Back From the Dead and Sunset.

Well we finally have a broadband connection again. The previous occupants of the house we have moved in to didn’t disconnect their phone service. So until that was sorted out we couldn’t order our new connection.

The nine or so days since I last posted have presented one problem after another. As if moving house wasn’t enough we had to deal with one minor family tragedy and face the fear of another.

On Friday we took the hard decision that we had to euthanize our 14 year old family cat. We have had Sapphire since she was a small kitten. As a purebred Siamese she was getting quite old. Physically she was still fit, but she has been getting confused lately and clearly suffering a cat form of dementia. In the past she has always been content as long as she had her people around her. Previously moving house has never distressed her but this time she was continually crying and was obviously distressed.

So when I came home from work on Friday, four of us took Sapphire up to the vet and said goodbye. Then as Io my middle daughter cradled her, the vet put her to sleep. My three girls were all reduced to sobs and I have to say I was in tears as well.

On Sunday we were over at the old place cleaning up. Lu, our youngest managed to trip while walking backwards. Her head went straight down onto concrete with a sickening crack. She didn’t loose consciousness but she was clearly groggy, and had a lump the size of an egg inside 20 seconds.

You don’t muck around with head injuries, so it was straight up to the ER at the local hospital. The diagnosis “minor concussion”. Lu was held for observation for 6 hours. During that time, she was prevented from going to sleep and had obs taken every 30 minutes. Gradually her condition improved and the doctor said she was fine to be discharged.

The instructions we were given on discharge were that during the night she had to be woken every two hours so we could check she was responsive and assess her coordination. On one level I felt quite confidant that she was “on the mend”, but it was one long night.

The next day Lu was a bit quiet (which is not at all like her), but the past two days she has been back to her normal self. All in all a frightening experience, but no harm done. Except perhaps to my grey hair count!

On a lighter note we are settling in to our new house (although unpacking seems to go on forever). As a bonus the back veranda looks roughly west and we have had a couple of nice sunsets.

Me being me out came the camera:
This was Monday nightAnd this was Tuesday night

Moooooving

As you might guess from the title of this post this whole move really is becoming a saga.

Packing. Packing.Packing, it seems un-ending.


I had a hire truck booked for tomorrow (not just a ute, a proper 3 tonne van). Then I get an email from the hire company telling me they had double booked and I was the lucky sod who missed out.

As we Aussies are wont to say BUGGER!

So after a little hair tearing I began ringing and emailing around to book another. Finally with a sense of relief I had one booked with another company for the morning.
YAY!

So all things being equal our move will be mostly over tomorrow evening.

This brings me to another point. I have been fairly slack in posting and in responding to all your comments over the past little while. I'm not super human enough to work, pack and post all in the same limited number of hours we are allotted in any given day. I want to say a big thank you to everyone who has read my posts recently and especially to those who have been commenting. Thank you all for being so supportive as I ruminate about self publishing and the like.

Finally, thanks to the vagaries of the Oz telecommunications system we are likely to be without a broadband connection for some days after the move. The phone line is connected so I will have access to a dial-up connection but that will send me mad just checking email. (Dim dark memories of 300 baud modems in the bad old days briefly surface. Shudder!).
So I expect I will not be able to post again until next week at the earliest. I hope it will all be sorted by then.

In the meantime all of you good people take care!

The Moving Saga Continues

Not a proper post at all this evening. I’ve been busy, our house move has run into a minor hurdle. We have decided to hire a truck and move our stuff ourselves. This is because we can save about $1000 on the best quote we got from professional removalists by doing it ourselves. This means a slight delay until I can get a mate to help with shifting the heavy items.

Anyway not wanting to be entirely idle I hired a ute and began moving our bookshelves and book cartons over the weekend.

The hire ute loaded to the gills with bookshelves and cartons.Next week, when my mate is available, I will hire a 3 tonne truck (lorry for my UK readers) and hopefully bring our moving saga to a quick and relatively pain free end.

In the mean time we have been packing the rest of our all too numerous possessions. I knew I should have listened to those arguments on not being too materialist.

Next: Remembering.

EEK It’s all too much!

My house is littered with book shelves.
For example:
I custom built these shelves for the house we used to own, but couldn’t bring myself to leave them behind, so they moved with us.

Also

And
This is the hutch on the back of my writing desk.
(for those who are nosey curious, you can see the titles of the sort of things I have been using for researching my second novel).

Just for a change
The head of my bed also has a little light reading material taking a rest. My youngest mainly uses hers for homework and trophy storage.
I have to admit that there are a few more book shelves lurking in sections of the house that were just not tidy enough to spread across the internet (all this reading leaves little time for housework, that is my excuse and I am sticking to it)

So all this is lovely and we’ll never die of boredom for want of a book.

But we’re moving after only 12 months in this house. Yuk, Yuk Yuk!

As you can tell I’m a big fan of moving. NOT!

So all these wonderful treasures have to be packed along with all our other bits and pieces, odds and sods and the cat. The only saving grace is we're just moving suburbs, not interstate.

So far we have packed the books on the big shelves in the first piccie. They are big but also misleading. They are deep, so all of the paperbacks are stacked in two rows.
20 book cartons so far. From one set of book shelves!

Did I say 20?

So if I am a little inconsistent with blogging over the next little while please forgive me in advance. I'll be busy tearing my hair out.

Now just ‘cause I need to de-stress.
A headland near the famous Bell’s Beach.