Category Archives: Planning and Staging

Beginning The Back-to-Europe Process

Leaving Australia began to feel a bit more real this past week. I have booked the movers to come and pack up the household goods and ship them back to the UK — in a VERY few weeks. Yikes!

Several of you have asked if that means we plan to live in Great Britain — but truthfully, we don’t know where we want to resettle. We’re starting in England and sending our ‘stuff’ there because that’s Mark’s passport country. Are we more likely to end up living in one of the EU countries? Quite possibly.

We are very open-minded right now and since we’ve been away from Europe for three years, we plan to do short term work contracts and travel through several countries BEFORE we make a final decision.

Boxes, boxes, boxes and mountains of bubble-wrap and shipping tape. THAT is what will take up at least 50% of each day for the next few weeks. And we have to do a long list of pre-departure things like new glasses, dental cleaning, getting our medical records, donating things to charity, and a big garage sale. And did I mention packing – packing – packing?

Packing boxes — ready to load!

We’ve gone from a gorgeously tidy house as people viewed it for a few weeks prior to sale to stacks of boxes and bubble-wrapped artwork lining the walls of the hallway. I’m still wrapping my head around it!

Just a short update today.

More soon!

Why So Driven With The Writing?

A friend asked me the other day why I was suddenly so VERY driven to complete an entire series of books before we leave Australia.

Short answer — I don’t know how reliable our internet connection is going to be when we first arrive back in the UK for a short visit with family — and then we head on to France.

Also, since I am truly ‘out of the closet’ now about all of the psychic encounters throughout my life, these books will hopefully be a sort of printed ‘calling card’ or multi-page business card that lets people know who we are BEFORE we arrive. And who knows — that up-front attitude may open some new doors that we could never have imagined.

That’s where my intentions and manifestations are aimed right now!

The latest book — Acts Of Intention — went live 45 hours ago. So from now on I will refer you to my AUTHORS PAGE at deborahharmes.com where I will update the BOOKS page each time there is something new in both PRINT and EBOOK versions.

actsofintention-cover-print-website

Time To Move On — Joyfully

It’s been a challenge — being back in Australia after living in Europe. We returned to find the social and political climate had changed significantly — and it wasn’t our ‘cup of tea’ any longer.

We had a plan and we’ve stuck to it — even if it did all take a bit longer to unfold than expected. We bought a fixer-upper house in a charming and established neighbourhood — a practically derelict 1950 house on a 1/4 acre lot with mature trees. And yes, it was that classic real estate cliche — the worst house on a good street.

The goal was to fix it up and sell it and then head back to Europe. But my oh my — didn’t 60 hour work weeks (on top of the renovations) and BREXIT and other kerfuffles add to the stress.

The house was completed and listed for sale in early July — and 7 weeks later we had an unconditional sale. Now the gritty part begins — deciding what to sell, what to keep, and then the flurry of packing boxes and bubble-wrap appears again. There will be happy moments and wistful moments and we know that it’s all part of the process of getting us BACK to a continent where our hearts are happy and we resonate with the look, smell, art, history, and social ethics of the place.

gladstonestreet-sold-sign

So wish us luck as we transition away from this quite beautiful Mid-Century house and off to the unknown! I’ll post progress updates along the way — and there will be some REALLY big news in the next few weeks about my simultaneous project (as if I didn’t have enough on my plate!) of launching an entire trilogy into the Amazon universe plus re-issuing 2 previous books that have unexpectedly gained ‘traction’ again.

Whew! Back to work!

Calm Determination

This has been an odd week weather-wise and the heavy-soggy-blustery nature of it all finally took a bit of a break today. I feel rather relieved since I don’t sleep well when it feels as if the house is going to lift off the foundations. We’ve had cyclonic bursts of wind hammering the sides of the house along with constant, heavy rain — then it all swirls and hits the exact opposite side of the building. Rain alternates with hail. The temperatures plunge and snow falls then melts. Most unsettling…

The mood of the weather is rather a match to the mood of the world right now — but I choose not to focus on that.

The house has been on the market for two weeks — and now we wait. Oddly, since I am not always known for saintly levels of patience, I am feeling quite calm and purposeful.

Really looking forward to what will be coming in the post in the next few days. I’ve waited and waited until the time was right and the PRODUCT was right size-wise. I no longer enjoy huge honking camera bodies with humongous lenses dangling off the front. They make my wrists and shoulders ache and they’re a pain to worry about because they’re so expensive to replace if damaged or stolen. And with the ever-smaller equipment nowadays, it seems like the right time to downsize before we leave here.

On Sunday I bought a GoPro Hero 4 Session at a 20% off sale. Then I got accessories like hand grips, telescoping mono-pod, foam-cube protectors and the like, and a bike handlebar mount for Mark to try it out. And since this toy-sized video camera is so tiny, it will fit into a purse. It is seriously teeny-tiny — and we noticed that the Tour de France riders were all using them during the last few weeks.

