Moving house and writing up my life

It's been nearly two months since I last posted here - once upon a time I posted most days, sometimes more than once a day.

There's been a lot going on in our household - selling our house, for one thing, and trying to find somewhere else to live for another. At the moment we're 'boarding' with my daughter - who bought our house. So in a sense, things have hardly changed at all. She and her partner and foster boys had already been living in the house a year or more when she bought it, due to circumstances beyond her control. So it was no big change for any of us!

But we are looking for another house. The market, however, has gone crazy in our city. Once you could sell your house and find another easily because it was a buyer's market. Now it's completely the opposite: sellers are the winners, and buyers, if not quite the losers, are certainly having trouble buying something else. The prices are moving upwards at such a pace that if you leave it too long, what seemed a good sale figure on your own house, suddenly becomes not enough when you go to buy something else. And that goes not just for bigger houses but for little townhouses, units, places known as 'doer-uppers' - which usually stands for a place that going to take a good deal more than you paid for it to actually live in it.

When I last posted, I 'reprinted' a piece from 1994 which first appeared in a column I used to write - called Column 8. My intention is to keep on posting these columns (if they're not completely and utterly dated). There were five years of them originally!

But what's held me back from doing that, in part, is that I've been typing up more than 700 printed pages of a journal I kept from 1989 to around 2000. The journal was originally on an earlier computer, and thankfully I kept a printed copy of it. However, it had felt risky for a long time that I only had it on paper, so it's now all back on computer again. Amounting to something like 500.000 words, I guess.

More recent journal notes, from 2000 on, were typed straight onto computer, and copied from one model to another as time went on. And well and truly backed-up online.

When we began to tidy up things that we own in the present house, preparatory to a shift, we got rid of a lot of it. As you do. Including lots of papers and things that were really no longer of value. But I decided to keep a bunch of around 45 exercise books I'd written in over the years. Some of them are completely full; some have empty pages. Most of them relate to my spiritual journey - they might be classed as letters to God. Usually written in the morning, often at white heat (if my handwriting is anything to go by), and, to my surprise, more full of insights than I'd expected. Others relate to the craft of writing - various different approaches to encouraging myself and keeping my writing skills honed.

I've begun typing these books up too, and inserting the entries (which are mostly dated) in amongst the journal entries. It's intriguing how the more down-to-earth journal stuff contrasts with the spiritual. I might not live long enough to complete the task. But I'll give it a go!

Photo courtesy of F. Muhammad from Pixabay 

Clipping coupons

I was reading somewhere on the Net the other day about a woman who saves all the coupons she receives and actually gets the discounts that are offered, thus saving herself a considerable amount of money each week. It's hard to gauge how this works, but then I'm not in the States where coupon clipping seems to be a much bigger deal than it is here. For instance, with New World supermarkets, even though the company regularly sends out these little booklets advertising all sorts of discounts on various grocery items, no one actually uses the booklets; they just take off the back page which has the barcode on it and get the check out girl/boy to zap that. Saves all the hassle of pulling pages out of the book (which is the way it used to work) and presenting each of these individually to the check out chick (a term which can cover the blokes as well, if my son, who worked as one for some time, is reliable in his information). In fact, if other people are anything like us, they just use the same bit of card with the barcode on it for several months, and toss out the booklets into the recycling each time they arrive.

Anyway, all that is a lead into the subject of Billy's Savings Club, which seems to be a kind of online coupon clipping outlet. At the moment they're doing a bit of a promo on moving companies. Billy's is quite a fun site in this regard: under the info about local Tucson movers, say, or a Phoenix moving company, you can discover the good and bad points about these cities (or any others you choose). You might find that the crime rate will put you off, or the pollution (Houston's bad, apparently); the knowledge that Phoenix has over 200 golf courses might be a real incentive to you. (Regrettably, not to me. The last time I 'played' golf, it was a total embarrassment, even to those who remained polite.) This is certainly a little more interesting than tearing pieces of paper out of a booklet; that is, if your ultimate pleasure in life (as it seemed to be in the case of the woman mentioned above) is clipping coupons as hobby, recreation, and employment.

8 posts to go....

