The Moving Diaries, Continued

So, the fun never stops at the Villa Apartment Muscato.  Just ask Midge.

In the latest - but, alas, I fear far from last - stage of our settling in, this weekend we had an enormous array of bookcases and such delivered from Ikea.  Ah, you say, this is going to be one of those rants about the evil Swedes who think that a fun way to spend a weekend is trying to affix Splürn glass doors to your Bluxis bookshelves, the missing Allen wrenches, the heartache and horror and bruised thumbs.  Oh, no - I'm one step ahead of you there.

In a rare stroke of practical genius, you see, I decided that at our advanced age (and diminished attention span), Mr. Muscato and I are simply not up to putting the damn things together ourselves.  So I trolled the Internet for a service that would do so.  Quite successfully, as it turns out, for just as scheduled, two very pleasant gentlemen showed up and took care of things in record time.  Having had more than my fill of Splürn and its ilk in the past, I can tell you it was worth every penny.

I realized, though, that this is yet another way in which we've gotten spoiled out there in the Sandlands.  We have Ikea there, you see, but it's rather a different kettle of fish.  There, they take it for granted that no sane person wants to actually trundle around in a warehouse, load up boxes, take them home, and then have to put together your own goddam breakfront.  Barbarous notion.  No, it's a full-service world out there, and I can only be grateful for the good old Yankee enterprise that makes it possible to have something of the same experience back here.

So now we're fully shelved, or as fully as we can be in this abbreviated space, which is very much a good thing.  However, it's already clear that having added pretty much all the storage space we can, we are still wholly and entirely unprepared for the coming deluge of yet more stuff that will descend on us when that dreaded freighter docks at Baltimore sometime around Labor Day and all our Sandlandian possessions join us.  We're toying with the notion of actually shipping a great deal of the stuff back to the Cairo flat, which seems a rather roundabout solution, but one that would at least clear some floorspace.

So that's life on the home front.  I wish I could say that on top of all this domesticity, life was a mad whirl of sophisticated amusements, but I would be lying through my teeth.  Ramadan totters along, although the end is in sight, as the fast-ending Eid al Fitr hits later this week and we can stop having to eat at sunset on the nose every night.  I believe some of Mr. Muscato's far-flung crowd of friends are popping along to help celebrate, so we have that to look forward to.  In the meantime, if you're looking for me, I'll be in back, unpacking books...