I’m ready to start making videos in addition to doing still photography and my agencies in London and New York have asked if I plan to add that sort of additional artwork to my portfolio since it now sells so well. Even wee burst videos of 2-ish minutes at 8 megapixel clarity seem to do well!

Happy that I will get ANOTHER my-brain-will-never-get-old-and-fuddly learning curve with a new editing program (ask me again how I feel about that statement in a week!) to master.

And other than the %^&*£@! flu that we’ve both picked up from all of the %^&*£@! sick people in Ballarat — life is good!

Being Brave and Bouncing Back

Global turmoil and sudden economic instability are beginning to feel less like out-of-the-blue events and more like a set of ongoing challenges to deal with in perpetuity.

To look specifically at the UK and realise that the ‘architects of destruction’ — Cameron, Gove, Johnson, and Farage — have ALL resigned in the two weeks since they schemed and plotted to unravel the decades old alliance with Europe — who could have even imagined such a thing? No matter who ends up inheriting the reins of power as the successors to BREXIT, they will need to have carefully considered solutions ready to implement without delay.

Enough of politics for now…

After our ‘body-blow and mental angst’ reaction to BREXIT — my husband Mark thought he was prepared to just summon up a stiff upper lip and stay in Australia even if it wasn’t our first choice. But then, after two or three days of feeling shell-shocked by that decision, he told me that he hadn’t realised how badly he was going to feel if Europe was totally off the table as an option. That was an interesting admission from the sort of man who usually just gets on with things without whinging. I’m going to be honest — we were both wandering around in a fog and deeply depressed.

We’ve had a variety of ups and downs and rapid changes in our 22 and 1/2 years together, so it isn’t surprising that we were able to brush ourselves off, infuse ourselves with some bravery, and bounce back. It is clear now that whether or not BREXIT is ever actually enacted — there are going to be several years of transition. And during that transition period, we still have a chance to get back to Europe, get back ‘in the system’ in one country or another, and sink our roots into a part of the world that brings us joy.

I called our previously chosen real estate agent, he came over on Tuesday night and we signed our listing papers, and on Wednesday he brought the staff of his office through on a brief tour so that they knew what the house looked like and what the pertinent features were.

In the weeks ahead, I plan to keep you apprised of our progress as we hopefully sell quickly because the market is simply plummeting right now. Brexit didn’t just knock the stuffings out of the financial markets in the UK — it bounced half way around the world and punched us in the gut, too. The value of our tiny pensions have dipped, the banks are suddenly tightening up the money supply, and according to our real estate agent — the values of houses here in our town are a stunning 16% lower than they were a mere six months ago. The time to go is now — not a few years from now.

Wish us luck — seriously! Good vibes add to the energy of success and we need to summon up as much of that as possible. And where are we heading? First stop — back to our beloved France!

Watching the Tour de France on television in Australia.

And perhaps Mark will be watching the Tour de France LIVE again next year instead of on television. He would love that.

Allons-y!

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Backlog Of Boxes and A Bit Of Backstory

Would you like to know WHY we moved into a new apartment in Melbourne 3 weeks ago and I am still unpacking? Here’s what I have been up against!

In addition to the delays in getting the internet turned on, we’ve discovered that just keeping this 1950 era house warm is a bit of a challenge. There is no central heating — not all that uncommon in Australia — and the entire first week was spent bundled in a lot of layers since the one and only heating unit had died. Many calls and emails to the agent later, we now have the same sort of flat panel Euro-style convection radiator in the main living area that we had in the last house that we built. Now if we just had double glazed windows and insulation!

We’re living in a very urban environment and it’s a lifestyle choice that we have consciously made. But it also means that we don’t have the luxury of just being able to nip out to the back garden to retrieve some stored item from the shed and we are having to rethink every single thing that we own.

When the movers arrived 3 weeks ago, I blithely told them to just put all of the boxes into the larger of the two bedrooms since that was going to be my office and studio. I planned to use that room as a ‘staging area’ to unpack. The garage was already full of Mark’s tools, so that was my one and only option. AND remember, we had shipped an entire shipping container over to Australia from France. Merde!

After the movers departed, I walked to the room that I had assigned as the ‘staging area’ and realised that I couldn’t even get into it. The boxes were stacked from wall to wall, they were stacked taller than I am in most places, and there was absolutely no place to begin. Here’s a picture that I took as they began filling it past any point of management! By the time they were done, I couldn’t even SEE those windows on the other side of the room.

