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Pool normalcyToday was a notable day. That is, we went swimming for the first time in our pool this morning! That means it has gone from this
to this
It’s still a wee bit slimy on the bottom, and it could be clearer, but it’s mostly good. This is excellent! Now when I’m done sweating in the brutal sun I can just walk 6 meters and leap into a lovely cool pool!!! Settling inHOORAY We have INTERNET again (what did we ever do before there was internet?) The house is great. I really like this house! Good thing, since we bought it. After that very entertaining and exhausting moving experience on Thursday [I’ve never in my life met such slow movers: Zaubi and I were carrying boxes faster than those two guys were) it has taken us only about 4 days to get settled. Of course, I’m one of those people that feels all distracted and out of sorts when my living place is a mess, and therefore I put a lot of effort into unpacking as quickly as possible. It’s a good layout. I should take more pictures. The living area is an open floor plan – there is a nice timber kitchen opening into a large dining/living area, and then the 3 bedrooms are off the adjoining hall. The south side of the house is taken up by a shaded patio with a ginormous solid timber picnic table — the thing is atanker. You are hard pressed even to move one of the benches, let alone the table! Although it’s not a particularly big house, it ends up having a lot of room. Whoever decided on the closets did a great job, and then there is not only the two car garage to storestuff in, but also a tiled work/playroom under the house next to the garage (the house is partially on stilts as it is built into a hill). It even has a little laundry room! And given we only need two bedrooms for our bedroom and study, that means we have an extra *guest bedroom* (cough cough). So, aside from cleaning/unpacking, I’ve been planting a lot of stuff. Put in 4 passionfruit and 8 fragrant climbing things next to the pool fence, and I bought some more fragrant climbing things to crawl over the property fence so we don’t have to look at the house next door. I’m also planning to move all my herbs from their pots into a proper herb garden today. Ugh. I sound so domestic. But, I really like plants! And since I moved here, they don’t die on me nearly as often… After 4 days concerted effort, the swimming pool is once again blue, and nearly clear. Perhaps we will be able to take a proper celebratory swim this weekend. I hope so given that its been broilingly hot these past few days. Back to work! Moving DayMoved.Today. Am too exhausted to type. And did I mention, it’s broiling hot with about100% humidity? It has been an interesting day. Started off before 6AM closing up boxes and carrying them out in order to minimize the work for the moving guys and thus how much we have to pay. The sky was looking dubious but we figured we’d move with plenty of time. Then things started going wrong. First off the moving guys took out a power cable in front of our house becuase the truck wastoo tall. Then a million hours later when we finally got to the house the pool had turned a virulent shade of green from disuse.Then Kettricken dug up and clawed openone of the underground pipes coming from the pool, then she sneaked into the house while covered in 3 inches of mud to make mud pies everywhere, then a torrential downpour took out my bed cover, then in starvedexhaustion we order Thai but negleceted to get plastic utensils and had to open about 15 boxes in search of where our own utensils were, I am disgustingly muggy, sticky, stinky filthy, and disheveled and I cannot possibly give any details. It’s time to collapse. AilmentsThere is definitely something off about the creatures in this country. It has now been two weeks since the notorious wasp stung me, and today is the first day that I have not been itching from it. HOWEVER, two days ago, I had the misfortune to kneel on a bee whilst disciplining Fitz, and it got me on the top of my foot. At least, I think it was a bee. It felt like a bee, but I didn’t see the culprit. Now, normally a little bee (or wasp) sting wouldn’t faze me for a moment, but again, this sting is different. It has been two days now, more than two days, and my poor foot has swollen up like a pink pancake. Yes, that’s right, from toes to ankle my foot is fat and pink and ITCHES like you wouldn’t believe. I have practically dug a hole in it from scratching: magic anti-itching/sting/whatever creams do not work, and I am thoroughly miserable. I thought that people who were allergic to stings had their throats swell up, not their feet. My throat is as ever, but walking around in 104 degree weather on a pink paddle is not fun. Whooooeeee!I feel all woozy. I just bought our plane tickets to Rome. Buying plane tickets always leaves me feeling woozy. I hit ‘Confirm’, and then go into a panic. WHAT IF I PICKED THE WRONG CITY???? WHAT IF I WROTE MY NAME WRONG?? WHAT IF I PICKED THE WRONG YEAR?????!!!! It always takes me a little while to recover. I found super cheap airfare on China Airlines. The cost of the ticket, after taxes (which are like $400 AU) is still less than the next least expensive ticket, before taxes! This fare didn’t show up any of the other days I searched for fares! God is good. Anyway, the airfare is such that on both journeys we have a day and night layover in Taipei. Entertaining. I never thought we’d actually go to Taipei again, but now we are going to spend two days and nights there! Maybe we can head to the nightmarkets and get some of the delicious pepper beef I’ve been dreaming about for the last 2.5 years… Anyway, this is ging to be one crazy trip. We will stay about a week in Rome while Zaubi is at the conference, then he will fly up to Frankfurt while I take the train to Munich. he has to visit a company up there and then train down to Munich where I will meet up with him (it will be his birthday!), and we’ll spend a day with a friend there who just had a baby. Then we will rent a car, drive to Stuttgart, spend the night with my cousins in law who also just had a baby, drive to Amriswil on the Bodensee, maybe meet up with my relatives that live there, drive to Zurich where Zaubi gets to talk to another company, drive to Gstaad which is where I’ve always gone to Swizterland when I’ve gone before, and which is beautiful, and spend a couple days there. Then we will drive down to Milan to look at art and stuff for a day or so, drive to Florence and spend half a day there, and finally back to Rome, where we will fly out. And then of course spend another day in Taipei I am so looking forward to this! Can’t wait! Bleh.Mr. Wasp stung me over a week ago and it still itches like all getout. This can’t be normal. I have spent the morning going through old packing materials in preparation from our move, which is supposed to take place exactly one week from now (tho’ I will believe that when I see it!). I am clearly violently allergic to mice, because mice got into some of the stuff with great enthusiasm and even though I was sorting through it outdoors in the sun and fresh wind, I am sneezing and itching and dripping like I am in a basement. Ugh. Packing. What an uninspiring task! Second only to the most uninspiring task of all time: trying to work out exactly where your cat has peed upon the carpet. Amusing myselfSo I made this thing the other day.
