Progress?

Blimey! It's been an interesting couple of weeks for all sorts of reasons. Not only have we been slaving away with the whole moving house/studio/office business but I've had the privilege of participating in my first Australian parliamentary elections... and what an election to start with.

Now, when you've been through the whole process of obtaining citizenship there actually isn't an Australian Politics 101 course to enlighten you about the political parties, the electoral system or the history. You are spoon-fed a whole pile of blurb about your rights and responsibilities as a citizen, including the important fact that voting is compulsory and not voting will land you with a hefty fine (which I applaud, on the whole, since I do feel that if you have the luck to live in a democracy it behoves you to ensure that such luck continues), but no-one prepares you for the enormities of the ballot papers.

MY GOD! Two ballot papers and eighty-odd names! And everyone's bandying about phrases such as 'Above the line' and 'Below the line', and you are supposed to know what it all means by osmosis! In the end I was compelled to ask two dear friends of ours what it all meant, and found it all rather amusing.

If you vote above the line you are simply selecting a political party and endorsing whichever candidates it chooses to field. If you vote below the line you are being picky and putting the individual candidates in order of preference - and you're spoilt for choice. Since it was my first election and I've been loosely following things with a measure of incredulity I decided to vote below the line, starting with my least favourite candidates which in my case included everyone from the Families First party and the Christian Democratic Party. The Australian Sex Party were a lot further up my list you will be unsurprised to hear, not because their manifesto coincides with my personal peccidilloes but because they have a great small 'l' liberal approach to life which I like. In the end I found myself quite torn about my top preferences: I am a natural leftie and voted Labour in the UK all my life but Labour means different things in Australia. I am also concerned about the environment and would liked to have been able to vote Green with a clear conscience but some of their policies on things like education worried me.

Anyway, I won't bore on about the details of my (limited) political views: what has astonished me has been the last 17 days' worth of bizarre posturing that has resulted from a very close vote! Madness! The entire nation has been left dangling, waiting to see which party would offer the Indepent candidates the best deal in return for their vote and finally this afternoon the Labour party has been able to declare a minority government after schmoozing the Independents to best effect. As someone who has grown up with 'first past the post' voting it has been very strange, and 17 days of wondering is LONG time... but in the end perhaps it is a good thing? The Independent candidates have pinned the major parties to the wall and demanded their way over all sorts of issues and, in the end, as new Prime Minister Julia Gillard has commented, her minority government is going to be held to account as never before. I wonder what will happen now?

Oh well, never mind the government. What about my studio? I can't give you a final result yet: at this rate it may take more than 17 days to work it all out! But here are the first pictures:
















Lots of stuff stacked outside...








Lots of lovely space inside! Although sadly it isn't going to remain calm and peaceful inside for long. I'll let you know how I get on in due course, but I'm having a bit of a break from it for the next few days until the excitement (I mean damned hard work) of the school's Spring Fair on Sunday is out of the way.

Still here, but not fully functional!

I just posted some amusing photographs of the before and the after in what will eventually be our office/studio, which is where we are temporarily living while the 'big' house is built. So much for the pristine state of things when we first arrived! But the main thing is that we have moved house, so the awful part of that process is over. No more packing, no more shifting furniture (for a while, at least) and no more cleaning up your former rental property so that you can see your face in the toilet lid. Hooray!

The only downside to moving into our office/studio building is that we are a little cramped. Now I have to confess to the fact that we own FAR too many things, so it's mostly our own fault. But sadly my 'studio' for the next few months is going to be in the 'garden store' room with a roller door, at the end of the building... We've bought a collapsible gazebo thing that we're going to erect over the garage door to give me some shade from the sun beating down onto the metal door and wall cladding in the morning, which will be a relief, and the gazebo will do double duty as it will also partly shade the inflatable swimming pool (12' across) that is part of darling daughter's birthday present. The wet-edge infinity pool will have to wait until our scheduled Lotto win later this year, I'm afraid.


























