Here's a little look at our furnished apartment in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It's a little smaller than our last place, but it compares well to our previous apartments with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. The unique thing about our new home is that it's in a hotel. The hotel has similarly sized apartments setup as daily rate hotel suites alongside their long-term residences like us.
Here's a little look at our furnished apartment in Algiers, Algeria. It compares well to our previous apartments with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms of a good size. We're very fortunate to be in a new building with a great view of the city.
Here's a look at our furnished apartment in Riga. There's 2 bedrooms, an office, and 2 bathrooms. It compares very well with what was provided in Caracas and Stockholm.
It feels a bit roomier than Caracas with the really high ceilings and huge master bedroom suite even though it might be roughly the same size. The dining room is bigger and living room is smaller, so I think the rooms are distributed better in this layout. There's a better overall feel of space and it felt comfortable to me rather quickly.
I hear Stockholm is a furnished post now, so the handful of posts that don't provide furniture is that much rarer. We have to keep all of this furniture other than being allowed to swap out the master queen bed for our own. I already hate this mattress so it'll be good to eventually get our stuff.
Unfortunately the bulk of our household effects (HHE) is still in Miami and won't be available here until the middle of next month. It'll feel more homey once we get our own decorations on the walls and shelves. Otherwise, we're home now (for the next 3 years)!
I finally moved out of the hotel and into the apartment after 6 weeks at post. I came in at the end of the summer rush and post had to expand their housing pool again, so my assigned apartment was still being renovated when I arrived. It might be another 3 weeks until our stuff arrives including a much delayed Unaccompanied Air Baggage (UAB), so living out of 2 suitcases continues. It's good that my wife was held up with a visa issue and doesn't arrive until tomorrow.
Let's see, pack out was 1 week before departure, 6 weeks of home leave, 4 weeks in DC for training, and now 6 weeks at post to get into an apartment. That's 17 weeks of feeling homeless since the end of June. I've never lived out of 2 suitcases for so long and I'm still doing it! Well, at least we have a nice apartment to start feeling like home again. We'll get more familiar belongings delivered and then it will be a home for 2 years. After that, it's time to start the whole process all over again. :-)
Here's a few pictures of the nicely renovated and furnished place. The bed will be replaced with our own, but otherwise the rest of the furniture is here to stay. The first picture is the very important water tank added because of frequent water outages, which should really hit hard during the dry season in the spring. There's also a filter for the sink because of quality issues. We may get power outages but not enough to justify a generator... yet. Otherwise, it should be a nice apartment to live in while avoiding all of the crime outside.
Our apartment is finally looking like our home. I hadn't really posted any pictures of it. I was waiting until it had our stuff in it and didn't look like we were still moving in. Our daughter's bedroom may never be finished because we're not doing it, but we finally finished the rest of it. First, here's a picture near work of the lovely day outside. There wasn't any rain and it was a nice warm 64F. It's been more rainy and overcast so it was a nice break. I'm having some fun with the panorama feature on my phone (click to enlarge).
Our Household Effects (HHE) were delivered today! My wife did most of the directing in the rooms and I mostly marked off the items on the list as they came up the elevator over and over and... I saw the scene below at least 50 times. I sat a good bit but still ended up hobbling around on a crutch to help keep an eye on the action around the apartment.
The adage of a picture is worth a thousand words minimizes the true value of a picture in my opinion. Maybe it doesn't take into account inflation since it's an old phrase. One set of pictures I try to take during a move is a visual inventory of our stuff. Another useful set of pictures is what the nice housing people at post can provide.
Visual Inventory
We didn't have digital cameras when we first moved with the military. Who wants to mess with developing film or the expense of Polaroids for household stuff? We only had the inventory sheets on which the moving companies always checked off that every side of our stuff had marks and scratches. They also wrote in that they couldn't verify if electronics worked even if they just saw me unplug the working TV. I forgot to take pictures for our short local move from the house to the apartment so there are some new scratches here and there. It's mostly old furniture so we don't care about that as much as things going missing or arriving broken.
I quickly wandered around the apartment with my phone's camera and they're automatically saved to Google cloud storage. It was the fastest I'd ever taken inventory pictures. I even remembered to get some of the model/serial numbers for the electronics.
Another nice thing about our digital age and buying things online is having a lot of our recent purchases in emails to prove what we bought and how much we paid. I always intend to keep the receipts but can't always find them after I've filed them somewhere. Receipts are definitely good to have with the pictures.
Some people suggest taking videos and describing your things while you do it. That sounds like a bit more work and I don't go too crazy with move preparations. Selected still shots are easier to send to insurance companies instead of cutting down a video or saying "just watch for 20 seconds around the 12 minute mark and look close because it blurs a little as I'm spinning wildly around the room."
