Thursday, September 20, 2007

S & J's Mini Mart Now Open!

I haven't been sitting around all week eating everything in sight...we have actually just got back from our trip to Dubai. Very interesting trip...but more posts on that later.

OK, back to the arrival of the food on Friday. After many delays, we finally heard that our food would be arriving on probably Friday. However, we do not receive a time (or time frame) that it will actually be delivered to our house...from what I had heard, they just show up and someone had better be home to receive the food. Well, Friday afternoon, I had a meeting at husband's office that I needed to attend, so I passed off the house keys to our head security guard in case the food would arrive while I was out. After the meeting, I considered staying around waiting for S to get done working, but decided instead to go back home to finish getting ready for our trip to Dubai since we were leaving early Saturday morning.

My friend called me around 5ish to see if my food had came as hers had just arrived. I told her no...well she knew that we were leaving in the morning and really needed to get our delivery that night, so she passed on to the delivery people to get my stuff to me (there are more than one delivery trucks, so her delivery people had to pass the message on to the truck with my stuff). I don't know what she said to them exactly, but within 10 minutes I received a phone call from the delivery people wanting directions to my house and within 10 minutes after that my food had arrived. Yippee! I was doing the happy dance!

Well due to the fact that I think India has every known bug out there, I decided that all of the boxes needed to be sorted through Friday night before leaving Saturday morning. After all, who knows where the food had been for the last 6 weeks, and the last thing I wanted to do was come home from Dubai to a house full of cock roaches.

Well S and I had 27 boxes of food...but also we received 16 boxes of food for some people who are moving here in a couple of months. So I start going through our food. One of the first things I come across is a box full of boxes of cereal (I had ordered around 50 boxes of cereal...we eat it non-stop). Well the box had a lot of damage on one of the corners. The box of cereal in that corner had it's corner ripped off (oh well, I figured...only 49 other boxes to eat, I guess I can sacrifice one). There was lose cereal floating around the big cardboard box, so right away I was glad I was going through everything...this would have attracted a lot of bugs...probably ants by the time we got back from vacation. Well as I'm cleaning this box out, I discover that besides lose cereal floating around that there is also dog food lose in my box. OK, now we have a dog...but she is living in the U.S. with my parents, and I hadn't ordered any dog food in my shipment...so how did I end up with lose dog food floating around in one of my boxes? Well after closer inspection, my destroyed box of cereal had a lot of dog food mixed in the bag...almost like the box got ripped open, the contents fell on the floor (along with someone else's dog food), someone shoveled it all back into my box of cereal. So anyway, I had to call my mom and ask her why she shipped me dog food flavored cereal!



The big brown chunks are the dog food pieces. Note the lower left corner of the box is completely gone.

Well, some of the rest of our boxes were in pretty sad shape, but in the end all we had to sacrifice were two boxes of cereal that were opened.



I'm pretty sure this is not how this box was originally packaged. I was confident that I would have some damaged stuff in it. In the end, all I had was a bunch of dented canned goods.

So, I worked away at emptying the boxes looking for bugs. S joined me when he got home from work. He was grumbling the entire time that this was a great way to start vacation. We got the majority of our stuff organized and put away.



In the end, it looks like we could open are very own mini mart. Some of the canned goods I may have went a little overboard with my ordering. Thus, my next shipment should be considerably smaller. I did realize that I forgot to order a few things. No big deal. I've lived this long without...what's a few more months? My mom did a great job of shopping for me...although I had to harass her about sending us a can of split pea ham soup...does she really think we would eat this?

Well, after we got done with all of our boxes, I insisted that we go through the other people's boxes. I had forewarned the wife that I was going to do this. So, S continues to grumble because now we have to sort through all of their stuff and repack it into boxes. Not to mention that we still had a mess of boxes and packing paper from our stuff. Well, everything in our friends' boxes was looking pretty good...that is until one of the very last boxes I opened. I knew there was a problem when the outside of the box was crawling with ants. I opened the box and one of their Hershey's chocolate syrups had came open. Chocolate covered ants everywhere! A few of their canned goods lost their labels (although I was kind enough to write on the can what the contents where...I don't know this couple well enough, or I would have just had them guess what was inside!).

In the end, I was glad to have stayed up until 11pm and went through everything instead of waiting until after we got back. I was also glad that the shipment came when it did...or I would have had an ant colony living in my house. Also, I was very glad that we ended up on the 9am flight to Dubai and not the 4am flight that we had originally thought we were going to be taking.

So, now I guess I don't have any excuses about not cooking dinner for S!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awwww, the ants found their "happy place."

Stephanie said...

We had an oatmeal container with the corner ripped out. I put this up to the nice customs people taking a look to see what it was and also their way of saying hello. They did the same thing with one of my boxes of detergent - put it back in a kroger bag and then got the box wet. NICE PEOPLE!

The Green Family said...

Thank you so much for storing all our stuff and checking it all out! We really appreciate it! I hope this wasn't a huge pain for you! Like I said I went a bit overboard! But then food was one of my biggest concerns.