Champing at the bit

I'm at the point where I can't wait to get away, now. Not that I'm not enjoying being at my daughter's place; we feel at ease there, and it's not like we're 'visitors.' And the agents who are looking after the house have already rung twice about things; I passed the woman onto Celia the second time. She'll sort 'em!

I don't feel as though my house is home anymore – no doubt it will be once we're back and settled again – but in the meantime, we're in a kind of limbo, and still not thoroughly packed. At the last stages of leaving home, we still hadn't decided exactly on what we're taking, and so we have some clothes that we'll be leaving behind. It's hard trying to think about dressing for six months.

I don't remember having this kind of indecision when I first went to England, forty years ago. Being young, I probably ignored all my mother's advice about what I should take, and took things that I thought were important, such as books, and music and so forth. This time, the books are a bit thinner on the ground, and there's no music. But there is a laptop, a thing that hadn't been imagined in 1967, and there are clothes. Probably a better selection than I had previously, but still probably too much.

Last minute things

Last night we came to stay at our daughter's house, with her man and her three children. We exhausted ourselves doing the final clean-up of our own place, spending most of the day at it, with occasional interruptions, and pushed the last bag of stuff into the store room about six o'clock.
Just before we went to bed, Celia realised she didn't know where her glasses were. We looked through all sorts of things, and no sign. Of course, neither of us slept well - one, because we were in strange beds, and two, because of the concern that the glasses might be in the house still.
This morning we got up even earlier than usual and went back to the house. It didn't seem like ours anymore: so tidy and so uncluttered! Not a sign of the glasses anywhere, and to make matters worse, Celia couldn't remember when she might last have had them. We even opened up the store room and searched through the last bag of clothes that had been put in there, as well as amongst the bits and pieces. Hopeless.
She thinks she had them on at church on Sunday morning, but she wears them spasmodically, and it's not easy to remember - for either of us - when she last had them on. I wear mine all the time, so it's no problem! In the end, she decided to go to our eye guy, and see if she could order another pair, if hers didn't turn up. She could, but she'd need to definitely order them, not order on the possibility. So she did. And then she rang the insurance company to see what they'd do if they couldn't be found at all (which they still haven't been). They'd pay 75% of the cost of the new ones. That relieves the burden a bit!

Seeing each other

While in the midst of all the Skype stuff (talking through the computer rather than a phone) Celia has also considered the possibility of a Web Cam. One of her favourite occupations has been looking at the Sheringham (in the UK) Web Cam that’s focused on the car park. Sounds boring, doesn’t it, but to her it’s a way of seeing a little bit of home. And it changes every thirty seconds!
We haven’t gone any further with the Web Cam idea, since it would mean someone here would have to buy one, as well as us. One of the kids may have one that he’s never used, but if so, it would still mean everyone in the family would have to gather round at a certain time to show their faces on the computer. Think this is one to put on the back burner.

Counting Down

This weekend is our last in the house for six months. It's a bit scary, knowing that we're going to do the final lot of sorting out of the place out in preparation for other people to live here. This weekend will be a time for clothes-packing and clothes-putting-away; for making final decisions on what we take in that line and what we don't – and how much of my suitcase can be taken over by my wife. And then there's all the bits and pieces: medicines (of which we seem to have an abundance - because of our age); umpteen cords to charge up cellphones, the laptop, the MP3 player and so on; papers we need to take; bags for bits and pieces that we'll carry on the plane. It's all a bit mind-boggling. Normally, when you're only going away for a week or so you can just get on and assume you'll manage with what you've got; six months is a bit different.

The thought of sleeping in other people's beds for six months is a bit weird, too, and never having places to put things where they'll have any sense of permanence. The thought of not being 'home' for six months is strange. I've obviously become so settled that the idea of such a big change is almost too much for me!

And then there are things like needing to get up in the night to go to the loo. One of the women who used to volunteer in the shop was away from home once (when she was only about 75) and got up in the middle of the night – and walked into the edge of a door. She had a mark right down her face and chest, and wasn't well for months afterwards. I don't usually walk into things in the night (because I know where everything is) but in other people's homes it's a different story. And you don't want to wake anyone! As I say, I'm normally familiar with my own home, but one night I woke up, didn't quite bring my brain with me, and scrabbled against a wall trying to figure out where the door had gone – and it wasn't even the wall that the door was in. Fortunately such times are rare.

The nifty bedfellow comes from a StumbleUpon page.

Bearly Coping

The half a dozen teddy bears that we've got in the house (there are two more upstairs) have been ganging up on us. They want to go to England, and definitely don't want to be stuck in a room with all the bits and pieces that we're storing, for six months. They sit together with one of the large rugs wrapped around them, either watching telly, or muttering amongst themselves, and the other day, we came into the small lounge to find they'd written a note on an envelope: We're going to England, and we don't have to pack! I've tried to convince them that bears hibernate in the winter, so they won't even notice that we're gone, but they're not persuaded.

I'm not sure where all these bears have suddenly come from: there's Teddy, of course, who've been round almost as long as I have and has come back into view again after having been in hiding for years; there's Bill, with his little hooded jacket, his fluffy hair that gets in his eyes, and his please-love-me-because-I'm-a-pathetic-little-bear look – I suspect he's the ringleader because he thinks he's the most favoured. Balthazar, of course, just sits there being good and never saying a word out of place. He came to NZ from England with P G Tips, the scrawny and rather ugly little white bear who unaccountably went missing when the kids were quite young. He and Balthazar were in a trunk that got delayed on the way back from England, and I think we were more upset about not seeing them again than we were about the rest of the stuff that was in the trunk. And then there are a couple of other smaller bears who have come from nowhere: we think bears are breeding in the house.

