Quantity Isn't Quality
Janet and I decided months ago that we weren't going to stir from our apartment this Christmas. We have both lived all over the world, and found ourselves heading to the airport come Christmas with altogether too much frequency. In fact, ever since I left home for university, I have celebrated precisely one Christmas at my own residence, and that was when I lived in Egypt, and I arranged for my mother and sisters to come to me. What with moving into the new apartment, me starting a new job, and all the traveling of the last couple of years, enough's enough.
Luckily my father-in-law accepted the challenge and graciously brought the mountain to Mohammad. He flew in on the 21st, and helped us prepare the apartment and decorate for Christmas. We made a space amidst all the cardboard boxes, he and I picked out a tree, carried it home and Janet decorated it. The three of us successfully made the sugar plums dance all by ourselves. The pictures above and below are the two pictures of the season that we managed to take in the moving-in chaos of our Christmas celebration.
The before-Christmas-dinner champagne toast is an O'Reilly tradition that my new family seems to find infectious
Caught in a Blizzard
I spent all day Sunday waiting for a plane at Pearson International. I came up on a border run: a short trip to pick up the TN visa that permits me to work in the US. I arrived on Friday, saw a few people, dropped off Christmas presents, picked up a few more, then headed to the airport on Sunday at 8:30 a.m. At 8:30 p.m. I was still there, having been scheduled on cancelled flights twice and missed another on standby. I did make it home eventually, so perhaps I was lucky. I could have taken the same plane as my baggage, in which case I'd have missed my first day of work.
Moving Day, Really
We moved in a couple of weeks ago, but it has taken until today for our furniture to arrive. Janet has taken the day off work to supervise upstairs and I'm managing things at the lobby level.
Our truck arrived early, but in the wrong place. With all the security arrangements in our neighbourhood it took the movers about half an hour to go out through the barrier, around the block (get lost once, and go around again), then back in through the right barrier, get checked out by the bomb-sniffing dog, and finally make their way to our back door.
Time to get back downstairs.
Christmas at the Exchange
They have erected a massive Christmas tree outside the exchange. Another thing for the tourists to stop and take pictures of. They take pictures of everything! On our block is a Tiffany's and a Trump building, and I've seen tourists posing outside of both, as well as the constant stream that stop and shoot the exchange itself. Of course, I had to be one of them to take these pictures.
And here it is at night
Moving Day
We still don't know when our furniture will arrive, but we believe it has left France, so we've decided to uproot from our temporary hotel-like digs in Battery Park and move into our new apartment in the heart of downtown. It is indeed new, in that we are the first tenants to occupy the apartment - yet it's an older building, recently converted from offices to residences. They told us it would be ready at the beginning of October - but we never believed that in the first place, since the construction was, and still is, in progress. A few weeks ago they told us we could move in, and then it was us who had to drag our feet because the notice we received wasn't enough for our movers in France to get our container on the next ship. But in an effort to make things come together by force of will, we are moving in regardless.
What on earth is filling our Zipcar minivan to the roof?
We arrived in July with two suitcases each, plus hand luggage and a cat. The day after our official moving day, we rolled all the leftovers (still upstairs when the picture was taken) into a taxi - and, with the cat in her bag, it was about as much as we could carry. So what was all that stuff in the minivan?
Our new building is behind the security barriers that surround the stock exchange. Imposing as they are, we were allowed to drive in without any special arrangements or documentation. We had only to wait for the bomb-sniffer dog to give us the once over - which most people would find an inconvenience, but my animal-happy wife considered a delightful bonus.
The dog's name is Sam. Working dogs are too busy to hold still for pictures.
At last here we are in our new home - and knocking around it like ping-pong balls on a squash court, making dishes out of leftover delivery cartons and tables out of cardboard boxes. Our best intelligence leads us to hope the movers will show up Monday or Tuesday next week, but since we haven't heard from them recently, that hope grows increasingly faint. Happily, the internet connection was installed today, and since the building has been wired with fibre optic cables, we have a connection that is much faster than old-fashioned DSL. We may not have dishes or furniture but at least we have email.
