angharad_gam

Two firsts for me recently.

A couple of weeks ago I got into the full version of mermaid pose for the first time.

And this morning I managed to synchronise coughing and swallowing in such a way that tea came out my nose. I can't recommend it as a method for clearing out the sinuses.

But hey, today is the first day of the year that the pollen count was forecast to drop to 'low', so I guess that's something (it's normally dropped way earlier than this, but note the unseasonable weather I mentioned a few days ago)...

I have had the week off, it being the last week of school holidays, and also having looked at my leave allowance and decided I could totally do it and still take three weeks off at Christmas. And it's been a pretty good week. It's been very relaxing, and I've even managed some 'quality' time with the kids (as opposed to just having them annoy me). So what have I gotten up to?

Last Saturday, since it was forecast to be quite warm, I decided to skip grocery shopping and take the kids to the swimming pool. For some reason I could only persuade one of them, so Ashwyn and I had a lovely afternoon at the pool. I think it actually did my ankle some good too.

On Wednesday I went to visit irreparable at her new(ish) house, where we drank great volumes of tea and admired her garden in the spring sunshine. She gave me an inkle loom, which is pretty neat - now I just have to learn how to use it. I have been holding off making early period garb for a little while now for want of suitable and appropriate decoration (who wants a beautiful, hand-sewn silk bliaut with cruddy plastic store-bought trim on it?), so hopefully that will open up my garb range a bit.

On Friday we drove up to Gumeracha and had a picnic and then took the kids up the Big Rocking Horse (or at least, Andy took the kids up and down the Big Rocking Horse a couple of times, and I sat at the bottom in the shade). We missed blossom season, but it's still very pleasant up in the hills at this time of year.

In between I did a couple of jigsaws, played some Skyrim, made paper planes with the kids, did some sewing and some gardening, and generally enjoyed the lovely weather. I really am very fond of Spring, so long as I am loaded up with anti-histamines.

Back to work on Monday, which I can't say I am entirely looking forward to, but I shall only be there for one week as the week after that I am heading to Canberra for a whole week for a training course. Then only six more weeks and I shall be off on Christmas holidays. So there's that...

Now, about that tax return...

Sorry, I meant to be getting back to this sooner, but between hot weather (the kind of hot weather where it's too hot to do anything but scurry between air-conditioned boxes always seems to discombobulate me as much as if I actually had to be out in it) and toying with having a bit of a cold, and the new place not quite as well set up for sitting at my laptop, I couldn't really summon the energy for it.

Anyway, where were we...ah yes, we'd just gotten the keys.
So we drove over to the new house, let ourselves in and marvelled at it a bit. Then we poked around a bit, discovering the confusing range of air-conditioning and heating options (there seem to be two of the former and three or four of the latter), the very large number of picture hooks (good) and the fact that we didn't seem to have keys for all the locks (bad). Then the removalists showed up and started hauling stuff out of the truck.

I spent the next few hours doing the 'put that in there...no just dump that there for now...' thing while Andy went to get the kids from school and then he and the removalists went back to the house for round two and I actually started unpacking. The new house was a bit dusty because no one had been living in it for a while, and also there's no obligation when someone sells you a house that they do the kind of clean you need to do when you move out of a rental property and have to pass an inspection or lose your bond. So all the shelves and cupboards had to be swept out before we put anything in them.

The removalists came back about 5pm with the remainder of the stuff, and once they had gotten all that inside, it was time for them to reassemble the furniture that they had disassembled to move - principally the beds and the dining table. There were a number of problems with this as a) they could not understand how to put Andy's and my bed back together, so Andy had to help them, b) they had managed to lose a large number of the bolts from Liam's bunk bed, rendering the top bunk unsafe to use and c) they put Erin's bed (also a bunk but with a desk underneath) together the wrong way so the ladder and the guard rail were against the wall. This latter meant that Andy and I had to half disassemble it, turn it around and then reassemble it again.

We ordered pizza for tea, bathed the kids, managed to actually find all of their bed linen, and put them to bed. Then, for want of anything better to do (we couldn't find the antenna cable for the TV) and a great many boxes urging us to unpack them, Andy and I did more unpacking. Until finally about 10:30 we packed it in (ha ha) and went to bed. Unfortunately for us, we couldn't find the bedding that was on our bed just that morning, and although we managed to dig out a couple of sheets, we could only find one spare pillow.

And so we passed our first night in our new house, passing the pillow back and forth between us. Since then there's been a lot of unpacking and sorting out of various teething issues.

It turns out we were missing some keys - the real estate agent rang us up on Monday and said they'd forgotten to give us them all.

We never found the antenna cable for the TV - Andy went out and bought a new one. And then went out and bought another, because he got the wrong kind first time round. And even then we couldn't watch the telly, because the reception was terrible. 'Maybe this is why the previous owners moved out', he said. 'People don't sell their house and move to Canberra just to get better TV reception' was my response. Eventually we had to call out Mr Antenna, and he discovered that the house appeared to be wired up in a more elaborate way than most TV studios, with a large number of TV points and far more sophistimacated connections than were actually necessary. So he snipped a few of those out, and now the TV is fine.

