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| Monday, December 31, 2007 |
| Cold Feet |
According to my countdown timer on Facebook, it is just under 8 days until we leave the country... we leave Adelaide on Thursday, however, so we have now officially reached the mad-rush stage. Qantas lets us have 32 kg on domestic flights, and we are flying Qantas to Darwin. From Darwin to London we take Royal Brunei, who have a limit of 20kg of checked baggage per passenger. Mr Ata is out installing surround-sound at his parent's house, and Ata is (supposedly) doing a practice-pack. So far, it looks as though we will be fine to Darwin but may need to do a little reshuffling & leaving-behind of things before departing Darwin. And there are three cupboards that still have a litter of unresolved items on the shelves, and the weather is filthy-hot, and Ata is suddenly struck by that clenching sense of fear that can find no cause to attach itself to... this is the cold feet stage of making a major life change. The point when the thought that the way things were was just EASY slams you across the back of the skull, the realisation that this is HARD follows it up, and the confronting knowledge that the future is UNCERTAIN is close behind for the hat-trick of head injury.
I was going to post some pictures of things I was throwing out, and also of my birthday cupcakes which turned out satisfactorily (and very unnecessarily) pretty. I decorated them with icing butterflies that I made All By Myself - well, okay, I bought the ready-to-roll flower paste icing and the mould to shape them, but I moulded & painted them myself. It was ridiculously unnecessarily and insanely time-consuming. Exactly the sort of project I like to take on when I should be busy doing other things.
Mr Ata has just called to say the install is not going well and he will be there a while longer. We still haven't gotten rid of an external monitor & keyboard that we are using with the laptop. The laptop & external hard drives that Mr Ata wants to take will probably eat up most of our carry-on baggage allowance, leaving just enough space for my current Perfect Pillow (that I refuse to leave behind) and a couple of books. I have no TV to watch to distract myself from the creeping fingers of loss that I had thought would wait another day or two before they began to tickle my spine. Ah well. All things pass in time. |
posted by Ata @ 6:52 pm  |
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| Monday, December 17, 2007 |
| Garagey Goodness |
Last weekend we had our Last Garage Sale. We've had three in total. The first weekend in December we had garage sales on Saturday and Sunday, then a week off, and then just Saturday last weekend.
Mr Ata had done some research & discovered that many people recommend putting only your street name - not the number - in any garage sale advertising. This discourages people from turning up an hour before your advertised start time in the hopes of snagging a bargain early. It proved to be good advice. We advertised a start time of 7:30 am, and left the house at 7am to put boxes with signs on them out on the main roads (and pick up breakfast) - on both weekends we noted several cars cruising the street carefully inspecting every house for a suggestion of garage sale activity. We very deliberately ignored them. On the first day, we were 10 minutes late opening the door, and got reprimanded by a couple of enthusiastic garage sale goers. Last weekend, there were a few cars parked up & down the street when we got back from putting out the street signs, and as we got out of our car some people leaped out of their own vehicles & began following us down the driveway. I went around the back of the shed to go in the little door & open the big sliding door from the inside. The peg that holds the door shut is a little old & rusty and took a bit of fiddling with to get it to lift, so I was still scowling at the bottom of the door as I slid it back... and then looked up to the sight of about 20 people stampeding down the driveway. I stood there openmouthed for a heartbeat, until it occurred to me I was about to get trampled, and I got shouldered aside by a few people as I tried to get out of their way. A warning to anyone contemplating a garage sale - don't mess about with those people. They're like buffalo: cranky, unpredictable, and particularly dangerous in herds.
While I took the bargain-hunting hordes pawing through the accumulated detritus of our lives with good grace most of the time, there was one woman who particularly annoyed me. She came on the first Saturday, and browsed through everything making little comments just loud enough for me to hear - "Ooh, that's ugly. Mmph - cheap. Look at that." Then she would offer me a fraction of what I was asking, as if making sure I knew how crappy my possessions were would make me more inclined to let her buy them for fifty cents. She was particularly interested in a blockmounted poster of Jeff Buckley (that I had stickered at $10, knowing full well I probably wouldn't get it, but I figured it was worth a try) She came back to it several times, making comments about it - "Oh, my son likes him. He might like it. I don't know. Probably he wouldn't. Maybe I'll get it for my son." She asked how much I wanted. I said $10. She said, "Oh, no, that's too much. I just thought my son might like it. I'll give you a dollar." I said no. She poked at the blockmounting and said, "Oh, that's just cheap. No. I'll give you $2." I said no again. She had a couple more goes at insulting the poster, and bought some other things instead.
