I'm happy to report that I survived our HHE (household effects) and consumables pack-out! The truck just left with our stuff. I know I'll get used to this over time, and it will become no big deal, but I really have a lot of anxiety over the pack-outs. Mainly because I stress about how much our stuff weighs and worry that we're overweight, or if I've distributed the weight in the right place. We're allowed 7,200 lbs of HHE, 2500 lbs consumables, 800 lbs for UAB (unaccompanied air baggage), and then we're each allowed 100 lbs to take on the plane to fly to Angola. I spent three hours at the State Dept. storage facility in Maryland last week going through unlabeled boxes from our first pack-out in Utah, trying to figure out their contents and if we wanted them to stay or go to Africa. The weight of what we selected to take from there was 5,770 lbs., so I had some wiggle room today with what we wanted to add to the HHE. As part of this weight, we added 400 lbs. of Ikea bookshelves that I bought on Saturday for Briant so we could have somewhere to put his 50 boxes of books. :) We're hoping that the embassy in Angola will add a few more to the mix so we'll have enough shelf space. We bought cheap Ikea ones so we won't feel badly when they get ruined moving around, or we can just leave them in Angola when we're done. The morning went smoothly. The packers were wonderful and worked quickly, yet carefully.
Here's how the pack-out started:
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| Bribes for the packers. :) |
The end:
This picture makes me happy! We have room to breathe again after having the consumables stacking up in Thomas' room for 3 weeks. I have no idea how he avoided breaking his leg in the middle of the night going to the bathroom! And after all the work of buying the consumables and sealing the glass jars in bags with bubble wrap, it was nice to not have to do the actual packing. I'm hoping that this extra effort to cushion everything will pay off and we won't have any breakage. Especially from the vinegar bottles! I take a deep breath when I see this picture. Relief...now on to the pack-out of our UAB in a few weeks. And then we head to Angola a few weeks after that!
Funny, when my friend Meghan texted me and she realized that we were going to be leaving in a month, her text read: "Holy moly you will live in Africa in a month!!! AHHHHHHH." My reply was, "Well said." There's really nothing else I could add to that. :)
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