As you can see, my darling press is sharing the space with the washing machine AND one of the builder's diesel generators, which can't be helped. The purple pipe running out of the garden store room is the outflow for the washing machine (strangely you don't have a washing machine outflow plumbed into a garden store under normal circumstances so we're improvising), trailing across the sand out the front (base for the pool) and over the edge of the hill!

So far, so good. Only a few outbreaks of temper in the last two weeks, which I count as a blessing and a miracle all in one given the grim resignation with which we approached the task of moving house and the fact that dearest daughter had to endure the whole thing with us as all my cunning plans to entertain her elsewhere fell through... We're tired, frequently sweaty and totally over the whole process but we have survived relatively unscathed and that celebratory bottle of champagne we drank a few days ago went down very nicely, thank you.

Then it got ugly

Sometimes life is a complete pile of poo and I wonder why I bother to get up in the morning. Today is definitely one of those I-am-totally-fed-up-with-coping sort of days. I trundled off to see our lettings agent because she wanted to speak to me and discovered that we have a choice: either we sign up for a full year's lease on this place (with penalties for breaking the lease) or we have to move out on January 9th 2010. Obviously we can't sign up for another year because at some point next year we hope to move into our own place, so we will have to move. AGAIN.

Since arriving in Australia just over 3 years ago we've already lived in 3 different houses, so this will be our 4th... and we'll be moving at the hottest time of year, when Coffs Harbour is full of holiday-makers and short on accommodation, and we have to find somewhere that will take our dog. Did I also mention that I'll have to pack up my studio for the umpteenth time and kiss goodbye to any chance of doing any meaningful work...?

Just for the rest of today I'm going to pretend it isn't happening, because I really feel that I can't cope right now. I'm going to give myself some time off, and then I'm going to get angry (I'm quite looking forward to that bit), which will delay the necessity to DOooo something about it for a few hours longer. No use thinking about it now because I've got to take darling daughter to her piano lesson. In the rain. Grrrrr.

Ciao!

You're quite right, I have been RUBBISH at posting anything while away, but there are several reasons for that: I've been too busy eating/drinking/seeing the sights/relaxing/reading books oh, and did I mention we've had the best part of two weeks with no internet connection? It's a curiously liberating experience although after a while one begins to get the fidgets and wonder how everyone else in the Blogsphere is getting on...

I'm not trying to make you jealous, but I should tell you that I'm typing this sitting in the bar area of Antica Casa Coppo, our home-from-home in Venice. We're down to the last few days of our holiday and by this time next week Darling Daughter and I will be at home and may even have managed some sleep.

Talking of home, a new complication has arisen in our lives that I'm going to have DEAL with once I get back to Oz... just before Darling Daughter and Dearest Husband departed Coffs Harbour to join me in Europe they discovered a bad water leak coming from our en-suite bathroom and manifesting itself in Daughter's bedroom. Further exploration on the part of our managing agent and landlady have revealed serious problems in the first floor plumbing that will require a complete tear-out and re-build of our en-suite bathroom and Daughter's bedroom, plus other associated areas. Why do renovating builders not realise that sealing water pipes in concrete is a recipe for disaster...?

The implications for us are huge: naturally the insurance company is dragging their feet which means that far from completing the repairs while we were conveniently away for 6 weeks, they won't even get started until early November. As water and electricity are being switched off during renovations we are required to move out!!! Our agents are offering us temporary accommodation at a vastly reduced rate in a holiday flat but we have no information yet about whether it will even be suitable... I, for one, cannot just move all my printmaking kit on a whim: it's too heavy and there's too much of it, so I am going to have to continue to work at the 'old' place, wherever we eventually end up sleeping. I'm still trying to clarify what our agent's and landlady's obligations towards us are under the contract: if we chose not to accept the offer of the holiday flat, does that mean they have no further obligation to find us somewhere to live? And as our tenancy agreement is shortly due to expire is there a possibility that they may simply give us notice to quit..? And what about Toby: can we take him with us or...? Lots of questions and currently no answers! Bummer.