The Craters are Coming...but not quickly

There's good news and bad news. The good news - our crates are in India. The bad news - they’re not with us, and we're not exactly sure where they are. At least they’re in the right country. The main shipment (aka The One with our Household Stuff) is somewhere between Mumbai (where the ship arrived) and Delhi, either on a lorry or a train. Rod had a conversation with the import agency and he wasn't exactly more informed after it. Our paperwork said the estimated date of arrival was 20th September - I know, it's the 25th now. Remember time in India is a flexible concept. Considering this, the maid has always been punctual. She's never been five days late.

The second shipment (aka the One with my Quilting Frame - this is starting to sound like episiodes of Friends, is it not?) is even closer, we think. Because I was not willing (and surprisingly neither was Rod) to give up the master bedroom of our apartment for my quilting machine, I needed a new, smaller frame. Nolting made me one and sent it to me in England so it could come with the main shipment. I'd arranged many shipments in the past, and if you allowed three weeks for the machine to get from door to door you were safe. However we hadn’t factored in the economic downturn reducing the number of ships needed to cross the Atlantic. The table got to the US dock in plenty of time, and there it sat. Eventually our ship was full and it set sail. It made it to England at the end of July, before we left, but after our house was crated up. So I arranged for the table to be re-routed to India. The boat it was on berthed on September 4th. It was put on a train on September 12th. It's now in New Delhi, but we're in the process of collecting the 153 pieces of paper we didn't know we needed to get it out of customs. Nothing happens quickly here (that flexible time concept again), and they sure love paperwork. Carbon paper is readily available. I'm really hopeful one of the crates gets here soon. It would be helpful if it was the main shipment, because that contains the tool box we'll need to put the table together!