My first active participation in the webpage (beyond viewing it). How exciting! Of course, I’ll just be typing this up and asking Neil to actually load it for me.
I read Neil’s previous blog and had to add a bit more to it. Namely an overview of his gallant undertaking of 90% of the move logistics and labour. Also thought I’d expand a bit on that, “...it was a typical nightmare move...” sentence.
The “typical nightmare move” began with the water leak as Neil told you about. The drama of which was greatly eased by our good friends’ Christopher & Caroline’s generosity in letting us bunk with them for a few days. Please note that the irony didn’t in any way escape us of being in a situation of owning two houses neither of which we could live in. At this point, Neil had packed roughly 50 boxes whilst I had packed about 5. So while I went off to work as usual on the Monday after we sprung a leak, Neil went about packing more boxes, organising plumbers to show up sometime before 2010 and giving Mouse Control strict instructions to annihilate anything that moved in our ceiling. Anything that wasn’t a plumber that is. Mostly. He also hired a trailer to haul our beds up to the new house, loaded said beds and then engaged in ferocious telephone arguments with the solicitors who were stalling on the new house settlement. He was ably assisted in all this by Christopher who I think is the only reason Neil doesn’t have stubs left for teeth from grinding them together in frustration. After all that we arrived at the new house only to find it wasn’t fit to sleep in. Not if we didn’t want to de-louse ourselves the next day. Slight exaggeration there, but suffice to say we didn’t really want to sleep on mattresses on the floor until the floor had been cleaned. Unfortunately, I had been given the sanitised version of what had happened during the day (wasn’t even told about the solicitors at that point) as no one wanted to stress out the chick with the dicky ticker. (I won’t mention here about a certain someone scaring the bejesus out of me pretending they’d electrocuted themselves trying to fix the water leak.) Therefore I was, ashamedly, a little less than positive in my reaction to the state of the new house. Poor Neil was desperately trying to look on the bright side while I was staunchly refusing to budge from my negative viewpoint. If only he’d told me he actually agreed with me (which he told me later he secretly did) instead of trying to be Mr It’s Alright Lets Make The Best Of It & Be Happy, then maybe I wouldn’t have been Ms It’s Not Even Close To Alright And I’m Going To Keep Insisting So Until You’re All As Unhappy As Me. Ah the benefit of hindsight.
But Neil was my hero and had the cleaners in bright and early the next morning. Luckily for us they were quite switched on (well one of them was) and discovered that our oven was missing the inner glass on the oven door. Which means, best case scenario the oven won’t work efficiently or at the correct temperature. Worst case scenario, the glass will explode and blow my legs off while I stand there stirring something on the cooktop or kill Oscar/Missy as they happen to be walking past. Needless to say we haven’t tested the oven door limits and are STILL awaiting a replacement part which we keep being assured is “on the way”.
Hmmm, gee, what else? Oh yeah, there was the box of our belongings flying off the trailer at 100km/hr on the highway. There was the trailer that was lent to us by one of Neil’s work colleagues that got broken. There was Missy injuring her paw by almost ripping one of her claws out somehow and bleeding ALL over the new patio (giving my heart another shock it didn’t really need. Did I mention that someone pretended to electrocute themselves in front of me?). There was the high speed internet connection we were assured would be available at our new address and wasn’t which Neil then spent over a week getting hooked up (having more ferocious telephone arguments). There was my reaction to being told my surgery had been postponed. Being emotionally retarded I spent the next 24hrs behaving like a complete beast to everyone within slaying distance and then realised why I was acting the way I was acting and spent the next 24 apologising to anyone who’d come within my target range. There was the joy of basically camping in our new house for a week with beds, a bar fridge and toiletries. There was the dickering with the insurance folk about who was going to pay for the repairs (and how much thereof) to the old house, including the Oscar-size hole bashed in one of the walls by the plumbers during their “exploratory” work. Neil once again handled this, along with the real estate agent and the stress of getting tenants in to start helping us pay the mortgage! There were plenty of other fun things too but I won’t itemise the whole lot. Suffice to say Neil summed it up with “it was an exercise in whatever could go wrong did go wrong”. BUT, nobody got hurt (although somebody did pretend to electrocute themselves – did I mention that?) so it really could have been worse and we should be grateful it wasn’t.
So basically whilst Neil was handling pretty much all of the details and hard labour, I focused primarily on getting Oscar settled into his new school and new before-school-care and trying to maintain some sort of status quo ante with usual rules and routines. Not an easy task as our sensitive, slow-to-adjust, I’m-7/8yrs-old-it’s-all-about-me boy had a few melt-downs expressing some interesting behaviours and languages. This has improved somewhat but Oscy is still struggling to find his niche at his new school as, having been to his class a couple of times now I can attest, there are some “big personalities” for him to contend with. Fortunately he has begun to make friends and there are some children in the street he has made friends with too (not without dramas of course) and because they can all ride bikes suddenly Oscar can too!
So don’t get me wrong... it’s not all bad news. I just felt the need to expound on Neil’s previous blog and talk a little about that “typical nightmare move” sentence. I don’t see toooo much that’s typical about it but I must acquiesce that most moves are nightmarish in their own way. I also wanted to try and get across to what great lengths Neil went to, to protect me from the huge majority of the stress of the move which he really didn’t mention at all in his page.
Am worried now that I’ve rambled on a bit and my first blog is getting too long so will do another one another time with all the good news highlights and I promise – no whinge-fest!
xo