There is a huge bamboo jungle growing down the street. Zaubi cut a few large stalks out of it last week. So I sawed off some lengths, drilled appropriate holes in them to fit them together and drilled out the center nodes, put rubber tubing up the bamboo, attached a submersible pump to the tubing, put the whole thing in a ceramic pot, holding all pieces in place with a brick I found in the yard and some small lengths of bamboo jammed in the corners to act like springs, filled it half full with water, filled in most of the rest of the pot with leftover bathroom tiles and cut up old plastic flowerpots, placed two little Baby Sunrose in there in their pots, and filled the top with pretty river stones to hide everything else. Then I tied two shorter thinner lengths of bamboo to the main tube with grass from the garden, just to make it interesting. Then I plugged it in, and voila! Zaubi helped too. I love doing stuff like this. Cost: $50, for pot, pump, and river stones. Dazed and ConfusedNostalgia hits me and I gasp with the shock of it. Sometimes I am so terribly, illogically afraid of facing the future. It makes no sense. I love where my life is now. I love my husband, I love Brisbane. I am so thankful and relieved every day that I have found a good place and the perfect man after so many years of instability and hurt. And yet, when past memories stab me, little glimpses of passion and wildness and lost friends, I want nothing so desperately as to go back. I’m getting older, and I worry about cellulite and fine lines and house buying and having children. But at the same time, something in me screams to be as free and wild as I ever was. I’m still the same me! I still want to stay up all night riding motorcycles or playing hockey in the basement; flirting, taking long walks, having complicated conversations, climbing up places I shouldn’t be and to hell with the dirty dishes! I want to resussitate my midnight love affair with my bicycle and smell the soft air and walk in the middle of the empty streets. I want to be beautiful, even though I don’t think I ever was. Some part of me feels that if I lose that constant restlessness, I will have become a Crashing Bore and life will be over, prosaic, soccer mom. And I fight it, nights like these, panicking, shooting myself in the foot. I’m buying trouble. I know I am. It’s 2AM right now and I’m absolutely terrified. Holly: No. The blues are because you’re getting fat or it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Don’t you ever get that feeling? things draw to a close, moreIt’s finally a normal summer’s day, 90 degrees inside the house. The thermometer outside registers a toasty 106 but Zaubi says that he thinks it is inaccurate. Whatever. In any case, it finally feels normal to me, that is, I can’t get up without having to unpeel myself from the seat, and my face is constantly covered in a sheen of sweat and perspiration is constantly running down the undersides of my arms. Tasty, eh? Anyway. I am very stressed out. Buying a house is stressful. Everything has been done just at the last minute and I am utterly sapped from it. Today is the due date for unconditional finance, etc. etc. – and, amazingly enough, everything has indeed passed and been finalized! As such, not half an hour ago I sent off a massive amount of money to the escrow account. Settlement date (= move-in date) is two weeks from today. Of course, being the pessimist I am, I’m still not going to believe we own this place until they put the keys into my hand. There are STILL so many things that could go wrong… One strange thing is, as soon as you put a contract down on a house, you are required to take out insurance on it. Bizarre, eh? Contracts can and do often fall through for a plethora of reasons – build and pest failure, failure to get finance, etc. etc. – how on earth can you take out insurance on something that you do not own and may well never own? It baffles me. In other news, wasps are taking over our current place. They got me good this morning. Got twelve more mangoes too. |
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Copyright © 2009 Elise Bosse. All rights reserved.
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January 31st, 2007 10:51
