Oof.

Parenthood Gripe of the Day:

There's nothing like a swift, sudden "hi-YAH!" punch from your rambunctious 4-year old at a perfect right-angle directly between your legs into your crotch to send shockwaves of pain through your body and really wake you up in the morning. Maybe this is just his subtle way of telling us he doesn't want any younger siblings.

Reminds me of a recent video on the Fail Blog.

Moving Gripe of the Day:

Hooray, I can print again!

Before the movers came to pack up our stuff in Hawaii, I specifically packed up my laser printer in the original box it came in with the pieces of styrofoam specially designed to hold the printer in place inside the box. I also specifically packed the print-server in the box with the printer so that I wouldn't have to hunt for it on the Virginia side of our move.

A month later, I saw the printer box come off the moving truck here in Virginia, and I felt a sense of satisfaction and reassurance that I had the ability to print again.

Um... not so much.

I opened the printer box to find that the packers had removed the specially designed styrofoam and wrapped the printer up in packing paper.

And there was no print server in the box.

This meant I had NO printing capability. Besides the convenience the print server provides by allowing us to print from any of our computers on the LAN, it also serves a very important function. My laser printer is an old but very reliable Epson Action Laser 1500 with the old style printer cable.

My wife and I both use laptops now.

Newer model laptops don't have the old standard printer cable plug. They just assume nowadays everyone has USB. ...or a print server.

So now my unpacking quest has been to find the print server. WHO KNOWS what THAT box will be labeled. Any guesses? Like my previous quest to find the iron, the printer and print server were in the closet under the stairs with the iron. You'd think maybe it would have been in the same box with the iron, but no...

Thank goodness our Unaccompanied Baggage (UB) shipment arrived on Thursday.

Aside for anyone not knowing what an UB shipment is: When you move overseas with the military, you get three shipments. Your Household Goods (HHG) shipment is the bulk of your stuff that you are taking with you to your next duty station. Your Non-Temporary Storage (NTS) shipment is stuff you don't think you'll have room for overseas and you're either sending to or receiving back from storage. Then, you get an Unaccompanied Baggage (UB) shipment that's limited to like one or two thousand pounds.

Some people call the UB shipment the "express" shipment because it's a limited weight and supposedly travels via AIR instead of SHIP, so THEORETICALLY it should get there faster than your HHG shipment. So far in our two overseas shipments, neither UB shipment has earned the title of "express." End Aside.

We packed out our HHG shipment near the beginning of August so that it would get across the ocean and meet us in Virginia pretty close to our arrival date. We got the Aloha Furniture and loan locker stuff for the kitchen, and we kept a small amount of stuff at the house to send in the UB shipment just before we left Hawaii - stuff like the bicycle I was riding to work, one of our satellite dish receivers, the X-Box, etc.

Now getting back to the printer story...

We had sent my printer and the print server ahead in the HHG shipment, and kept my wife's printer (okay, so I just think of it as "my wife's" printer because we bought it to replace her old printer that she had before we were married) to send in the UB shipment.

Since our UB shipment arrived this week, we at least have my wife's printer that's a newer HP with a USB cable.

The search continues for the print server though. I just had to share my frustration with the packing company who apparently didn't like my printer packing job.

Again, keeping things in perspective, if this is the worst of the stories that come out of this move, then it'll be a pretty good move. Overall, this move has still been MUCH better than some of our moves inside CONUS.