Down come the photos

Yesterday we had another day of clearing away stuff prior to renting out the house. It’s amazing how many bits there are. Do we just live in a house normally with so much stuff and never notice 90% of it? That’s scary.
Cleared away a lot of the framed photos of all the kids and grandchildren, and of me in the three plays I’ve done, as well as the large painting Wally Crossman gave us some years ago (in return for Celia doing gibbing at her house). And then I took down all the photos from our photo board, some of which are real oldies from when our own children were small, or going to school for the first time, or having birthday parties, or looking the spitting image of their own children, or Celia holding up the first salmon she caught. (She’s just been sitting beside me eating salmon on toast!)
The house is looking distinctly bare. Maybe we just keep all this stuff around us to make us feel warm.

Need new glasses, perhaps

I’ve just noticed in the photo that accompanies this blog the phone on top of the CD shelves appears to be pointing at my head – and there’s something else sticking straight up out of my scalp! At least that’s what it looks like at first glance. It’s actually the edge of the door. How our eyes can deceive us.

Insuring the car

Trying to insure the car my brother-in-law has bought on our behalf has been a bit of an issue. Some insurers want almost as much for the insurance as we've paid for the car. Some want to charge us a lot more for a six months' premium than for a year.

Celia tried getting a quote online with one crowd, and got stuck at a certain point each time. Seems that she may have 'answered one of the questions in an unfavorable way.' In the end she emailed them and got a response late last night. Rather than trying the whole thing again, we rang the English number, got through to the guy who written the email (how's that for amazing?), and he was very helpful. What a difference it makes when you get someone who's helpful. (Like yesterday morning I rang the Dept of Justice because they'd sent the police report on my convictions – there aren't any convictions, by the way – in the name of Crown. I find that pretty amazing too, that they should have my name wrong but my details right. But at least when I rang I got straight through to someone who was also helpful, and promised to get onto it straight away.)

This morning we had an email with all the insurance details we needed – price is still on the high side, comparatively, but better than some of the others, so we'll probably go with it. But whatever we do, the cost of insuring a comparatively cheap car is ridiculous.

The photograph is supposed to be of a Peugeot 306 XR hatchback - which is what we're trying to insure.

National Trust membership

One of my in-laws has been trying to email us for a few weeks, but unfortunately she was still emailing my old email address, which I haven't been checking for some time. (Though when I did check, there were some 665 emails awaiting me – 95% of them spam.)

Amongst other things, she wanted to let us know about the NZ branch of the National Trust through whom we can get a membership that will enable us to get into National Trust places in the UK, either free, or at a discount. And it reduces the parking fee as well. Furthermore, getting a membership in NZ is more economical than getting one in England. Now how would you find out about something like that?

So of course we've followed her advice, and taken up a family membership. This means if we have any grand-nieces or nephews that we'd like to take on a trip to one of these places, we can take them on the same basis as ourselves. We don't really know these grand-nieces or nephews as yet, except by the reports we've received from their grandfather, so it will depend what they think of their never-before-seen and aged relations from over the sea. Hopefully we'll get on with them as well as we get on with our own grandchildren.

Only so many more sleeps!

I'm finally starting to feel as though the trip to England has some reality about it. Our suitcases have some clothes in them (far more in my wife's than in mine) and most of the stuff that can be put away is away. (Except for a certain recalcitrant couch.)

Celia's been testing out Skype with the kids, and it's working, for the most part. Though it does seem rather odd to me to be talking through a computer.

I'm having to think seriously about the dates we're going to contact the Electricity people and the phone, and how we're going to do that while still working and such. I'm counting down the days till I finish this job – a great incentive to look forward, I can tell you! This job has almost put me off work for good…work with difficult people, that is.

I'm not sure I'm looking forward to the day I leave, however. There'll be plenty of people I'll be sorry to say goodbye to, even though I've only known them for four months or so, but there are a few I'll be happy to farewell. In my worst moments I feel like telling them what I really think, but I won't. It won't achieve anything at that point, and I'm not even sure that it would make a dent in their self-satisfaction.

We have a car waiting for us in England, courtesy of my brother-in-law. Trying to arrange some insurance for it has been a bit of a mission; in fact, it might cost almost as much to insure it as it's cost to pay for it because we're not residing in England permanently. We'll have to keep working on this.

And we have accommodation organized for several weeks already. Filling in the gaps will be the exciting part!

Removal

One of my wife’s aims before we left was to move our relatively new lounge suite into the littlish room where we’re storing everything. No problem in terms of room in the storage area, but, we discovered, considerable problems in terms of access to it. We got the first, smaller, couch in, with some difficulty, and the lazy-boy chair. But, in spite of struggling for an hour, moving the larger couch back and forward in the hall and turning it upside down and around the other way, there was no way we could get it into the store room. We exercised our brains in every which way, but nothing was going to make that couch go where we wanted it to go.
The problem was that the doorway to the lounge is just a little taller than the doorway to the store room. So, while we could just squeeze the couch out of the lounge, there was no way we could get it through the smaller door, hampered as we were by the doorway on the opposite side, to our bedroom, being not directly opposite, but just off-centre.
Sadly, we had to manoeuvre the large couch back into the lounge again, where we’ll cover it with some blankets in the hope that any spillages from the family that’s going to stay here won’t affect it. So it goes.

Don't bank on it...

Yesterday we received a letter from the Bank in the UK that we're going to be dealing with, asking us to either send them a pin number to enable internet banking, or to ring the number through. Since it was ten o'clock at night when I talked about this with my wife, we decided to ring.

What a schemozzle! For some reason the letter had come addressed only to my wife, so she made the call, while I listened in. The guy at the bank, when they finally answered after a variety of options were presented, and after putting in our account number to help them identify us, didn't really know what my wife was talking about. He said he'd have to ask her several questions, some of which she might have to go away and check and ring back with the answers (!). Anyway, he first asked for her date of birth, which wasn't too much of a problem for her, and then asked if she had a debit card. She said no, because we're due to pick up cards and such when we get to England. That seemed to stump him, somehow, and he asked her to hold for a moment while he went to confer with someone else.

At that point, some canned music came on the phone. It sounded like a tape that's been used over and over, and was wearing out. Not only that, it was the same piece played over and over, some unidentifiable piece played mostly on a piano. We had the joy of listening to it two and a half times through before the bloke came back on the line. A long confer, by the sound of it.

The music reminded me of the canned music used in the public toilets here in Dunedin It's a short piece played on a piano, and on an average visit to the toilet, you'll hear it played at least twice. It has a glitch in the middle, and repeats a couple of bars as a result. Very annoying, if you're a musician who uses the public toilets a lot!

Anyway, when the guy came back on the phone, he said he'd have to put us onto his confrere, and did. She said they couldn't actually help us, because they couldn't do anything until we got our debit cards and we weren't going to be getting those till we got to England! I suspect that someone in one part of the UK sends out these interesting letters, and puts a phone number on them for a different part of the UK – where no one knows what's being done.

The photo isn't of our bank, by the way.

Drifting away

My wife, still searching for the best options internet-wise, while we’re overseas, checked out wireless hotspots last night, and came across The Cloud. We discovered, after some digging, that it would probably be more economical to sign on with them for a year, even though we’re only going to be there six months, than to buy cards for limited times. As far as we can make out, if we sign on, it’ll only cost us 144 pounds, compared to 180 pounds for doing something different over six months. I can’t remember now what the something different was, as I was becoming a bit boggled by that time.
So I think we’ll go for that approach. There are plenty of hotspots around the country, though it might cost us a bit in coffees! But we’ll have access at relatives’ places, I imagine. If not, we’ll be out and about looking for hotspots a good deal of the day. Interesting way to spend a holiday!
Someone at work said, but why would you want internet access a lot of the time? I should have said: why wouldn’t I want to breathe, but I refrained from such sarcasm. There’s enough of it in our office already.

Connectivity

My wife has spent an inordinate amount of time on the Net searching for ways to be able to use our laptop while we’re away. It won’t be a problem when we’re staying with people – we’re assuming they’ll have internet access – but when we’re not with rellies, we’re not quite sure what we’ll do. The laptop is wireless enabled, so internet cafes are presumably an option, but short of travelling around the streets searching for someone who’s got wireless and then piggybacking we’ve struck no gold so far.
We did look at mobile connect, a little device that fits into the laptop and enables you to use your mobile phone as a receiver, but this looks to be a quite expensive approach. We may just have to check things out when we get there and see how it goes. Prices in the UK are quite a bit higher than in NZ, for internet access, but being without it for long periods means I won’t be able to enliven the reading world with my regular posts.
And we can’t have that now, can we?

Living with Less?

At present we're living in a house where half the stuff is packed away - and more is to go away yet in the small bedroom that's been allotted as the store-room while we're gone. We're renting the house out, so we've been advised (and even if we hadn't been, my wife would have insisted on doing it) to pack away things we don't want to lose, or that are of any value to us. There have been arguments over what's worth storing and what isn't. They will no doubt continue - and I will lose, almost invariably. What's a bit shocking, though, is that we're not really missing anything that's stored away already. It goes to show how much clutter there is in this house, and how much of it we don't really need. Okay, a number of books have gone away that I'd like to have more ready to hand, but in general there are things in the store-room that could quite possibly stay there for years after we come back, and never be missed. It says something about our acquisitiveness, or our inability to throw things away, or our long-gone enthusiasm for certain hobbies, or our bargain-hunting traits. Could we learn to live with a lot less? Maybe this is telling us we could. My thanks to mini-lathe.com for the photo of a junk room.

How to Get There

Talking of travel - as we intend to do - here's a little something a friend sent me by email.

1. go to www.google.com
2. click on "maps"
3. click on "get directions" (at the top of the page, not the side)
4. type "New York" in the first box (the "from" box)
5. type "London" in the second box (the "to" box)
6. click "get directions" and scroll down to step #24

!!??!!

This little blog

After a couple of years - or more - or being neglected, this blog is going to come into its own as the place where I focus on the trip I'm due to take abroad in about four weeks. My wife and I are going to the UK (we live in NZ) and I'll be documenting the preparations and the travel, and making general travelling-sort-of-comments as I go.