...before I reach the magic 1000th post. Well, I've given myself till the 31st to achieve this, so here's one more step on the way.
The piano arrived this morning, rather later than expected because when the guys went to collect it they found they'd left some vital tools behind. I heard this from the former owner, when I finally rang her to see if they'd actually left her house yet.
I'd been told that these guys - or rather this company - had experience at shifting grand pianos, and maybe they have, but I'm not sure that the entire team that arrived had all had the experience claimed. Well, they got it to my house in several pieces (that's the way grand pianos travel) and put it back together without too much difficulty, so there must have been some experience there.
I gave them the option of taking it in the front door or in the back, and they decided on the back even though there are four steps up into the house at that point. (There are two at the front, but there's also very little turning room, as we've often found when we've taken something large into the house.) Getting the main part of the piano up the fours steps was a bit of an issue: one guy was doing all the hoisting up, it seemed, (puffing and blowing) while the other three did....something else. They were on hand, but you got the impression that they weren't always putting full muscle into it.
Suffice to say, they hoisted it into the house, swung it round through the kitchen, along the hall and with ease into the lounge. And, as I said, put it together.
And I played it. It's very bright sounding, which will take a bit of getting used to, and it needs a bit more effort from my fingers to move at speed on certain passages. It's not sluggish, just a bit tighter than my other piano.
We're going to have to reconsider where we put it. The current spot isn't quite roomy enough for me and the piano, and at the moment I'm the one who's getting the short end of the space. My wife and I will do some rethinking tonight, and see how we get on. I'm most concerned not to have it against an outside wall, as I've been told more than once that this isn't good for pianos.
Neither is sticking them up against a heater, or a heating vent, as Teachers' College, where we hold our church services, used to do to the very nice baby grand they had. I played it a lot, but gave up in the end when the other musicians could never get in tune with it. Now it's stuck out in a kind of sunroom area where the temperatures are alternatively very hot or very cold. Someone needs to have their head read - it's likely the piano will become irrepairable - or irreparable, depending on how you want to spell it.

Out with the old

We’ve been shifting stuff around in our house over the last week, because we’re now back from overseas and have to get everything we locked away out of storage and back into the rest of the house. (We used one bedroom for storing.)
This has involved throwing out some old furniture, because there comes a time when it’s just served its purpose, and even the borer are barely holding the thing together. (We actually tossed one item of furniture out of the upstairs window – or rather, the various pieces that made up that piece – and thoroughly enjoyed the disintegration that went on below us. Why do humans like a bit of destruction every now and then? There’s a kind of vandal in all of us, I think. I’m sure you’ve seen people at the dump/tip/refuse place/transfer station throwing things off the back of their trucks: the smashing and crashing that goes on seems to get something out of their systems.
The only problem of course with breaking up old furniture is that you have to replace it with something. In our case that’s not too much of a problem, though I wouldn’t mind swapping my very elderly computer desk (it must have come from some office at some point) for the item in the picture. It’s a piece of Bush furniture – and ain’t it grand! The only problem is it would take up the entire space in my ‘office’. Not being able to get at it to do my blogs or write music might be a bit of an issue!

Moving right along...!

The need for self storage is huge these days, with half the world’s population seemingly constantly on the move – and I’m definitely not talking about refugees.
What did people do in the past? Probably what our kids still do: leave all their gear with Mum and Dad. It’s just as well we’ve got a large house. At one time we had all the furniture and most of the belongings of my son and daughter-in-law packed into the room I’m typing this in, packed to the gunnels, in fact. And we also had various other items belonging to the other children, stuff they’d left (and in some cases forgotten about) and stuff they intended to pick up…some time.
Here in Dunedin we’ve got several storage facilities. The old Roslyn Mills, where my mother worked for many years, has now been partly turned into a self storage facility. And it’s amazing how much you can pack into a small space. I remember helping shift someone who’d had most of their stuff in storage. We walked down this alleyway of what was rather like a prison without any little windows in the doors to see the prisoners, arrived at what appeared to be a pokey little ‘room’, and found that it contained, quite happily, a houseful of goods. When we have our furniture stacked around the room, we don’t realise how little the space is that it would take up if we packed it all on top of itself. Not so convenient for the average householder of course, but it would leave quite a bit of floor space free. (To put up a large table-tennis table, as we have.)
Moving.bz (haven’t seen one of those suffixes before) is a great site to figure out in advance where you’re going to put all your gear. And what’s more it has some very good advice on the whole process of moving.
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