I have been so busily involved the preparations for getting to Qatar that I haven't had time to eat or sleep, let alone blog. And yet, I really should be doing so, if for no other reason than the fact that as I have been prepping like a madwoman, so many other blogs have been helpful along the way (and maddening when they look like they are going to be helpful and then peter out...much like my own blogging). And so here, for the record, is a brief synopsis of preparations so far:
--This point probably deserves a post all by itself but right now I am too done with the topic to do so so let it suffice me to say I finally, FINALLY (glory, glory, hallelujah) secured a moving company in which I feel confident. This is after putting down a small but significant deposit with another company and then being unable to sleep thinking about it one night and following my gut reaction with an extensive web search the next morning, during which I discovered that this company was at the very least disingenuous and at the very most a complete scam. (When I tried to get my deposit back, they claimed I had electronically signed some document stating that the deposit was nonrefundable--things deteriorated rapidly from there.) The only bright spot in this experience was that my thorough web searching uncovered MovingScam.com, a treasure trove of information and reviews of local and international movers. I really don't know how I would have found the company I settled on without extensive use of this site and their Guide to International Shipping has become my bible in my protracted search. Eventually, I had 5 visual surveys of our house and goods done by different moving companies, got 5 wildly different estimates, ran into 2 more scams while investigating those companies, had one other reputable company quote me double everyone else, had yet another company sign me up but then completely fail to follow up or respond to my concerns or even get back to me promptly (that same company also fired the woman I was originally working with), and finally, after all these red flags and problems, I went with company number 5, Corrigan International, the last one I found, just seven weeks before we were scheduled to pack out. But not for lack of trying, people! This whole process was awful, by the way. International shipping is hard enough, but the amount of dishonest people involved makes the ordeal even worse. Here's hoping it will all work out as planned now!
--One of the revelations I had while getting our visual surveys was that we were planning on bring far too much stuff with us. To be fair, originally I was envisioning us getting an unfurnished place and
basically decided we wanted to move everything we owned just as it was so we could set up our home in Qatar. However, we quickly realized that 1, moving everything was simply too expensive, and 2, moving into furnished company housing was going to be infinitely easier on us in both the short and the long runs (more on housing in a minute). So, instead, we decided to move half of what we owned or less. We were originally estimated as having 9700 pounds. Our last estimate said we were planning on moving closer to 4000 pounds. If you're paying attention, that means we have essentially decreased (or, more accurately, will have decreased) our belongings by over half. In part, that was somewhat easy because we ditched all but a few pieces of furniture, but this decrease also meant that over the last two months I have touched every single item in our home, every single toy, every single sheet of paper, every single memento, tchotchke, photo, book, or fork and decided if it should come with us, go to one of our parents' homes, be sold at an enormous garage sale, or be trashed. This process has been exhausting, to say the least. And I have been ruthless, which is its own kind of exhaustion, especially with regard to books for adults. I sent 6 boxes to my parents' house of books that are half mine and half the husband's, and I am taking 5 boxes of our books with us to Qatar, including cookbooks, scriptures, and music...and the rest are already gone, sold at an earlier garage sale or left at Half Price Books for a pittance. The Queen is dead; long live the Queen! I did draw the line at kids' books, lest you think I have completely lost my English major mind. I culled a box or so from their extensive collection, but we are bringing all the rest, largely because lending libraries are almost nonexistent in Qatar and even the new (aka hopefully soon to be finished--pretty pretty please!) Qatar National Library will allow one to take out up to 6 books at a time, which is not nearly enough for my little reading junkies! Thankfully, my mother came last week and helped me finish the immense sort of everything else, and my sister-in-law is coming next week to help me sell it all in an event I'm calling "Shop My House." Which means, I hope, that all the extraneous stuff will be gone before the movers get here in the middle of December.
