There’s something a little bit quantum about moving house. Book shelves that were full just days ago are now looking empty and forlorn – BUT – somewhere else the books are sitting on new shelves, ready for fresh sets of eyes. The only trouble is they don’t move magically because of entanglement, you have to physically load ’em up and truck ’em down.
Still, it’s done. The books we can’t bear to part with are coming with us. It can be really, really hard to discard books, I’ve found. Not so much novels (except for my Terry Pratchetts – but that was a no-brainer). More the big glossy reference books with full colour photos and such. Yep, that can go (you think to yourself). Then you pick it up, feel the weight in your hand, open the cover, flick through a few pages, look at the pictures…Wow, I haven’t looked at this for years. And your hand hovers over the ‘to keep’ pile. Then there’s that little mental struggle as you make the Big Decision. I tried to speed things up by not looking too hard. Which led to Pete holding up a book and saying, “So you don’t want to keep ‘Phar Lap’?” Oops. Happened more than once.
You’ll notice the Librarian (the orang utan for non-Pratchett people) and Darth Vader still up there on the empty bookcase. Remember Marie Kondo and her de-cluttering methodology? “Ask yourself if it sparks joy.” I ummed and aahed about Darth. He’s a plastic kit model I built in the 80s. I finally decided he stays. And the Librarian looks after my books, so he stays, too. He was a gift from my work colleagues when I had my hysterectomy.
The books and DVDs are done. Now I need to tackle the kitchen, reach into those dusty corners of the cupboards where we put our seldom used (never used) items. They can have a home in somebody else’s kitchen, maybe even get used.
It’s pretty full-on, this moving lark. The old bones tend to complain after a while. The muscles, too. To take a break I sit down and read. And because I find it easier to read on a screen these days, despite having Terry Pratchett’s entire collection in hard back in a glass-fronted bookcase, I’m buying the ebooks to re-read. They’re AU$15, which is a lot. In1992 the same book in hard back cost AU$33. Today, it’s AU$25.40 on Amazon. Still, most of those hardbacks in the bookcase are first editions. Which might be nice if there weren’t many thousands of the same vintage out there. I reread because it’s easy. You know what’s going to happen, more or less, and you know you’re going to enjoy the journey. No mental energy needs to be expended, which is perfect at this rather traumatic time.
And just so I won’t get bored, we’re changing internet provider before we move. We’ve been with iiNet for about 25 years but since they were taken over by TPG it’s gone downhill, especially when they farmed off their email component to another company. Changing from one ISP to another is pretty straightforward. But we have a VOIP landline and we want to take our number with us when we move. The physical house address has an identifier attached to the phone number, so it’s mainly a matter of changing that id. It’s not quite that simple of course, as there are two companies involved. Anyway, we discovered to our astonishment that our new premises doesn’t have an NBN line and therefore no id! It’s just that house, the neighbours are connected. Shock horror. How can people survive without high speed internet? We can’t, so that’s another thing that needs to happen before moving date.
Talking of Phar Lap brought thoughts of another racehorse to mind. Remember Black Caviar, the mighty mare who was never beaten in her 25 race starts? It saddened me to hear of her passing. She died of laminitas after delivering her last foal at the age of 18. Sadly, her foal died, too.
For those interested in my author sideline, Pets in Space 9 is available for preorder.
The birds have apparently seen the writing on the wall. They’ve almost abandoned us, although they do come for a bath, so I keep the water up in the bird bath. So much for them becoming dependent.