The mystery box

Those of you who see my status updates on Facebook and Twitter will know that our sea freight delivery wasn't without it's hiccups. We had a missing box - which was found and delivered, however when it was delivered it didn't include all the items I expected. Most importantly it didn't include the best of my yarn stash, some books and software I wanted, and from Nick's perspective the home theatre and projector remote controls.

We had left 5 smaller boxes, all labelled Christmas decorations, in storage. As they were the last to be packed and were fragile it seemed possible that the yarn and remotes had been packed with them. So I arranged with Crown to go and pick them up when I was out that way. This took two attempts as the first time I headed that way, when I had picked up Ana from the airport, we had a call to say there was a gas leak down the street and they had been evacuated. So the next available time was last Monday heading home from our trip to NZ.

Lo and behold what should happen when we got there, but they had found an extra large box that had apparently been missed in the first delivery. They were a little embarrassed about this (not surprisingly) so were very helpful about letting me open the boxes and check for what we were looking for. The large box had several of the things I anticipated arriving several weeks ago including yarn, software, jewellary and nail polish - but sadly -no remotes! Nor does it appear that they are in the smaller boxes either. While I am going to appeal to my children for them to check I am beginning to wonder if I have inadvertently thrown them out with all the packing materials. I don't think I did as I was looking for them from quite early on.

Anyway back to the mystery box which came home with us. It was almost the straw that broke the camel's back of my finding places for everything! It sat half full most of the week while I tried to work out where I would put everything. It probably didn't help that there was an element of
"not sure I really needed this" for a number of items. If I wasn't working full time I'd have been delighted at the extra sewing materials and patterns but as it is they seemed a touch superfluous. Today I sat down with the quilting magazines and extracted only the pages I wanted which reduced the pile substantially. I also sorted through a couple of boxes I'd already put away (again checking for the elusive remotes) and discovered they could be consolidated a bit.

And on a humorous note - Jon was fretting about his Nintendo DS being in the boxes we were going to collect. However when we mentioned this in his elder brother's presence on Friday night while we were in New Zealand, Toby promptly told us that no in wasn't in the boxes it was in his room at the flat; he'd "rescued" it when he saw we'd left it behind. I'm obviously now hoping he may have rescued the remotes as well :)