Tag: LBC

I Guess It Couldn’t All Make It Through Shipping OK

Bradley Farless4 Comments

One of the running jokes about having things shipped by the military is that you’re bound to have something get broken.  When I was a kid, we did a military move from Hahn AFB in Germany back to the US and the movers managed to lose a whole section of a German wall shrunk, as well as damage some other stuff.

German-Shrunk

This is an example of a German wall shrunk.  How do you lose even a section of something so big?

I thought I’d left that behind along with my service to the Army, but I guess mistreatment of shipped goods is a universal problem.  My HP F2120 All-In-One didn’t quite survive the trip.  The glass on the scanner bed was shattered in one corner.  It’s a shame too, because I was hoping to get started on scanning stuff and now I have to see about getting reimbursed.  I have no idea how to start the process.  I guess we’ll take the receipt and pictures of the broken device to an LBC office to find out what the procedure is.

DSC04871

This is what’s left of my HP F2120 All-in-One. Thanks a lot guys!

The real issue is that there’s a huge price difference in these types of things between Singapore and the Philippines.  Even if we get a full reimbursement on the scanner, it wouldn’t cover the cost of the exact same scanner in Manila.  There’s a mark-up.  Singapore is one of the cheapest places in the world to buy electronics, so unless we get a one-for-one exchange where they give us money to cover the purchase cost of a new unit, we’re just SOL.

Can’t win ‘em all I guess.

Speaking of that, I’m still engaged in an e-mail battle with Philippine Airlines to get a reimbursement on the pet carrier that they damaged during the fiasco where one of my cats wound up running around on Changi’s tarmac and in the belly of the plane before take-off.

Tomorrow (or later today) I’m heading to the Bureau of Immigration in Manila.  I have to get my Visa taken care of before I wind up being here illegally.  Hopefully that all goes smoothly!

LBC and the Cat Welcoming Committee

Bradley Farless4 Comments

Slowly but surely we’re making minor improvements to our living arrangements.  It’s something of an uphill battle and I’ve been trying to clean and organize as I go, with short dedicated periods of cleaning up every day.  Parts of the house seem to have not been used in months or years.  That was the case with the room we cleaned up during our first visit.

I haven’t gotten back to organizing the bookshelves on the second floor.  There are still books all over the place as well as files and random bits of paper that will probably wind up as tinder for the fire I plan on making to burn quite a bit of this junk.  I really want to get back to that, but other things keep popping up.

LBC Shipping Box

The day after we got here, the first box we shipped from Singapore arrived.

Cat Welcoming Committee 1

Cat Welcoming Committee 2 

After the welcoming committee finished using the outside of the box as a scratching board, we started to unpack it and bring everything upstairs.

Cats on the Gym

It was a pretty happy occasion for all of us, since there were things in it we could put to immediate use, like the cats’ gym, some cables I was looking for, clothes, and the tool that you have to use to remove a SIM card from an iPhone.

We’ve been doing a lot of shopping as well.  Living here is temporary, but it’s just not going to work if there’s no furniture, which there wasn’t.  Luckily, furniture is cheap in the Philippines, if you know where to go and shop around for good deals.  The problem we’re facing now is overcrowding, and we haven’t even received the 2nd and 3rd boxes we sent from Singapore yet, so we’ve been buying plastic boxes to organize everything.  We’ll put them on top of the dresser and under the bed.  That should help us utilize the space effectively.  When we move to Manila, pretty much all of this stuff will go with us and we’ll have more room for it.  For now we’re staying in my wife’s old room, so it’s understandable that there’s not much space.

Computer Desk

One lucky break is that I keep finding scrap metal everywhere.  I’m going to make quite a hefty sum when I sell all of it, which I can then reinvest into further renovations around the house.  I swear there are half a dozen unfinished projects in here and for every unfinished one I see, there are that many more that I’d like to start on.  I’m not willing to make that large of an investment here, but we’ll do what we can while we’re here.