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.

I've now put a blog on OC Book's home page though I've been doing it the 'hard' way with html and sending it via ftp. I don't want to use Blogger for it because it would mean the whole page would be mucked around - I presume. Not sure if I can do a test run on it, so in the meantime I'll use the old-fashioned method - which doesn't bother me anyway. I see even Time Magazine has got on the bandwagon with an article on blogging - which means, if I want to do some articles in NZ about them I'd better get a move on. Having had a crook finger for the last few days has rather set me back from doing much writing - infected it somehow internally. Now how can you do that? I mean, why would your finger just up and get itself infected from the inside? Struth! Looking up internal infection on Google doesn't give me much clue - I can find something on swimmer's ear (I always thought most swimmers had two ears) or internal infection in aquarium fish or a nasty piece on how bird faeces can get airborne, get into the lungs and infect you internally, leading to disability and sometimes death. Ouch.
Onto something less drastic.
Seeing somewhere that it was easy (oh, yes, in the Time magazine article) to change the way the page was laid out, I've changed the format of the page - really brave - and hopefully it will have gotten rid of that ugly green and yellow, which in spite of being somewhat similar to the Norwich football team's colours, isn't that attractive.

Having said I was giving up the Blog, I'm tempted back into it by reading all these other bloggers, especially the ones I interviewed by email for this article I'm aiming to do....or these articles in the plural that I'm attempting to get off the ground. The variety of blog-approaches is interesting. I suppose I hadn't really got to look at too many others in the past because the huge lists of blogs on places like Blogger are overwhelming to the degree that you give up quickly. None of them mean anything to you - in a personal sense - and so they appear to be just some body ranting off about their life or other people's lives, neither of which they seem to like very much - and often the language is that of a person who learned the basics in primary school, added 97 swear words in secondary school and now strives to get those 97 words into most sentences, to the exclusion of any other words that might be available. One of the writers on the writers' list today claimed that English has its roots in German and that the Norman conquest proves this. Hmmm, I'd always thought William the Conqueror was French, or at least came from that part of the world. Curious how history appears to be changing! Maybe it's a by-product of deconstructionism. Or maybe, more likely, it's a by-product of ignorance. Another writer on this same list the other day claimed that Great Britain consisted of England, Scotland, Wals and Cornwall. Hmm. Don't know when Cornwall became a country rather than a county. Of course, it's a little difficult sometimes to see a single letter like 'r' on a computer.

I think what irritates me about blogging via Blogger, is that I'm having to learn aspects of web-design all over again - web-design according to the Blogger rules, which ain't that self-explanatory. I don't like the way it's all set-up - certainly there's an ease of getting the stuff you write onto your page...once you've figured out how the heck you do it...but trying to make the page look half-way appealing is a major task, and not something I'm really keen to spend the hours required doing. In the meantime, then, if I want to keep writing in this Blog, I have to put up with the end result which is an ugly page (even though Ben had a go at sorting it) and the inability to make it look as though I care two hoots about it.

Mosgiel Coronation Hall

Did the Mosgiel Coronation Hall thing tonight. The Hall certainly is much improved after its refurbishment: the foyer is now a large meeting room and a new entranceway has been built around the side, leading into a smaller area and into the theatre. The stage has been extended (it used to be very shallow) and is now a decent depth for most performances. Backstage has all been improved, upgraded, painted, modernised...whatever, and there's quite a lot of space around there.

Grant sang his one song, mucking up the same line twice, but that was okay...he went across well. But it was exceedingly hot inside the theatre; it's been a very warm day, muggy and overcast, and I'm now sitting in my singlet and shorts, 10.30pm, and it's hardly cooler. We finished painting the flat today (apart from a few touching up bits we have to do) and laid down newspaper under wood chips. So the place is looking a lot better, and, once tomorrow's out of my hair, musically, I should start to be able to get back to some normality. Although Christmas is on the way, and that's always a bit stressful. Hopefully this year it won't be, with fewer presents being given all round. But I'm sure we'll manage to make it stressful anyway!

The concert tonight was a rag-bag of all sorts of Mosgiel-connected groups, and people who'd been involved in their Taieri Musical Society's productions. (Turned out Grant had played Pontius Pilate in the recent production of Jesus Christ Superstar.) There were bodies everywhere, though it was all very well organised. Ladies singing groups, of the older than middle-aged kind, with all the ladies sporting their latest perms - must have kept Mosgiel and its environs busy for the last couple of days. Dancing groups, taps dancers and the sort who appear to be about to do a ballet and suddenly do pop. Solo singers, and ensembles, and country bands, and a group doing a version of Cinderella with a bloke, a heavy, beer-stomach-carrying feller, dressed up as the fairy godmother. Would have been a great concert (I didn't see much of it except on a video monitor and didn't stay after I'd performed) apart from the heat. Can't imagine what it must have been like inside the theatre for those sitting through it all.

I had 85 emails to churn my way through today. I notice there's more junkmail arriving on my home address - I haven't been accustomed to getting it there. It all claims to be stuff I asked to be sent, but I think that's a lie in most cases. I don't even bother trying to 'unsubscribe' because I suspect that trying to do that will only indicate someone at the email address has paid attention to their nonsense. The rest of it was mostly from the writing group. I'm getting good at deleting anything that doesn't immediately interest me in the way of subs (and thus, their crits) and trying to note those that are worth keeping. But of course I seldom get back to those...at the end of of trying to deal with 85 emails you don't have much energy for going back and reviewing the stuff you put aside. So eventually it goes in the bin, too.