Wound tight.

I have a million more posts to make.. but this story has to be told and it won't hurt that it's out of sequence.

I'm high strung--just wound a little bit tight. There are several drawbacks to this. The first of which is that I tend to way over think things. Things are much harder than they need to be in my world. For example, I haven't put gas in the car yet. Perhaps it's because they call it Petrol. Perhaps it's because some of the stations are full service and I'm unsure what to do. Perhaps it's because I don't know on which side of the car the gas tank resides. Perhaps it's because the gas pumps are so different.. no place to put your credit card. Perhaps it's because I'm not sure exactly how to use my debit card. (Every time you have to tell the cashier whether it's cash, check cheque, or savings. It is our checking account, but we have to tell them credit else it doesn't work. Then we have to tell them pin or sign).

Until today, I've only had cause to get gas once and I conveniently waited until Mark was in the car with me to drive to the station. But, today, the light was on. There was some indication of how much mileage (or is it kilometerage??) I have left, but I wasn't really sure what it meant for practical purposes. I don't have a good sense for kilometers yet. It's really too much to ask for me to contemplate that while still having to remind myself to stay on the left side of the road.

With all that on my mind, I pulled into the gas petrol station. I hopped out and opened the door to the backseat to retrieve my wallet from my purse. Of course it was on the other side so I had to crawl across to get it. I pulled out my debit card and swung around to grab the nozzle and SCREAMED! The gas attendant was standing right behind me. He scared the living hell of me. Another drawback of being high strung. I can say I was just a wee bit embarrassed.

There was more to move in day

...but the post was already too long and that was without many of the necessary details to really give you an idea about how horrible the day was.

I'll sum up the rest, but before I do I forgot to mention more about the car deal. On Monday, when we went back in and selected the Audi there was some necessary negotiating. Mark said to Bernard, "ok, so is there anything we can do about the price." (It's amazing the standard blank white paper, price written in large font, then crossed out strategy is used across both hemispheres.) Bernard wrote the price down on the top of the page, crossed it out then wrote a price that was 20% less beneath it. This was much less than we hoped to negotiate and less than the fair market value of the car. That was the easiest negotiating either of us has ever done. And, they wanted to keep the car the extra day while the financing was being worked out so they could replace the tires. I think Bernard scored a customer for life. Between him and Fiona, I'm not sure how we would have managed.

So, we had electricity. Life was definitely getting better. We still had no utensils, towels (bath/kitchen), pots/pans, bowls, plates, cups or anything similar. We did have toilet paper (thank goodness). We had no soap. Even as I write this 3 weeks later, I think, that doesn't seem too bad. But I remember the sheer anguish of trying to just get through the first day without any of the essentials. Banana bread was everywhere, yet there was no way to clean it up. There was no way to stop it from getting everywhere because we were digging in with our fingers to eat it. But, the beauty is.. I met Mark at the door when he got home at 6:30. I had to go check out our new wheels. When I came back to the front door I noticed a grocery bag on the doorstep--I had stepped over at least 3 times that day. What's this?, I wondered. Nothing more than yogurt (the squirtable kind), bananas and other wonderful food that Mark had brought the previous night. Since I didn't know it existed, I didn't know to look for it. Since Mark didn't know we only had the banana bread, he didn't know we didn't have it. All day we had all the great food at the door step!!!

I had to laugh.. but it was over now. We were in the house, the electricity was on, we had a car, Mark was home. I was happy.. for about an hour. We headed back to the apartment to make sure we didn't leave anything. I asked Mark what happened with the down payment for the car. In the haze of the I never coordinated with him about what to do. As I have mentioned over and over again, getting our money here has been extremely difficult. He said, Oh, I just paid for it with our debit card from back in the States. I felt like someone had just punched me in the stomach. First, I knew we didn't have that much in that account, so the account was definitely overdrawn. Second, I've been trying to get whatever money we do have in there sent here for weeks. So, now I'd have to send money BACK there to cover the deficit. AND, Mark gave that debit card number to the apartment manager to pay our rent for the last 10 days. What a nightmare. We did sort it out, but it wasn't easy. And, it wasn't Mark's fault--it's just the nature of having a million things going on at once and not being able to communicate every single detail, even the important ones.

While I was at the apartment grabbing the rest of our stuff and getting it tidy, Mark and the kids went to the supermarket to get food for dinner. Mark was so incredibly proud of himself because he had enough foresight to buy a bunch of frozen food so we could sustain ourselves for several days. He didn't mention this until we got back to the house and he headed toward the freezer... the freezer we don't have. I did mention this to him earlier, but he forgot. As much as I'd love to give him grief for this, it's not too unreasonable to assume you have a freezer in your fridge. We cooked as much of the food as we could--as if it would matter. We would have to throw it out cooked or thawed because we couldn't eat it all anyway.

At least we had yogurt and bananas the next day.