Feels Like Home...Again!!

One very small slip of the pen can cause a tremendous degree of frustration and anxiety.

We packed our things up into a container on June 12, 2006, eager to start our adventure and live like we're camping. With a comfortable estimate of date of receipt in hand (July 7) , we felt very happy about our lot in life and continued on our merry way...camp-style. To make a long story short our things FINALLY arrived on July 25 and only because we had some wonderful friends who knew friends in high port places. Our container left Winnipeg by rail to Tacoma port in Washington State. A very "diligent" customs officer at the international border counted 53 units packed, and cleared the container for shipment by barge to Honolulu port. Honolulu port received the container around July 7th, counted 138 units and said...."Whoa...now hold on dere little wahine(missy). Dere's dis biggah misteak. Dey need to findah outah where dese mo' stuff come from! Dey cannah send dis dere, 'til dis is fixed!" Well now, according to our Canadian freight forwarder's papers (which were faxed to the local Hawaiian moving company), there were originally 138 units packed and loaded. So the error was made in Tacoma. Will anyone admit their mistake and correct the error?? But of course not, darling. So, the container sat and sat and sat in Honolulu until a wonderful church member felt so sorry for us that on July 20, she made a few calls. A homeland security officer called us that evening with a few questions and that morning we received a call that our container had been released and had made the barge from Honolulu to Nawiliwili port in Kauai and would be in port by Saturday. It had to be checked and released and would be delivered on July 25th in the am. Yipeeee! So that's the short version. There were alot of phone calls in between with alot of incorrect information between ports that was passed on to us. A bit of an emotional roller coaster.

But the important thing is... Ben now has his 5th appendage and the world is okay again.

It was like Christmas this week as Oceanic Time Warner Cable came the day after our stuff arrived and hooked up digital cable, road runner high speed internet and digital phone service. So if you call us, it flashes on our tv if we are watching it. How cool is that??!! We can screen our calls without getting off the couch!!! Hey, remember...DIS is paradise!!!