With a really enormous truck parked in the street outside our house, the inventory was laid out in numerical order on the kitchen counter so that each and every item could be checked off as it entered the premises! There were only a few instances where a number would float in from outside which had already been marked off and then we would have to see who had done what incorrectly! I secretly believe that one of the fellows doing the carrying and yelling of numbers is slightly dyslexic - which could be why he is making a living loading and unloading furniture and isn't some high powered executive-in-training somewhere.
The dining room seemed to decrease in size rapidly as the furniture arrived! However, now that it's all unwrapped and set up, it looks good with the wooden floors. We took this picture because it was quite interesting to note that even though everything isn't unloaded here yet, one of the guitars was unwrapped almost before it got put down on the floor! We were told that all the guitars would be crated together after they had all been wrapped and prepared, but as you can see, this didn't happen for some unknown reason. One of the classical guitars has a 'pressure dent' on the front, which is disappointing, but trying to be very philosophical about it, it now just has another 'character' mark on it.
These two pictures were both taken in the living room - one looking towards the dining room and the other towards the front hallway.
I think that the reason that Jo is fiddling about with the fridge in the garage is that he is actually measuring it to see if it will fit into the allocated space in the kitchen, before we move the one we bought on Trade Me out - it doesn't! Unfortunately, there is a fitted cupboard above the gap for the fridge and our fridge/freezer is a couple of millimetres too tall. We were hoping to be able to adjust the feet of the fridge, but with maximum adjustment, it just doesn't make it! The Trade Me fridge can stay parked there for now, and our one has been relegated to the laundry - not a train smash! The chap on the left of the picture is the 'chief in charge of operations' - the guy in the 'bum apron' glow in the dark jacket is the truck driver who assures us that the pianos are safe and sound in the store in Auckland - we have no idea what more we can possibly do to have the pianos released to us - both of the pianos have ivory keys and although we were informed SPECIFICALLY about this in SA before we left, now, apparently, there is a huge issue about importing protected species (in the form of ivory) into NZ and exporting it from SA. The fact that the elephants who provided this particular ivory, did so approximately 100 years ago and the pianos were both built in Germany, seems to carry no weight whatsoever! It is extremely frustrating when you think that maybe the ivory didn't even come from Africa in the first place!
The motorbikes were both delivered on the following day - the chap who collected them and drove them in the back of a truck from Auckland to Wanganui tells us that it is extremely rare for any motorcycles to arrive from South Africa that are not damaged. Most of them are evidently quite extensively damaged, so we are fortunate (we have to suppose) that the damage to both the bikes is not quite as bad as we initially feared. The difficult thing to deal with is that everyone has someone else to blame and so we don't know if we will ever be able to claim for the repairs which are going to have to be done. We attended the local chapter of Ullysses Motorcycle Club meeting last week with the view to joining and have discovered that there is in fact a 'paint-job-specialist' here in Wanganui who should be able to match paint colours for us, so that's good news.
I think that although the facial expression doesn't say much, Jo is really pleased to finally have the bikes here! We can't take them out for a spin as yet - too much red tape to wade through in the form of licenses, registrations and so on. In any event, it's generally not 'bike weather' at the moment - plenty of rain and wind about most of the time. We are looking forward to being able to take a trip or two once the weather improves and see new parts of New Zealand.
Most of the mountain of boxes have now been unpacked and things are beginning to feel more normal. We were even organised enough to entertain friends of ours from Hamilton last night and not sit on the floor amongst heaps of boxes, so progress is being made! Thanks Annelien and Carl for taking the 'garage for destitutes' stuff back to Hamilton for us - no doubt all the things that saved our lives when we first arrived can now move on to the next lot of folks who arrive here with a couple of suitcases and have to do the camping thing for an indeterminate amount of time!
Someone asked us the other day, very tongue in cheek, what had brought us to Wanga-Vegas! And we discovered that we reside on Snob Nob - by necessity and not by design!
Dis al!
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