These past few weeks have been ultimately stressful.
I've been keeping my eyes peeled for any rare Crystal Chronicles merch and finally found a couple things to snap up. Unfortunately, I shipped everything out with UPS. What was supposed to be 2-3 day shipping has turned into going on 4 weeks.
My box arrived to the Louisville, KY worldhub on September 17th and has bascially been held hostage since. A couple days ago, a lot of people (myself included) got a "The package is undeliverable and is in the process of being disposed of according to the local guidelines" alert on their tracking.
My proxy, Zenmarket, gave me a heads up a couple days prior to this saying that they were told by UPS that my box wasn't able to clear customs and to call UPS customer service, and by the time I had gotten that message I had less than 11 hours to get in contact with them. Unfortunately, this was an impossible task as everybody affected was calling UPS about their boxes as well and wait times were 3+ hours. I have limited free time in my daily life (actually less than 5 hours to eat lunch/dinner, decompress, get chores done if I have the energy. You get the idea).
I still have yet to hear back from Zenmarket about whether they're able to claw back my box from UPS; but interestingly, as of 2 days ago my tracking has updated to another import/on-the-way scan. I am taking this update with a grain of salt and not holding my breath. There is a 50/50 chance my box either gets clawed back by Zenmarket or it winds up at my front door soon, the latter is the honestly the preferrable option at this point as I did tell Zenmarket I'd pay whatever for them to recall my box from UPS and I'd prefer to not fork out another 10k yen in shipping and DDP costs again.
I'm also in the middle of a move and am finding it difficult to focus and/or have energy (despite my job going back to the usual 6,30am start 8 hour shifts) to pack stuff. I have so much shit that I still have yet to pack up, namely my books (halfway there! The doujinshi collection is packed up, everything else is not) and my anime/video game figures/merchandise. I gave myself one rule: anything that can fit into 4 large size Walmart boxes (sans collectibles) and the rest is going in the trash. My sister, on the other hand, has not lifted a god damn finger in terms of cleaning up her ungodly hoard of worn-to-the-point-of-being-unfixable clothing and the deadline I set for moving out is the weekend after election day. I am tired and have hit the point of no return in terms of being able to deal with this situation, I have plans to shove all of her shit into contractor's garbage bags and either throwing everything onto a pallet in dad's basement or just straight up throwing it all to the curb.
In lighter news, the holiday season is rapidly approaching. And as is Youtube's apparent yearly harassment tradition, I am actively being plagued by this this video once again and now I find myself itching to dig around my dad's DVD closet for my childhood copy of The Polar Express to rewatch and for shenanigans. Though I was given an equally stupid (read: funny) idea by someone recently regarding this video. I'm also entertaining the idea of buying some twill yardage for and maaaaaabye some minky and learning which tension settings work on my Brother PE800 for some very fun embroidery shenanigans. It's a hard maybe, though.