I’m delighted to report that our shipment of personal goods from England was delivered today, and everything arrived in perfect shape! All the ceramic molds look good as far as I can tell without unwrapping each one. I was worrying that US customs might have smashed them to bits to see if the mold plaster was really something else…! I’ll have a big job organizing and storing them in the coming weeks. They are all jumbled up and the only way I can tell which mold is a leg etc. is to open them up and look. (They are only labeled as to which horse they belong to, not which body part.) The two bisque china horses I customized also arrived unbroken. Hooray for that ultra-memory foam!

Speaking of foam, the molds were packed into 10 wooden crates that were lined with 4″ foam, and they let me keep all the foam! That is probably several hundred dollars worth of the stuff, which I can use when shipping finished chinas to customers. That was a very nice extra benefit on top of the amazing fact that we didn’t have to pay to get all those molds home. I still can’t believe how that all worked out. A couple years ago when I learned that I was now the owner of all those molds, I figured I was going to have to make a special trip over and pay a ton of $$$ in shipping to get them all home–and figure out just how to do it by myself.

We’ve already gotten all our clothes unpacked and put away. (We really didn’t bring that much stuff even for a potential 2-year stay, and I hardly wore a quarter of the clothes I brought.) I am so glad to see again all my little souvenirs and mementos of the places we visited in the UK. I bought art prints, art glass from Malta, hand-made stained glass from Cornwall, lots of little things from the museum shops, a crystal dram glass with etched thistle from Edinburgh… and below are my Lilliput Lane model of Windsor Castle’s Round tower, my little Stonehenge snow globe, and a really pretty mirror that looks like a stone window.

I love to have things like this around me almost more than I like to look at photos. They instantly remind me of where I was when I got them. I also bought two lovely and different pill boxes. Since I am now taking thyroid replacement pills the rest of my life, no way am I going to tote around an ugly plastic bottle. I knew if I could find such a thing anywhere it would be in the UK, and I was right. I will be reminded daily of our time in the UK from a pill box I carry with me everywhere!

All’s well that ends well!