[ExI] End of Saga about Moving :-)

[Amara Graps]

And the end of my saga about Moving!

For my household, it arrived safely (no broken items except for one
picture frame, which I already knew about) last Monday. The path of my
household: upon arrival on the other side of the Atlantic to the Port of
Houston, Texas, in the third week of December, was separated from the
other shipments and Xrayed, and was then put on a train across the
mid-section of the US between Christmas and New Years. On Friday,
January 4, my house-on-the-train entered Colorado, and last Monday,
January 7, it arrived to my home in Boulder, two months after waving
goodbye to it in Frascati, Italy. Interestingly, I had Italians
(Sardinians), packing and picking up my home on the Frascati, Italy
side, and Mexicans delivering and unpacking my home on the Boulder,
Colorado side. The language lessons were fun! I learned some new Spanish
words last Monday.

Three companies were involved in the move on the Boulder end: the
company to bring the shipping container from the train to my home, the
company to unload and unpack the boxes, and I needed a third company: a
contractor technician to help me assemble my futon couch. The Rome
company Franzosini disassembled my couch to the bare screws and washers,
and I have not assembled it from such a basic state before. (I took
pictures of that futon assembly too, and so I will write myself an
instruction sheet for the next time.)

There was a sort of ritual to 'break the seal' on the shipping
container, then the truck driver, who doesn't have authority to touch
the boxes inside of his own truck, went to the cab of the truck and sat
there (I hope his heater was on, since it started snowing a little in
the afternoon) for several few hours, while the _second_ company
unloaded the boxes and while I checked off the numbered boxes on my list
to make sure that we had everything. I am _so glad_ that I wrote on all
four sides and in English the contents of most of the boxes in Frascati,
because it would have slowed us up considerably. And yes, the boxes that
slowed us were those whose contents we couldn't figure out from the
Sardinian Italian and which I had not marked.

The second company brought a large truck too -- these two trucks
occupied a large volume on my street last Monday, obstructing, for a
short time, the City of Boulder garbage pickup truck. The purpose of the
second truck was so that they could store the packing material from
unpacking my boxes. Our strategy was for them to leave with as many
empty boxes as possible, Monday evening, which meant emptying the
contents of as many boxes as possible onto the floor of my home. By
Monday evening, I had no space to walk, especially with 1200 books in
piles everywhere. The books were first to get off of the floor, which
needed some lessons too.

I have a plump carpet throughout my new home, now, which doesn't provide
the most stable surface for heavy bookshelves. My first bookshelf, of
physics books, neatly fell over, after I had spent two hours assembling
and filling it. Of course, in the process, it knocked over my cup of tea
onto the beige carpet and onto one of my beige meditation cushions. OK,
so after slipping enough pieces of cardboard under the front of the
bookshelves to force them to lean against the wall, I filled the
assembled bookshelves and they appear to be more-or-less vertically
balanced now ;-), barring any earthquakes (which I never heard of in
Colorado) so I think I am safe.

On the "Italy, Closing up" Things, excluding my end-of-contract money
and my extraction-from-pension money processes, still in progress, I'm
concluding that things are more-or-less closed.

I think that the services companies: ENEL, Tele2, Fastweb, Telecom
Italia would save themselves and their customers a lot of effort if they
write on their web sites:

"We don't have a clue for how to manage customers that move outside of
Italy."

Then it would be clear, and I wouldn't have wasted my last weeks in
Italy with faxes, registered letters, phone and so on, and I could have
taken the holiday that I had hoped to have had. I have not received any
fattura/bollettas for my last services, with the exception of one
company: ENEL. They gave me 5 ways to pay, none of which work for me
living here. One of the ways could have been potentially useful: paying
with credit card over their Internet web site, but they disconnected my
account number, and so that didn't work either. I'm happy to report that
the Ford auto shop in Grottaferrata did finally send to me my demolition
certificate that proves that they destroyed my car, and I received it at
the end of December. So I then sent all of the official papers to my old
insurance company, therefore, my car insurance is officially and legally
cancelled. I don't care any more if I pay my last utilities bills,
honestly, since the companies themselves don't seem to care to have my
money.

Now, to the rest of the putting away of my household... Ciao! Amara

-- 

Amara Graps, PhD      www.amara.com
Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado