Monkling's Blog

I will admit that my son perhaps could have had all his stuff packed before going off to Australia, saving me the trouble. However, the fact that he didn’t had 2 real good outcomes. One was it kept my mind off the fact that on Thursday he’s leaving for 5 years. The second good part – I can rant very well all by myself. Having him here doing the packing and having to listen to him rant would have been pure torture. Plus we would have been fighting about what forms need to be filled out, what we have to do, blah blah blah.

He gets back from Australia tomorrow afternoon. Since it’ll feel like 3 a.m. or so by the time he gets home, I expect he will go straight to his bed soon as he gets home. I, on the other hand, will be emptying his suitcase and doing his laundry. Again, there will be some who will say I should let him do it. Well you know what? This will be the last time I’m doing his laundry & that will be 1 more task to keep my mind off how far away he’s going to be.

You know something? (Now here’s some late night rambling that used to be confined to emails.) It makes me think about my great-grandparents. How on earth did they pack up their young children and leave the only home they ever knew and move away from everyone & go off to a foreign country? At least Stephen will be coming back. They knew they never would be. How do you do that? I mean I’m glad they did. There’s no other country I’d prefer to live in. (Yeah, especially now when I think of the trouble it would take to pack all my belongs! )

It had to take an enormous amount of courage for them to leave the familiar, to leave everyone they loved (well except for their spouse & kids) and move so far away. And I guess the bottom line is, they were trying to do what they felt was best for their family, for their children. I guess that I can understand.

End of rambling.

A few minutes ago, FedEx departed with Stephen’s 2 trunks. Technically, they should now be on their way to Rome. I won’t, however, hold my breath on that one until I know they actually made it.

Let me tell ya, this has been 1 really fun adventure. It took 3 phone calls to FedEx and 3 visits to the local FedEx office before I was halfway confident that I may have filled out all the paperwork properly.

Ask me how many times I packed. Oh, that would be 3 times. First we put his stuff in the really, really big trunk. When the nice lady on the phone asked how much the trunk weighs, I said I had no idea. It had to be over 100 lbs. but there was no way I could give an accurate account since I could not lift the trunk and stand on the bathroom scale. She then asked what the dimensions were & told me what forms I would need. Then I was told I needed to have an inventory of what was in the trunk. Time for unpacking. Yes, I had to take every single item out & made a detailed inventory.

After writing down everything, I repacked the trunk and called to arrange for a pickup. Again I was asked how much the trunk weighs. I said I don’t know exactly but I’d guess it’s very close to 150 lbs. Ah but 150 lbs. is their cut off weight so we assumed it was over and I was told I needed a different form. Back to the local office for the new forms. Oh, but they don’t carry those there.

Another phone call. Then I was told if it’s over 150 lbs., it has to go by ship & would take over a month to get to Rome. And if the trunk doesn’t have wheels (it doesn’t) then it needs to be on a platform because they would need a forklift to pick it up. Yeah, I just happen to have a bunch of those platforms around the house.

Fine. Forget the big trunk. I’ll just unpack the entire thing again and split it into 2 smaller trunks. This time we had a heads up that they would want to know the weight of the trunks. Luckily, these were more manageable so were able to weigh them.

Then came the really fun part. I had to assign a value for each item in there and had to know the weight of each item. There was no way I was going to unpack those trunks yet again, weigh every single book, sock, & cable so we just estimated on the weight. Far as value – let me say how stupid it is that I needed to act like I’m exporting good. Let me tell ya, if I’m able to sell some used boxers or ripped jeans, well they must be really desperate for American clothes over there!

Ah, yes, it was an adventure. Such a fun one that there is no way I would ever, ever leave the US and move to another country. Not if I have to do that all over again.