Last Saturday, the same woman turned up again. She made a beeline for the Jeff Buckley poster, picked it up and said, "I'll give you a dollar." Without waiting for an answer, she put it down next to the table where I was taking money & went into the shed to pick out some other things. I called Mr Ata over & quietly asked him to take the poster inside, having already decided it'd be better Ebayed. When he came back, I asked him to do the money for a minute while I went inside - the very presence of that woman was putting my blood pressure up already, and I just couldn't bear the thought of listening to another litany of "Oh, that's tacky. No. Ugly. I'll give you fifty cents." By the time she left, I was muttering to myself that I didn't care if it only sold for a dollar on Ebay - I'd rather it went to someone else even if I had to give the thing away.
I listed the poster on Ebay last night, at a starting price of $0.99 and with postage of $15. By this morning, I had six watchers, two questions, and one bid. Obviously SOMEONE thinks it's worth paying at least $15.99 for.
So, garage sales are over and done with, and all up I think we made about enough to buy ourselves a new mobile phone each. We also sold my car to a guy who, after learning we were moving overseas, seemed keen to offer us money for just about anything he laid his eyes on - including the house. We are quite determined to hang on to the house, however, and signed up with a real estate agent to manage the property for us while we are gone. They put an ad on the net last week, and apparently have had a huge response. The property market is very tight in Adelaide at the moment - there's not a lot available to buy OR rent. Tomorrow afternoon we are having an open inspection - "How long do you want the property for?" I asked the property manager. "Oh," she said casually, "about 15 minutes." I am now envisioning a scene similar to Saturday's garage sale, where people come stampeding up the driveway as soon as the doors are opened. We will not be here to witness this one, though. At least a 15-minute open doesn't really give people much time to steal stuff. |
| posted by Ata @ 11:42 am |
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| Thursday, December 13, 2007 |
| The Loss of Wisdom |
I had my wisdom teeth out on Tuesday. All four, despite only one being problematic - I figured that I I was going to have to do, I only wanted to do it once. Just now I ate two M&M's. I do not think I will eat any more for a while yet, because (a) it hurts, and (b) I can't taste them anyway.
It actually hasn't been too bad, really. The anaesthetic knocked me about a bit more than anaesthetic usually does, and I felt dizzy and unstable all Tuesday evening and a good part of Wednesday as well. The left side is pretty much pain-free, to the extent that when I woke up from surgery I thought they had perhaps forgotten to remove those ones. The right side is where the problem tooth was, and the hole left by the lower-right impacted wisdom tooth is causing me the most trouble. They seem to have stopped oozing blood, though.
The most bother, now, stems from the fact that I seem to have lost sensation in my tongue. Down the left side I have normal sensation, but down the right side - extending slightly past the midline of the tongue, more so at the back than the tip - I can't feel pain, temperature, or taste, just pressure. I still have motor control, though. So I guess that's something. Sensation in my right-lower lip is a little dulled as well. On the plus side, it doesn't really matter to me whether my coffee's hot or cold - so drinking cold coffee because I'm not meant to have hot drinks doesn't bother me. I do get the strange effect of feeling that everything I put in my mouth is unevenly flavoured - taking a mouthful of saltwater to rinse my mouth out with gives me the impression that the salt hasn't dissolved, and tastes really strong on the left side but completely bland on the right side. I can't really identify how strong things taste, either, so I suspect that the cordial I had this morning was probably somewhat stronger than I'd usually mix it - I couldn't taste it, so I kept adding more.
The hard rubbish collection came around today, so we have finally disposed of the pile of decomposing cardboard boxes that were cluttering up the back verandah. Mr Ata gave up the alpha server that had been saved from disposal at his workplace a year ago (he was careful to clean the hard drives, though) for the purpose of home systems recovery practice. The assortment of bits of wood and ratty planks that have been hiding around the yard were gathered up and left on the street as well, along with a Very Large Box full of general rubbish which we had feared the hard rubbish collectors may not take away (we have, on occasion, received nasty notes from the hard rubbish people when we leave out things that are not on their list of Things We Dispose Of. While general rubbish wasn't on the list of Things We Don't Dispose Of, we had feared that it might be in the small print somewhere that we hadn't seen). There will be no more hard rubbish collections in our area between now and when we leave (they come around every month or so in our council area, provided you have called the council & booked in to the collection day), so the more we can get rid of now, the better - there's no charge for hard rubbish pickup, but we do have to pay if we want to take it to the dump.
