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.

Celia finally finished the outside painting at the flat this morning, with the help of Dominic. I know this wasn't going to be a diary cum journal kind of blog, but the point of what I just said is that now my life is starting to get back to being my own somewhat, and not the flat's. We didn't go down there last night, much to my relief, because it was too cool for the paint to dry. This morning, however, it was blisteringly hot before we went to work even, and so Celia at the last minute decided to take the morning off work, and got the job finished as a result. Good on her.

Being able to stay home and relax last night meant that I could do some writing-related stuff: posted a somewhat revised version of one of my old columns (one that's on this Geocities site) to the writers' list, with the aim of improving it. The suggestions for doing just that came back quite quickly, and certainly there more positive and helpful than not. Also made some notes for an article on whether it's safe to send credit card details by email. Have had this in my head for a little while and thought it was worth pursuing with our old friends at InfoTech. Haven't queried them about it - may send them the finished article this time, rather than a query, as that seems to work better. I've always been a bit in two minds about queries. Certainly they save you the work of writing an article that's never going to get published, but they also have to be so spot on in order to get the article visible. Sometimes feel just sending the thing is the way to go, particularly it involves style rather than content.

Now all I've got to do is rake up some energy to get going on the writing side. Tonight I feel more tired than last night - but then I have done the bulk of an email newsletter for the shop today; the usual 2000 or so words. So I guess that sort of counts. And on top of this I need to do a bit more practice, piano-wise, of the songs I've got to play in the next few days. Was suddenly reminded that I have yet another engagement on Thursday, in the lunchhour, at the Savoy, playing for Brent Read. I'd forgotten about it entirely. Already I'm playing for Arnold's lot tomorrow, at the travel club's Christmas dinner. (Dinner? It takes place in the morning.) Then there's this Thursday thing for the Rotary club. Saturday night I'm booked to play one song for a guy who's singing at the opening of the refurbished Coronation Hall at Mosgiel, and on Sunday we have this thing where I'm playing for Brent again, and Anna Leese (always sounds like one word to me: Analiese). Fortunately Brent is singing the same few songs on every occasion, almost.

Painting, aggravation and a DVD

Still painting, patching, spraying, scrubbing, rubbing, brushing, and coating the bloomin' flat. Yesterday, Saturday, was an all out exhausting day, with no let up. We'd planned to get started really early, but the weather was very patchy, and we didn't get off the ground till about nine. Then the weather packed up again and drizzled, and put paid to another stretch of time; then we started again, and Doug and Stef arrived with the famous granddaughter, who managed to get paint and goo and mud and various other elements on her body at different times during the day. Had to pack up again because of the weather so we went and got the paint, and I listened to a very unuseful conversation between a polite customer and an apparently polite retailer: the customer had been waiting to have a bathroom cupboard stripped of its varnish by the firm's stripping dept which was located in Stafford St. The customer had been put off more than one with the excuse that the stripping wasn't finished, and was finally told that it would be ready by Friday - definitely. The customer went there at 4.35 on Friday and found the place closed at 4.30. He came into the main shop of the firm, where we were, on the Saturday morning, hoping he'd be able to get someone to open up the other dept and collect his cabinet. The retail assistant behind the counter seemed to come to conclusion very early in the piece that the customer was being difficult and really had no case. Whatever his reasoning was, he argued quietly and politely back and forth with an increasingingly irritable customer and was plainly not prepared to do anything; furthermore he claimed that because it was the weekend he (they - the shop) had no jurisdiction over the other dept. This went on until it almost reached interminability - at which point the assistant (who wasn't one of your young know-it-alls, but a middle-aged man who should have known better than to handle a customer the way he did) went off and got the other bloke, who cheerily agreed to meet the customer round at the other dept and open up for him! How to make a customer mad for no good reason...!

Celia and I did have one night off this week - when we babysat the granddaughter - and watched a DVD of Miss Congeniality, with Sandra Bullock and Benjamin Bratt - and Michael Caine. Bullock plainly has the time of her life in this movie - the promos that were also on the DVD showed her barely different in reality to her character on screen, at times. More amazing, to Celia, was the fact that whole scenes had been excluded from the end product: three of them that we saw, and all of them involving quite a heap of people and the equivalent of several minutes screen time.

Finally got the review on The Poison Principle off to the ODT today. Other than that it's been all go at the Craigleith St house, last night undercoating the back windows, which were a boring light burgundy colour, and are now a tarted over white - not sure what they'll wind up looking like yet, but at least it'll have to be better than what was there. The result of course is that I'm getting very little writing done - though I did send the review off to the writers' list to see what comments it would elicit (and anyway it was ages since I'd subbed anything). Got one quick response, which mainly concentrated on the the way words were arranged or gave me alternatives for words I'd used: in fact I suspect I'd already tried out a lot of her alternatives and decided against them. That's the way it is. Apart from that I critted Sanchona's chapter 12, an action-packed piece that didn't quite work in detail, but certainly moved along. I think she does keep things moving; it's the details that concern me most of the time. And forgetting who or what did this or that.

I've debated sending the columns that I have here on Geocities off to the writers' list - again mostly for something to sub, and also because it would get me moving again, I think. Time will tell. Once this flat is sorted out - hopefully mostly over the weekend - I can get on with something else in life.

Opera Alive show is now finished, and once I get over the exhaustion of it, I'll do something more creative here. As it is, this afternoon (my first free afternoon for a while, it seemed) was spent at the Craigleith St flat, clearing up the foliage that had accumulated over the last year. The tenants had apparently done very little in the way of lawn-mowing, so a team of us: Stef, Doug, Ben, Celia and I went to it and cleared away a good deal of the overgrowth. Quite satisfying overall.

Did some real writing this morning, in the way of a review of the book by Gail Bell, The Poison Principle. I'll stick the review on this site as soon as it's tidied up. As for other writing, however, I'm doing next to nothing...apart from here. Have to get over the feeling that having been rejected, so it seems, by InfoTech, is the end of my career as a writer, and go on to open some other doors. Easier said than done, but at least at present I have the genuine excuse that I'm so busy with rehearsing with Opera Alive that I have neither the time nor the brain nor the energy to do anything so complex as writing.