Well that was nice.

Isn't it kind of amazing how things work out sometimes?

I've been stressing about packing for months. Really, months. Do we ship anything? How? How much? Do we buy space on someone else's lift? Ship via New York, meaning we have to mail it all there and then pick it up at the shipper's Jerusalem office? Limit ourselves to the luggage allowance or pay for extra? I have been coming to a definite decision every few days, always a different one. Last week I decided to just deal with the luggage allowance and store/toss everything else. But the realities of that were just not practical. Seriously, what do I leave here: the kids' pajamas? my pajamas? the knitting needles? the pots and pans? the English books to read to the kids? 900 lb of luggage sounds like so much but it isn't much at all when you are moving a family of 6 across continents. I could just buy some of it again but it doesn't make sense when we have things we like already.

Then I decided, well, I'll just pay the excess luggage fees. But then I looked at our duffels and boxes and started to panic because they're all weighed out to 49 lb and what if the scale is off and we are charged $900--$50 per overweight piece?

Then I went into work today and when I got home there was a voicemail from my boss. I called her back and she said, sorry I missed you today, I wanted to give you a letter. About what? About your raise. And your $500 bonus for working so hard this year.

!!!!

(This never happens where I work, btw. At least if it does I've never heard of it. We didn't even get raises last year; I got a good one, relatively speaking, plus the bonus, which totally fell out of the sky so far as I'm concerned.)

Then the phone rang again. It was a friend who is sending a lift, from our neighborhood, to a city in southern Israel; we'd already dismissed the idea of shipping stuff with her as unrealistic because we'd have to get it and it wouldn't be worth it. But now, the lift is going to cost $8 a cubic foot, not $12, which is why she called. And we could pay someone to just drive it in a car--we won't have to get movers for the 6-8 boxes we'd be putting on. $300 or so for the lift space, a couple hundred dollars to pay someone to do the drive. $500.

Wow.