--As I mentioned, we are moving into a furnished "villa" (don't get excited; it's really a 4 bedroom town home) in the company's compound (again, a more appropriate word would be complex). In fact, the husband is already there. He left two-ish weeks ago and will be there until we arrive just before Christmas. Getting him out the door is another post on its own, but for now let me just talk about the villa (which he wants to call "The Ohio!"): it's furnished, as I mentioned, but when I say furnished, I want you to picture wall to wall furniture, so much furniture, in fact, that there isn't enough room anywhere in this huge place for a kid to make a train track or roll a car or even walk an unobstructed path except for outside on the patio. And the furniture itself is...well...not ideal. This place looks like it was decorated by a 13 year old girl from the 1970s who had unlimited funds. I'm talking red velvet couches and black lacquer as far as the eye can see, people! Occasional chairs the Jetsons would have loved and not one or two, but six of them. Shiny black dining table for 10. Dressing tables with tufted stools in every bedroom. White leather everywhere. Two tiered glass coffee tables. And every single unit in the compound is furnished with EXACTLY the same pieces, down to the art on the walls. Oy and vey! Right now, the husband is trying to convince the housing coordinator to take back some of this furniture so we can have some room to breathe. I hope this convincing goes well, because if it doesn't, we will be taking even fewer pieces of furniture and I will be sacrificing one bedroom in which to stack as much of the superfluous pieces as I can so I don't feel like all of it is choking me!
--While all this has been going on, I have been trying to find places for the boys in schools there. School after school told me the same thing: we have no openings for Kindergarteners and even our wait lists are full. I was beginning to despair that we would ever get J into a school, and he and I would be forced to home school and end our relationship as we know it right now for good. However, I persevered, finding one British, one American, and one International (basically also British) school that seemed likely to at least have some openings. The American school is a new one, opened specifically for the employees of the husband's hospital, but it suffers from being new. The British school was the fourth campus opened in Doha and was far away but likely to have openings because it was new. And the International school was my first choice, a long shot but one I liked very much. And before the husband left in early November, I decided to assemble as many of the kids' documents as possible for their school applications (which list included, by the way, birth certificates, school records from all schools attended in the past, health forms, vaccination records, long paper applications, copies of any standardized tests, fee schedule forms, emergency forms, copies of their passports, copies of our passports, copies of the husband's visa and residence permit--more pieces of paper than it took me to apply to college or grad school, is what I'm saying) and send them with him in the hopes that getting the apps in sooner rather than later would help our cause. I have since found out that our employer has also worked out a relationship with the same International school I researched, so we actually have a possibility of getting the kids into at least one if not two schools now, pending their on site assessments. Because my three year old needs to be assessed for an hour so he can attend school for, gulp, 5 hours a day 5 days a week! Umm, I think he and I are going to be having lots of sick days!
My, this post has blossomed! There is much more to tell, but I will end here and save that for later. There is so much to do I must be back at it!
--This point probably deserves a post all by itself but right now I am too done with the topic to do so so let it suffice me to say I finally, FINALLY (glory, glory, hallelujah) secured a moving company in which I feel confident. This is after putting down a small but significant deposit with another company and then being unable to sleep thinking about it one night and following my gut reaction with an extensive web search the next morning, during which I discovered that this company was at the very least disingenuous and at the very most a complete scam. (When I tried to get my deposit back, they claimed I had electronically signed some document stating that the deposit was nonrefundable--things deteriorated rapidly from there.) The only bright spot in this experience was that my thorough web searching uncovered MovingScam.com, a treasure trove of information and reviews of local and international movers. I really don't know how I would have found the company I settled on without extensive use of this site and their Guide to International Shipping has become my bible in my protracted search. Eventually, I had 5 visual surveys of our house and goods done by different moving companies, got 5 wildly different estimates, ran into 2 more scams while investigating those companies, had one other reputable company quote me double everyone else, had yet another company sign me up but then completely fail to follow up or respond to my concerns or even get back to me promptly (that same company also fired the woman I was originally working with), and finally, after all these red flags and problems, I went with company number 5, Corrigan International, the last one I found, just seven weeks before we were scheduled to pack out. But not for lack of trying, people! This whole process was awful, by the way. International shipping is hard enough, but the amount of dishonest people involved makes the ordeal even worse. Here's hoping it will all work out as planned now!
