Deliveries and fixing the piano

We got our UAB shipment a few days before we moved into our temporary housing.  There were 6 big boxes that I didn't open because we had appealed our housing and figured we would be moving again and didn't want to have to pack everything up again.  We did end up moving to this temporary housing, and about a week after being here, 1200 pounds of our HHE showed up.  Unfortunately it wasn't our consumables.  I was really hoping it was our consumables because I could really use some cheaper peanut butter and some actual spaghetti sauce (they only have jars of basically liquidized tomatoes here).  Yes, we could make our own spaghetti sauce, but the food options, produce, etc. to make it aren't the same quality or flavor even, as the U.S., nor does the running to a store for a few ingredients have the same convenience or ease.  So what actually arrived in this unexpected shipment was stuff that we packed out of our apartment in Virginia, including 4 bookshelves that we bought last minute from Ikea (400 lbs) for our books.  It appeared that we were not going to be given enough bookshelves at post to accommodate the number of books that Briant said he could not live without.  :)  Ikea had the quantity we needed and we knew we wouldn't feel bad about leaving them if we had to because of the cheap price.  

We packed all of the opened and unopened boxes into this front "mudroom" space where we keep our shoes.  Luckily this "extra" space exists!

We decided to finally unpack some of our things from both the UAB and HHE shipments since we haven't heard that we're moving any time soon.  Along with a few boxes of office and school supplies, we were excited to see our "piano," keyboard again.  We bought it 14 years ago when we were first married, and all of the kids started learning the piano on it.  Then a few years ago, we inherited Great Grandma Ida's piano, but we figured it was too precious to risk bringing abroad.  I think we made the right decision.  After opening the keyboard, we discovered 4 of the keys were stuck and wouldn't press down.  Now this is the funny part.  Briant's first response to something broken (and its been this way since we were married almost 15 years ago next month), as in the case of the piano, is, "Oh well.  Its been a good piano.  We definitely got our money's worth out of it huh?"  Then he walks away planning in his mind that we'll just buy another one.  My typical reaction, on the other hand in a situation like this is to ask, "Is there a way to fix it?  How can I fix this?  There's GOT to be a way to fix this."  Especially because we just shipped it all the way here to Africa!  So I asked Bri his opinion on our chances of fixing it, and not to my surprise, his loving, "lazy, lawyerly" response is, "I don't know.  I'm not going to try.  You can though if you want to."  So, figuring that I probably couldn't do any more damage than what was already done, I sat on the floor and unscrewed no less than 40 screws from the bottom side of the piano with our mini screwdriver set that Thomas luckily keeps with him (our tools haven't arrived yet, so fortunately for us, Thomas is more adventurous about taking things apart and figuring out how things work than his father.  :) ).  After tinkering around for a bit, I figured out how the mechanisms work for playing each key, and simply put things back where they had gotten disconnected.  The keys had somehow gotten unhooked from their holding place.  I yelled, "I fixed it!!  I fixed the piano!!!"  Briant came running in with the camera and got a picture of me so I could remember my proud moment.  He then went back to the kitchen where he was preparing my dinner.  I laughed at how comfortable we are in the frequent "switching of roles" in our marriage.  I'll fix anything, any time, if I get dinner prepared for me and I know Briant would rather eat his pinkies off than fix something.  It's a win-win.