The internet took just about as long to sort out. They would have connected us pretty much immediately on disconnecting the old place, except there was some kind of issue with the phone line to begin with (or so they said - by the time we dug the phone out of a box and plugged it in, if there was a problem it was gone). The there were no more ADSL ports left in our area. So we eventually had to get a man out (Adam from Adam) to put an antenna on our roof. Now we have wireless, and because it is more expensive we reduced our allowance from 200Gb to 100Gb. We had used 13Gb within the first 36 hours of it being put on. Stay tuned for us being shaped well before the end of the month...

We managed to get about 50% unpacked by the end of the first weekend, and maybe about 80% by the end of the first week (with no internet and no TV there was not much else to do but unpack). We got most things in order, but some things had to wait on furniture. We lost one bookshelf during the move (it was too fragile to move so we basically threw it out), and we also decided to put all the cookbooks on shelves (in the old house they were in one of those large kitchen pan drawers), so we were going to need more shelf space. Last weekend Andy did a run to IKEA and picked up some bookshelves and some deeper shelves, so we could unpack both books and board games. At this point the only thing that's still awash with boxes is our room. This is because we need some new bedroom furniture, and we can't unpack our clothes properly until we have drawers to put them in (although technically we have drawers, but I refuse to unpack things into the grungy old drawers only to have to move them again when the new furniture comes). There's also some figures and garb that has yet to be unpacked.

We have the following furniture on order: a lighted glass display case (for figures); a new bedroom suite for Andy and I; a custom gaming table.

We still need: a sofa bed or futon for the back/family room; a new bed for Liam; storage for DVDs and CDs

The new house is very awesome, and I think it will be even more awesome once we have it all set up to our satisfaction. There are a few small irritations and things that aren't quite how we hoped they would be, but for the most part this move has been pretty good.

Casualties: four fingernails (not a bad tally all told); the aforementioned bookcase; the last of our favourite set of wine glasses (it was already broken, but Andy's superglue fix was not sufficiently strong); The Big Fella (Andy's large 60cm high Alien figure) - like the wine glass he was already broken and the fix came unfixed during the move; Andy's left leg - which he somehow managed to impale on his replica Conan sword.

Right now we're gearing up for crazy birthday week, and then it will be off to Canberra for me.

Last minute packing still happening. The internet will shut off here at midnight, and we're not quite sure when it will be on at the new place (certainly not until we plug in the modem and router somewhere). I'm also pretty much out of mobile data. I am filthy right now from having squirmed right under the bed to fetch things out (the bed is up against the wall, so we can't reach under from each side).

Tomorrow is going to be interesting. I need to get up, empty the fridge and switch it off. Drinks will be going in the laundry sink in a whole heap of ice, and anything else we want to try and keep in a cooler bag in the bathtub.

The removalists will be here at 8am. The kids will be off to school at 8:30am. Then it gets a little hairy. Some time between 11am and 2pm, settlement happens. I thought settlement was some kind of automated event, like an electronic payslip, that ticks over at midnight (or 9am) on the day in question. However, it turns out what actually happens is that your conveyancer goes down to the lands and titles office, gets in a queue and performs all the transactions in person. If I had known this, I might have chosen a different day to move, because we can't actually get the keys to the house until we technically own it. Also sometime between 7am and 6pm the electrickery people will be showing up to switch the electrickery on. Until that happens there will be no air-conditioning at the new house. It will be 40C tomorrow. It's going to be interesting...

Odd things that have turned up while we were sorting through stuff and packing: a Yr 11 report (for me), my student diary from 1994 (second year uni), a letter to Andy announcing the closure of the last place that he worked, a copy of the original Civilisation game, a Lego viking fort we totally forgot we had, any number of nostalgia provoking old letters, photos and cards.

And believe it or not, Santa has delivered...

I've been meaning to update for a while, but lazing about on holiday keeps getting in the way. There are a few things to write about, but let's start with the house...
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You might have noticed that I haven't mentioned Skyrim recently. Or maybe you didn't. Whatever. That's because I actually stopped playing for a while. I took my character into the end game - the last part of the main quest - and it was really hard and I wussed out.

Then Erin started playing recently, and I thought 'Hey, Skyrim, yeah...maybe I'll start up a new character...' So on Saturday I picked up the controller, started up the game, and thought 'You know, I'll just have a quick go at that old game...' and I loaded it up, and lo and behold, walked most of the rest of the way through to the end of the quest (well, it wasn't quite that easy, but you know, I was pretty despondently stuck before).

So I finished the main game. Skyrim being what it is, of course, that doesn't mean that the game itself finishes. There are huge swathes of the game that my character hasn't touched. Strangely, my impulse (on behalf of my character) upon completing the main quest was 'now I want to go home to my farm and my children'. I wonder if that is a sign of getting old...

Anyway, if you are wanting to finish the main quest, I would recommend going for it a bit sooner than I did. I went in with a character at level 38 and because the game scales many of the quests, it was really hard. I have heard that you can pretty safely attempt it from level 25 onwards and it might not be quite so horrible then.

My new phone is awesome. The handwriting recognition will read my handwriting! In cursive! My handwriting! That looks like a bunch of spiders have gotten tangled up in Arabic!

This is also awesome: now you can get free books from the Met - many, many awesome free art books.

Also my phone is awesome.