I’m livin’ in a box….I’m livin’ in a cardboard box.

“I'm moving, but don't worry! [Someone once] told me we're all on the same planet, so I'll be okay!”  Takayuki Ikkaku

So, there I was with a little time on my hands.  Not doing much in particular, just daydreaming.  My fingers started to twitch as I started counting, striking off with each memory.  When my fingers ran out, I used my toes.  I made it to the big toe on my right foot.  “Sixteen times! Oh lord make it not be so!”  But it was true, and here I was, waiting for the big truck to arrive, again.

In over 20 years of being married to Mr Dear Husband, I have packed up and moved house so often, that the only place that truly feels like home is any airport terminal in the world.

Those of you that have been reading here for a while (you know who you are and I still LOVE your comments) will remember when my household was boxed up for the trip from Sydney to Cairo (what was I thinking!!):

And then we spent a bliss filled 3 months with nothing but a couple of suitcases.  It is so much easier to live without material possessions.  You save yourself a heap of time when it comes to housework.  No dusting, whip over those floors lickety-split when you don’t need to negotiate furniture. And the good lord know how often those Cairo floors needed to be cleaned.  But there was no putting off the inevitable, the boxes arrived: I seriously contemplated NOT unpacking at all, but once the beast is unleashed, it cannot be contained.  Before I knew it, we had started riffling through looking for this and that…then there was no stopping the flood.  What I wasn’t to know at the time was just how short our sojourn in Cairo would be.  After a year, the call of the wild was heard and answered and we were shipping out again.  About here would be the photo of the boxes repacked again, if I had actually been in the country at the time.  I made an executive decision…left Egypt for Christmas, and didn’t go back.  This meant that for the first time in all 16 moves, Mr Dear Husband was going to have to ‘go it alone’.  Of course, on this occasion packing was little more than a phone call. 

And so we come to last Saturday.  The boxes finally arrived here in Germany, after being stored in Cairo for almost 12 months.  Eight of those months were fraught with stress and uncertainty, as we negotiated our way through the mess created by the Financial Crisis. So here they are again: If you look carefully, you will be able to see that each box brought with it, a little piece of Egypt.  A layer of Cairo dust has permeated my entire house.  The boxes are not as pretty as the ones from Australia, but they survived the trip. Two days of non-stop unpacking has resulted in something resembling a home, just don’t look in the Cellar or the Attic.

Today it became just too much, I couldn’t face another box so I set out on my trusty cycle to gather supplies at Aldi. Although the sky seemed ominous, I decided to give it a whirl, anything to get away from those dreaded boxes.The bike was a gift from an elderly family friend, ‘elderly’ being the operative word.  When she told me she hadn’t ridden the bike for ‘a good while’ and then in the next breath mentions, ‘it is almost brand new’, I really should have put 2 + 2 together…  But she gets me where I need to go, and as I discovered today, works remarkably well in wet weather.  If you happened to be driving through Germany today and saw a wild-eyed woman peddling for her life, loaded up with groceries, looking like a half drowned rat, on a clapped out bike circa. 1945… yes, well, that was me!