The packing is just about complete. Our former flat is clean and empty, and the keys have been handed over.
This took not a small amount of effort. For me, it went something like this :
On Friday, I packed, and packed, and packed some more.
Most of the time, I consider days to be separated by sleep, so, on Very-Long-Continuation-of-Friday-day (other people apparently called it "Saturday"), I kept packing, and tidying the lounge so that we wouldn't be too ashamed to have people come through our lounge and bedroom for a garage sale. Managed to survive the garage sale, where about half the people who came through were various friends of ours. Also survived the "open for inspection" arranged by the real estate agent the day before (because calling at 4pm on Friday for a Saturday 11:30am inspection gives such a huge amount of notice to people who are in the middle of frantically packing stuff and getting ready to move overseas ... not). Continued packing, then finally went to bed for "Friday night" at about 10pm Saturday night (before Lisa, in fact, which doesn't happen often), after about 36 hours awake.
On Sunday, we had a surprise awakening, when a real estate agent turned up for another inspection. This had actually been arranged on the previous Tuesday, but we had foolishly assumed that having had an inspection on Saturday, the agents would have not held one on Sunday too (i.e. they would actually talk to each other, but apparently not). Once awake, we headed off for a group Yum Cha at the Han Palace, where everyone (Craig, Karen, Dreya, Justin, Eugene, Simon, Donna, Alan, Alison & Jon) seemed to have a good time. When we returned home from that, we had a housecooling, where various people came and went at various times, and quite a few of them took some of our stuff away (yay for them !).
Monday involved (wait for it ... ) more packing. So much stuff ! So many boxes ! How did we ever fit it all in to our two-bedroom flat ? (well, for a start we had about 80 shelf-metres of Ikea shelving around the place, plus five bookcases and a large writing desk/bookcase). In the evening we had a very nice meal at the-restaurant-formerly-known-as-Romanza,
Tuesday started with a trip to the dentist for a filling (so the day could only get better ?), then madly trying to finalise packing and get everything out so the carpet cleaners could do their steam cleaning with no hassles. We went out for dinner again, this time to the Flamin' Bull, and had dinner with a different bunch of friends (Julian, Simon, Craig, Karen, Nicolai, Hespa, Lucy & Julian (another Julian)). Is it a bad thing to eat an animal that happens to be on the national emblem ? (Kangaroo fillets, very nicely done).
Tuesday continued with more packing and tidying, trying to get the kitchen and computer room cleared enough for the cleaners. It did, in fact, turn into Very-Long-Continuation-of-Tuesday-day, long after the time where any sane person would have a) called it Wednesday, and b) got some sleep.
Mid-morning duly rolled around and the carpet cleaners were due, and arrived somewhere vaguely near the time they'd specified, but alas, we still hadn't finished getting everything out and vacuuming. We were close, though, and managed to get it all ready within about 30 minutes, with the help of
After the cleaner left, we loaded up the trailer that
Airline baggage limits are never quite enough for packrats like me, so we are sending a bunch of stuff across by slow-but-not-hideously-expensive sea shipping. This was to be picked up at 4pm, so I hung around waiting for the courier to pick up the relevant boxes while Ron and
And finally we come to today, which has been much less frantic. We woke up, drove down here (about 160km from Melbourne), lazed around for an hour, and have started going through a few boxes of stuff that contains some stuff we need with us, some stuff which can be posted to us, and a bunch of stuff that can just go into storage.
I can finally let the frustration and pains and sleep-deprivation of packing and tidying fade away (if there was something on the floor to trip over or knock over, I would invariably do so; if there was something to knock my knuckles, knees, shins, toes, elbows, head or other random body parts on, I did so; my hands are "dry as a dead dingo's donger" (thanks to our recent visit to the Australian Museum in Canberra for the genuine Aussie slang), with at least 30 separate cuts, scratches and scrapes on my hands and forearms, sore muscles all over the place, and this