A growing mountain of boxes on moving day when an entire shipping container arrived

I’ve managed to sort out the kitchen to the 80% organised stage and all of the furniture is in the livingroom and the master bedroom. We’ve even hung some pictures on the wall and I’ve filled the bookshelves. But I have also thinned down, down, down the amount of books we have and the local charities are getting a huge donation. Thank heavens we brought every single one of the Billy bookcases from France that we had purchased at IKEA in Toulouse. Who knew they’d come in so handy immediately to just wrangle the stacks of books into a manageable amount. You’ll note that even the smaller bookshelves were put to use as a kitchen overflow area to handle expresso cups from Rome, huge pottery bowls from Cley in Norfolk, UK, pictures of my two adult children, cookbooks, and our Wallace and Grommit clock looks down on us each day.

Bookcase chock full of books.

Even the small bookcases take the overflow.

Part of our issue with sorting things out was that we hadn’t even SEEN some of the things that were in those boxes for many, MANY years. Before they were shipped to France, they were stored in a storage unit in Ballarat, prior to that they were sprinkled between the house and several buildings out on our rural property in Central Victoria Australia, and before that they were packed up in Melbourne as we prepared to move to the country and build a house. I had to do a bit of mental backtracking, but I discovered that some of those items had been completely unseen for between eight to nine years. If all of those things were not incorporated into our day to day lives, they were invisible. Frankly, we’d BOTH forgotten how much we actually owned and in spite of all of those pre-Europe garage sales and donations, we now find that we still have a LOT of stuff.

Here is my current thinking on the subject…

Do I still place elaborate book plates inside my books nowadays where I write my name??? No.
Do I still place wax seals on the envelope flap when I write a letter??? No.
Do I still need multiple sets of flatware or silver trays for ‘entertaining’ when I don’t live like that any more and am more likely to entertain in a restaurant than our own residence??? No.
Do I still need to keep dozens and dozens of books on the topics of religious studies and spiritual studies and contemporary social issues since I purchased them 20 years ago when I was doing my graduate work, they are no longer current, and they use up a lot of bookshelves??? No.

I’m exhausted by the need to open every single box and touch every single item. But it’s also liberating even when it is fatiguing. I am paring down, down, down, but there are some sentimental items from my late mother that will go back into storage. And since I’ve been a photographer and journalist on and off for all of my adult life, can you even BEGIN to imagine how many folders and binders full of slides and negatives I have from the pre-digital days! Then there are the decades of hand-written journals. All of that needs to be checked and then archived.

Being truly honest, I had a mini-meltdown today when I couldn’t even turn around in that office in spite of unpacking for all of these weeks. I was awash in empty boxes, wrapping paper, and heavy duty shipping bubble wrap. I needed all of that to disappear and I need the shelves to go UP in that room and the cabinets to be brought upstairs so that the stacks and stacks of STUFF on every single surface can be placed in some kind of organisational flow. Aarrgghh!

Here’s where I am this morning. And LOOK! There IS a large and lovely window back there!

An office PARTLY cleared of boxes and previously stored items

It’s the ‘how do you eat an elephant’ theory I suppose. One small nibble at a time.

I haven’t disappeared (although it feels like it some days!), but I am very, very preoccupied with purging and nesting right now. (sigh!) I have so many stories and photos and adventures to share — but I’ll get to them when I get to them. I know you’ll understand that after all these years of semi-gypsy-and-never-really-settled lifestyle, this is a VERY necessary stage of sorting out.

Bye for now!

St. Kilda Bound in Melbourne, Australia

Quick catch-up because we are about to have a wildly busy week. We are moving into a new apartment on Wednesday and the shippers are coming to deliver all of the household items that arrived via shipping container from Europe last week. Whew!

It took several weeks of looking for an appropriately-sized apartment to rent and we had one extra requirement that most people don’t have — we needed a lock-up garage to safely store all of Mark’s work tools. Let’s be truthful, that’s practically impossible to find in the extremely popular inner Melbourne area that we were looking in! But I was persistent and finally found not only a groovy apartment with polished hardwood floors and LOADS of closets in a 1950s era apartment, but it also had the wish-list garage AND it was on the top floor so there is NO noise from neighbours walking around overhead. Hooray!!!

Livingroom

Sunny bedroom

Tiny 1950s kitchen with original cabinets!

The kitchen is going to need a LOT of refinement because it’s teeny-tiny and actually has all of the original 1950s upper and lower cabinets in place along with a grotty and very small refrigerator, but we’ll get there. Thank heavens we brought our brand new and energy efficient refrigerator with us from France. And we have the agent’s permission to make ‘refinements’ to the kitchen.

All in all, we’re just happy and grateful to have found 90% of what we were looking for — and we are in our first-choice neighbourhood with trams on our doorstep, good shopping nearby, the inner city is a mere 10 minutes by tram, and the beach is around the corner. Again — hooray!

More soon (I hope!).