What's another day?

Well, we're still ready here, and we're still waiting for the arrival of that container. As best I can tell, it is likely to arrive tomorrow (Tuesday).

Why the delay? Although Allen spent this past week working with an agency to prepare the paperwork to submit to Customs, and although the contents of the container were inspected, and a tariff assessed on these items; although we have paid the tariff in full . . . apparently the office workers in the Customs office have not been able to enter the information into their system, so that the paperwork can be finalized, so that the container can be released to us.

We pay a daily storage fee, when the container is stored more than a certain number of days, and we're curious to see if we'll be fined for these extra days of storage. The daily fee is pretty significant, and so of course we hope the extra days will not be assessed against us. But, we'll see. It's certainly well within the realm of possibility that we will asked to pay this!

Our friends Brad and Trish Ward had planned to come over this morning, to help with the unloading, and of course Alan and Faith Hayes were on hand to help. Rachel and I had made a big pot of chili, to have on hand to feed all the workers. The Wards came over late in the afternoon anyway, to drop off some things they'd purchased for me on a recent trip to the city, and the Hayes family swung by, too. So, we had a big chili party tonight, in spite of the non-arrival of the container. That was a fun way to spend the evening.

We had a most interesting time with the power outages tonight, during the chili party. The power went off exactly at 6:30, as has become pretty usual, and came back on again within about 10 minutes. But then, after being on for just a few minutes, it went off again, and again, and again. We estimate that the power went out about 20 times in the course of a couple of hours. Many times it was only on for seconds, and then gone again. About three times, it was on long enough for us to blow out the candles, then gone again.

We're all hoping tomorrow is the big day. I'll keep you posted on this.