No, The OTHER East!

 Moving includes ordering a lot of new stuff to be delivered, especially when you leave one place while not quite sure yet what the new place will be like. Packing to leave is a version of sorting what is loved, absolutely needed no matter what, and will fit in whatever kind of conveyance you can arrange for the task, from what you can either sell or donate before you leave. As a result we arrived in our new permanent home with both things we can't use and needing things we don't have. Hence the deliveries.

(BTW I have a lovely light blue Persian rug that has no place on our carpeted floors. Anybody? Needs just a bit of cleaning....)

The new home can be confusing at first glance. There is a door facing the street, up a few stairs to a tiny porch. It opens on the utility area, if your idea of a welcome is coming face to face with the water heater, laundry, and furnace. Our real front door follows the sidewalk along the east side of the house to a significantly larger porch with a very nice overhang to keep at least some of the rain off you, and opens to the living room. There's an actual "Welcome" sign once you open that door. 99.7% of the time we mean it.

To deal with possible confusion...OK, fooled us too the first time... we taped a sign in the window of the utility room door. It says "USE OTHER DOOR PLEASE" and for those still confused, has an arrow with a bend in it showing the way. 

Apparently it can be missed.

I've been ordering a lot of stuff from one company for the house. Mostly it's things not available in our other favorite shopping place, local thrift stores. Or perhaps things that don't fit once assembled into the hatchback. Or are heavier than my arms feel like dealing with for as long as it takes to drag it out of the car, along the walk, up the few stairs, and inside. A lot of it is shelving, assemble-it-yourself kind, "yourself" being my youngest son of course. We've been seeing a lot of him lately, even more than when we were living with him temporarily.

(Hmmm, maybe we should move more often if this is what it takes?)  

NOPE! Been there, done that, got the wrinkled tee shirts. Good thing I know where the nearest laundry is, eh? We even remembered to save the laundry baskets with wheels on them.

The company in charge of shipping has noticed our move, and asks on its form if we have any special instructions for delivery. Boy howdy, do we! Often what is meant by the question is whether it's a gated community with a code, or is there an apartment number, or must it be left with, say, a concierge.

Like we'd be fancy enough to have a concierge! 

My directions are simple: leave on larger porch on east side. Simple, right? Larger porch implies there is a smaller one to be ignored.  East side helps the delivery people who can't figure out relative sizes by eyeballing them distinguish between north side and east side. Or vice versa, I guess. But a couple days ago I was reminded that some people have no sense of direction, when a FedEx driver left two boxes outside the utility room. 

You know, the one facing north.

The OTHER east, I guess.

I'm just lucky that neither box was too big nor too heavy for me to wrangle inside the narrow space and around the corners to bring them inside before it rained... again.

My son will assemble them in a bit. This time it's a pair of inexpensive rolling chairs. Tomorrow it will be shelf units matching what we already ordered before and, once divided, will both raise their heights one shelf and provide my (still) only houseplant a home in a window. We'll see my son again then too.

Maybe we should plan on feeding him?