pieces of checked luggage down to LAX to board the plane for Boston. To make a long story short, the last packing/clean up things took longer than expected, as they always do. Add to that some setbacks, like unanticipated extra errands to have my road bike professionally packed, and you have a Joey-and-Danielle pair that's running crazily across Goleta/arriving late for the shuttle... Not something I'd like to repeat, but happily we and all our things made it in the end. Considering the volume of possessions going with us, everything went quite smoothly from that point on, even though we had to rearrange the contents of a few suitcases to meet weight restrictions at check in. Our flight was on time and smooth, our luggage came out mighty quickly - I imagine they couldn't wait to get rid of it all - and our chartered shuttle was waiting for us when we were done. All told, via USPS and Virgin America we moved more than a ton of things across the continent (literally, all our worldly possessions weigh over 1000 pounds in total, although I imagine the books take up a significant portion of that). Here is the beginning of daylight looking across the river from Boston on the morning of our arrival.


Heading into Somerville:


As expected, we were exhausted.


(Note, in the above photo, Joey is holding a melon that made it with us to Boston all the way from Santa Barbara, partly by design and partly due to a lack of time to consume it in the rush at the end.)

We took a bit of a rest after we got to the house, but between our leftover nervous energy and the imperative to get food and things to sit on, we were soon poking through suitcases and venturing out.


The idea was to acquire as much furniture as we could before our boxes started arriving, first so we would have room to assemble it (our furniture is largely from ikea), secondly so we would have somewhere to put the things that would be arriving in said boxes, and thirdly so that we would have something to do while waiting around for the cable company to show up and bestow internet upon us. This was a pretty sensible decision on the surface, and we largely managed to pull it off. In retrospect however, marathon moving excitement followed by marathon house-setting-up in an unfamiliar city is a little kooky of a plan. You live, you learn. On the second day we took a zipcar down to Ikea to acquire furniture items. What with the complexities of choosing things you like that will fit into particular spaces out of a very specific inventory of items, we spent a total of nine hours in the people's store (more on that later). Kooky.

Here I am, testing a chair and studying our list of needs, room dimensions, etc.


Needless to say, it was intense.

But there you have it: the first couple days. In the next installment, you'll get to see the arrival of our battered boxes of books, and more process pictures of furniture being put together than you probably need. We've put together more furniture than I care to think about at this point... But the place looks ever more established, and we're slowly getting used to the fact that we live here.

The end.