Cargo

The shipment. Ah, the shipment.

The stuff can be divided more or less as follows:

• wedding presents that we asked for
• wedding presents that we didn't want
• toys from the past two Christmases
• almost-useless electronic items
  
• yard-sale fodder
• pure trash
• small-to-large bowls/vases/jugs

I feel like I'm being haunted by the ghost of my twenty-something self. I never realised she had such crappy taste.

In my twenties, I was living the swinging (not literally), single (sometimes) life of a college graduate with a cushy job in booming software and a flat in the inner suburbs of Dublin. I liked stuff; in fact, I desperately wanted to own stuff, because once I moved out of my parents' house, and after my first flatmate had moved on and taken all his nice stuff with him, it became painfully obvious that I didn't have any. I could fill the shelves of my bedroom with books and clutter up the top of my chest of drawers with bottles of unguents and mugs filled artistically with makeup brushes, but once you stepped into the kitchen/sitting/dining room, the grubby white walls and landlord's furniture were unassailed by anything at all.

Unfortunately, priorities for my disposible income, such as it was, were clothes, shoes, and going out. I had no inclination to spend my hard(ish)-earned dosh on furnishings, pictures, objects d'art, and so on; so I relied on picking up the odd item here and there in the cheapest of shops and getting interesting birthday presents from people whose taste may or may not have coincided with mine. I seem to have amassed a lot of small bowls, quite a few jugs, and more yellow vases than you would think someone who has no inclination towards gardening might ever need. Also a horrible number of cheap and nasty whatsits, thingies, and tchotchkes. And some framed postcards.

So we have plenty of bowls now. Come over and sample a selection of chips and dips, won't you?

In the event, the unwanted toys took up very little of the useless-crap space in the shipment. Mabel is delighted with her new baby, has been playing with the Little People farm and the Sticklebricks, and the few books have been perused. Much more useless, heavy, and space-taking-up was the entire mid-size stereo, complete with two speakers, that inadvertently came across the Atlantic to us.

No, this wasn't a wedding present. What happened was that in addition to the nice boxes of dinner service and the several Waterford Glass objects we didn't ask for and don't like (and couldn't return for credit as we did several more), there was a bunch of stuff in the room (henceforth known as The Room) that had come from B's mother's house when she downsized a couple of years ago. So along with two bags full of past exam papers (Leaving Cert Chemistry, anyone?) and physics notes and reject photos, we got the stereo that I'd lent to her when I left the country and hers had been on its last legs. When she got a new one and brought the loaner back to my parents' house, it was put in The Room with everything else of ours. And then it was packed and lifted and driven and loaded and sailed and unloaded and driven and finally unpacked, to my horror and dismay, in our living room. Technically, it works; but it would need a transformer and a plug adaptor and it's horribly out of date (though it does have a double tape deck and a five-CD changer as well as knobs and buttons and slidey things). If you'd like it, let me know and we'll work something out. So long as it doesn't involve shipping it back to Ireland again, because I don't think I'm up for that.

Even more annoyingly, I opened another box to find my Irish hairdryer - the one I had specifically asked for as a Christmas present last year because I was sick of using a 15-year-old model every time we went home, and that was absolutely definitely meant to stay in Ireland. It will be going straight back with us at Christmas this year, taking up valuable luggage real estate, and I will be very grumpy about it.