One more garage sale next weekend, and anything left after that is being donated to the Salvation Army. I am surprised by what has sold and what has not - pretty much all the tools went in the first sale-day, along with an assortment of Household Stuff, but things like a nearly-complete crockery set and some very smart serving-bowls have generated no interest. Oh well. The more we get rid of, the better. |
| posted by Ata @ 2:21 pm |
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| Saturday, December 08, 2007 |
| Ace of Cards |
So. Ata has en evening alone at home, and feeling down and cranky. Under the circumstances, a perfect opportunity for some blogging.
The house lies in ruins about me. Alright, a touch exaggerated, but with one's entire life spread around on the carpet and laid out in the garage for strangers to paw through, one can surely be forgiven for feeling a little melancholic? We have three weeks to go, three more weeks before starting on the Next Big Adventure, and it can't come soon enough. Ata looks at herself and can't help but feel damaged, broken, stunted - only half of who she should have been, and her future seems cracked like old glass, brittle and crumbling as sandstone. The whole year is one of change - babies and new jobs, businesses begun and lives ended. Ten years in one city is long enough. Time to be gone.
What have I learned this year, what have I learned? I have learned it is hard to be childless when all around you seem to be glorying in their new children. Perhaps it would be easier if I had no choice in the matter, if I could say, "Well, I just cannot" - and then they would just look away in sympathy without prying further. Instead I say, "Well, you know, I have some Health Issues..." and if they are polite, no-one pries further at the edges of that weak excuse. I have learned that regardless of how close you are, new mothers are secretly (and not always entirely secretly) convinced that those without children are somehow deficient - selfish, perhaps, or otherwise lacking in love.
"You just don't know what love is until you have children," croons one who has had a particularly easy time of the transition to motherhood. And Ata pretends not to have overheard that comment - although it stings her to the soul to realise that taking time off work to be available to support that same friend in the chaotic days at home with a new baby does not count as love. Nor does rushing over at a moments notice to bring the cats in because the new mother does not want to put her baby down for long enough to corral recalcitrant cats. Or staying up until 3am because Ata's husband is out providing Ata's friend's husband with a listening ear when their relationship becomes difficult. It is painful to learn that, regardless of how badly you want to support your friends as they bring home new babies, none of your willingness to be on-call, to assist with laundry or shopping, to rearrange your social schedule to allow for the changes a baby makes, some will not count this as love because you hold no blood ties - no genetic bondf to take 'friendship' to 'love'. Others do not want to "impose", and so you lose touch because they do not feel they can ask you to meet at a different time, or in a different place, or put up with a crying child - and no insistence of yours will convince them otherwise. And you wonder if you are making the "right" choice - as if a baby is a ticket to a private club, and holding it out in front of you will make your friends suddenly decide they can trust you after all.
I have learned that it is difficult and heartbreaking to see your parents struggle with the mortality of their own parents. To sit beside a hospital bed and watch a once-strong adult fumble with their spoon of jelly is like seeing echoes of a future - what is now my father helping his father will one day be me helping my father - or my mother - or my husband - or perhaps my husband helping me. Echoes of a past, too, as I realise what other people saw in me when they came to visit, and probably what they will see again in a visiting-time to come. And so I counsel my mother - "All you can do is your best - you can make choices only for today, not for yesterday or tomorrow" - and wonder if, in a future waiting for me, a favoured niece or nephew will be saying the same about me to my brother or sister.
I have discovered a great reserve of patience and tolerance for the temperaments of others that I had thought I did not have. I have discovered that I trust too easily but ask too little of others for them to trust me. I have discovered the danger in trusting others, but not the hard way - yet (good thing I am moving!). I have discovered that I am more ambitious than I thought I was.
Today - in the midst of throwing out most of the contents of a Box of Assorted Stuff - I discovered a note penned by Mixed Hobblings and bearing a greeting from the Great Hobb herself. And I smiled a little, and smoothed it out, and tucked it in the front of Shaman's Crossing - discovering again the Kindness of Hobblings.
Also in the midst of packing, I discovered this year's Virgin Credit Card. It arrived in the post in July, and was promptly put away in a drawer (my Virgin Card is a 'reserve' card, so the expiry of the old one went unnoticed). The letter attached to the card is signed by whomever it is that is charged with the responsibility of authorising the issue of replacement Virgin Credit Cards, and underneath his name is his position title - "Ace of Cards".
Three weeks, three weeks to go. I cannot wait for something new. |
| posted by Ata @ 7:05 pm |
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