Boxes and Nuts, Part 2

Our freight has arrived! Yes, it has come all the way from Shenzhen. It took nearly three months to get here and now, at last, it is safely in our home in Kalotina. All we have to do now, of course, is to work out what we are going to with it. (We are not even going to bother trying to answer the question, “Why did we bring all of this junk from China?”) Why is it that you can do without it for three months and then it arrives and then you always wonder why you bothered sending it in the first place? It would have been so much easier (and a lot cheaper) just to give it away or simply throw it all away.

In case you are wondering, there is in fact something that is more time-consuming and frustrating than trying to transfer money from a Chinese bank. Can you guess what it is? It is called IKEA furniture. The big yellow-and-blue place is on the wrong side of Sofia and that means driving on the ring road. Argh! Then you have to find what it is that you want and find your way out again, rather like Theseus in the labyrinth (minus an Ariadne).

Finally you get home and that is when the fun begins because you have to put it together. Or try to. Of course, we would not have needed extra furniture if we had not sent all of that freight from China. (Yes, it is that old song again, the one about the old lady who swallowed a fly.)

The reason for our patronage of IKEA is quite simple: we have to put all of our clothes from Shenzhen somewhere. Living in two countries means having two lots of clothes and that is one big headache when they all come together and you do not have enough drawers and cupboards for them all. The smell was pretty bad too. Three months of shipping and storage can give your clothes quite a whiff, I can tell you.

Well, that explains the “boxes” in the title. 

The “nuts” are self-explanatory. Our walnut trees have really delivered the goods this year. Every morning, before breakfast, we would have a nut-gathering foray into the Secret Garden, but this afternoon the weather changed, there was a drop in temperature and the wind really started blowing. And then it started raining nuts!

Two new “boxes” are the raised beds in the garden, next to the kitchen. Peter kindly constructed these wooden frames out of some leftover timber. The soil next to the house is pretty awful, so I brought some new soil from the Secret Garden and added a lot of ash. In the Spring, Irena is planning to plant some herbs in one bed and some flowers in another.