--One of the revelations I had while getting our visual surveys was that we were planning on bring far too much stuff with us. To be fair, originally I was envisioning us getting an unfurnished place and
basically decided we wanted to move everything we owned just as it was so we could set up our home in Qatar. However, we quickly realized that 1, moving everything was simply too expensive, and 2, moving into furnished company housing was going to be infinitely easier on us in both the short and the long runs (more on housing in a minute). So, instead, we decided to move half of what we owned or less. We were originally estimated as having 9700 pounds. Our last estimate said we were planning on moving closer to 4000 pounds. If you're paying attention, that means we have essentially decreased (or, more accurately, will have decreased) our belongings by over half. In part, that was somewhat easy because we ditched all but a few pieces of furniture, but this decrease also meant that over the last two months I have touched every single item in our home, every single toy, every single sheet of paper, every single memento, tchotchke, photo, book, or fork and decided if it should come with us, go to one of our parents' homes, be sold at an enormous garage sale, or be trashed. This process has been exhausting, to say the least. And I have been ruthless, which is its own kind of exhaustion, especially with regard to books for adults. I sent 6 boxes to my parents' house of books that are half mine and half the husband's, and I am taking 5 boxes of our books with us to Qatar, including cookbooks, scriptures, and music...and the rest are already gone, sold at an earlier garage sale or left at Half Price Books for a pittance. The Queen is dead; long live the Queen! I did draw the line at kids' books, lest you think I have completely lost my English major mind. I culled a box or so from their extensive collection, but we are bringing all the rest, largely because lending libraries are almost nonexistent in Qatar and even the new (aka hopefully soon to be finished--pretty pretty please!) Qatar National Library will allow one to take out up to 6 books at a time, which is not nearly enough for my little reading junkies! Thankfully, my mother came last week and helped me finish the immense sort of everything else, and my sister-in-law is coming next week to help me sell it all in an event I'm calling "Shop My House." Which means, I hope, that all the extraneous stuff will be gone before the movers get here in the middle of December.
--As I mentioned, we are moving into a furnished "villa" (don't get excited; it's really a 4 bedroom town home) in the company's compound (again, a more appropriate word would be complex). In fact, the husband is already there. He left two-ish weeks ago and will be there until we arrive just before Christmas. Getting him out the door is another post on its own, but for now let me just talk about the villa (which he wants to call "The Ohio!"): it's furnished, as I mentioned, but when I say furnished, I want you to picture wall to wall furniture, so much furniture, in fact, that there isn't enough room anywhere in this huge place for a kid to make a train track or roll a car or even walk an unobstructed path except for outside on the patio. And the furniture itself is...well...not ideal. This place looks like it was decorated by a 13 year old girl from the 1970s who had unlimited funds. I'm talking red velvet couches and black lacquer as far as the eye can see, people! Occasional chairs the Jetsons would have loved and not one or two, but six of them. Shiny black dining table for 10. Dressing tables with tufted stools in every bedroom. White leather everywhere. Two tiered glass coffee tables. And every single unit in the compound is furnished with EXACTLY the same pieces, down to the art on the walls. Oy and vey! Right now, the husband is trying to convince the housing coordinator to take back some of this furniture so we can have some room to breathe. I hope this convincing goes well, because if it doesn't, we will be taking even fewer pieces of furniture and I will be sacrificing one bedroom in which to stack as much of the superfluous pieces as I can so I don't feel like all of it is choking me!
--While all this has been going on, I have been trying to find places for the boys in schools there. School after school told me the same thing: we have no openings for Kindergarteners and even our wait lists are full. I was beginning to despair that we would ever get J into a school, and he and I would be forced to home school and end our relationship as we know it right now for good. However, I persevered, finding one British, one American, and one International (basically also British) school that seemed likely to at least have some openings. The American school is a new one, opened specifically for the employees of the husband's hospital, but it suffers from being new. The British school was the fourth campus opened in Doha and was far away but likely to have openings because it was new. And the International school was my first choice, a long shot but one I liked very much. And before the husband left in early November, I decided to assemble as many of the kids' documents as possible for their school applications (which list included, by the way, birth certificates, school records from all schools attended in the past, health forms, vaccination records, long paper applications, copies of any standardized tests, fee schedule forms, emergency forms, copies of their passports, copies of our passports, copies of the husband's visa and residence permit--more pieces of paper than it took me to apply to college or grad school, is what I'm saying) and send them with him in the hopes that getting the apps in sooner rather than later would help our cause. I have since found out that our employer has also worked out a relationship with the same International school I researched, so we actually have a possibility of getting the kids into at least one if not two schools now, pending their on site assessments. Because my three year old needs to be assessed for an hour so he can attend school for, gulp, 5 hours a day 5 days a week! Umm, I think he and I are going to be having lots of sick days!
My, this post has blossomed! There is much more to tell, but I will end here and save that for later. There is so much to do I must be back at it!
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