Ah, the joys of moving. Sounds like Creo provided us with better movers when we moved to Belgium but it could also have been luck. Moving back was more like you described, but mostly because a) the moving crew couldn’t speak English and b) they insisted on smoking just outside open windows. Ah well, someone should have warned you that some breakage is just part of the moving game. If you didn’t want to have anything broken you should have stayed put. Or, to put it another way, you could have doubled the cost with guys who took twice as along but probably the extra cost would have outweighed the savings in breakage. There’s a tradeoff going on here. On the other hand, the folks who moved into our house while we were in Belgium organized it themselves, gave it to the cheapest bidders and had the delivery people drive off with one of their boxes still in the truck, never to be seen again.

BTW, I have some relatives about your age in Boston that I could put you in touch with if you need advice, help, rescue from the DMV purgatory, and whatnot.

Good luck with the assimilation. I’ve been here almost 15 years and I still find words (let alone history, entertainment figures, phrases, etc.) where Americans look at my blankly. Zee, silverware, napkin. It’s just the start!