Hindsight is 20/20 so I may regret not having a video I can overdub with some sappy remembrance song and describe how everything was horribly destroyed in transit or is forever lost at the bottom of the ocean. Reference this NPR story Lost, Then Found: Shipping Containers On Seafloor. Yep, this is how our belongings make their way overseas...
Provided Apartment Pictures
We're moving into a Stockholm apartment they picked for us and it's hard to see how our stuff fits into it when we've never seen it. This is even more important with Stockholm being one of the few unfurnished posts. They provided an initial set of pictures which mostly consisted of one angle of each room along with a separate list of room dimensions. Some of the rooms could be used for different purposes so it was confusing trying to keep the 2 correlated since I've discovered the names didn't match.
We just got an excellent new set of pictures of various angles in the rooms that were just taken after the current occupants left. This is where a picture is worth way more than a thousand words. I think the value increases exponentially when you have multiple pictures so 3 pictures may really be worth 9,000 words. Does anyone really want to know the exchange rate on multiple pictures to words?
There's a very narrow 3rd bedroom about 6 feet wide that we were going to use for the spare bedroom. However, the dining room has sliding doors that can close it off and I'm told the previous occupants used it as a bedroom. I think it would make for a better guest bedroom. It has a small balcony which means our daughter wants it as her bedroom. There's 2 other big bedrooms to choose from so we'll see.
The living room has 2 areas so it appears we can use the smaller part as the dining area. The narrow bedroom can be demoted to a computer room or storage. I'll post pictures after we move there and replace the sparse temporary furniture with our stuff. Only 14 days to departure!
This was a fun week of training because it was an entirely new subject I knew very little about. We learned about operating HF radios including how the HF transmissions actually work. We'll mostly just use the radios but we also learned a little about installing them and maintaining the antennas if that's ever needed.
Now I know a few things about radio propagation and the mysterious forces around us that may or may not let us talk to someone really far away. Some of it depends on the atmosphere, time of day (the ionospheric layers are different at night), and the effects of the Sun. Our instructor also said it takes a bit of luck or magic (he called it the Walt Disney Effect) to establish a link. I now have a better understanding of why amateur radio operators get so excited about making contact with skywave across long distances.
The picture is of the signs on a radio classroom (another door near my classroom but the signs are the same). Since we were working with electricity and non-ionizing radiation from the radios and antennas there was obviously some focus on safety. It's not really as dangerous as the signs look as long as you don't mess around with the antennas while transmitting and you've installed lightning protection on the antenna line. You should always be careful with electricity and use proper grounding.
The "danger of death" can happen with any high voltage so that sign could be put up almost anywhere. My wife had an experience with lightning traveling down a phone line. Lightning also hit a metal fence outside our son's bedroom when he was a toddler so that sign should be everywhere! The lightning strike near our son set off all of his electronic toys like that one scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I don't think there were too many lasting effects on him. ;-)
Anyway, through the week we talked on the radios, crimped on some cable connectors, and even went on the roof to check out the antennas connected to our classroom equipment. We get a good dose of "enough to be dangerous" for our jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none type of job.
Moving from House to Apartment to...
During this same week we moved from our house into a 3 month lease apartment. My wife handled a lot for the move since I can't miss training. Fortunately, she could take off work for 3 days so I only had to bust my butt on it after training and on the weekends.
We boxed up most of the house for a couple of weeks before the move. We hired a moving company to move the furniture and whatever we had boxed up. Even after that we still had to make probably a dozen trips with the SUV to get various things not boxed or too fragile that we didn't want them to move it. We only packed them good enough to move a mile in a car instead of stacked in a big truck by people that don't care as much about our breakables. We'll probably unbox stuff as we need it until the day the next movers come to pack it all up for long-term storage or headed for Sweden.
We still have way too much stuff for our apartment in Stockholm. A lot of that stuff in the 3rd bedroom picture above (including a walk-in closet full of boxes you can't see) will end up in State Department's long-term storage. We won't have room to put up the guest bed buried in there somewhere if we don't store a bunch of junk. It does make me wonder how much stuff we really need and how much we unnecessarily hold onto throughout our lives. We got rid of a lot over the last month but we're still surrounded by boxes!
Now I know a few things about radio propagation and the mysterious forces around us that may or may not let us talk to someone really far away. Some of it depends on the atmosphere, time of day (the ionospheric layers are different at night), and the effects of the Sun. Our instructor also said it takes a bit of luck or magic (he called it the Walt Disney Effect) to establish a link. I now have a better understanding of why amateur radio operators get so excited about making contact with skywave across long distances.
We boxed up most of the house for a couple of weeks before the move. We hired a moving company to move the furniture and whatever we had boxed up. Even after that we still had to make probably a dozen trips with the SUV to get various things not boxed or too fragile that we didn't want them to move it. We only packed them good enough to move a mile in a car instead of stacked in a big truck by people that don't care as much about our breakables. We'll probably unbox stuff as we need it until the day the next movers come to pack it all up for long-term storage or headed for Sweden.