Tag Archives: unpacking

Haven’t Disappeared Altogether — REALLY!

It has been ever so long since I updated the site and there are a lot of reasons for that. Short explanation…

1. Some health issues (now completely resolved!)
2. Buying a house
3. Moving and unpacking (and that is still an in-process situation)
4. Renovating

Additional delaying factors…
1. Trying to decide whether to stay in Australia or go straight back to Europe
2. Busy with the stock photography (surprisingly, on the upswing!) and uploading
3. Writing not one but TWO books.
4. Being a total nut-case and signing up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and trying to produce 50,000 words of a rough draft novel in 1 month. Did it — in 15 days with not enough sleep. But the novel isn’t done and will probably end up being about 70,000 words. So yes, I still have the rest of November to slog away.

 

NaNoWriMoCertificate

 

Got oddly Mother Earth-ish (small doses!) and decided to try doing a smidge of gardening after over decade away from that and have been remarkably successful thus far.
 

Freshly planted garden bed.

Freshly planted garden bed.


 

Seriously? It has been so long since I did one of these posts that I had to go back and refresh my memory on the html coding!

Plan to TRY and do better with keeping up on this site once again. Lots of things are percolating now that our lives have settled down and there are some big plans afoot.

Also — am rebuilding my portfolio with a new agency. Plan to upload weekly (fingers crossed!) or more often examples so you can see what’s up for sale as stock. As soon as I get several more dozen images up, I will post a link. In the meantime, here’s an example of what I will have on there for one time rights.

 

Sydney Harbour Bridge on a stormy day.

Sydney Harbour Bridge on a stormy day.


 

More soon!

 

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©Deborah Harmes and ©A Wanderful Life
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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

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.

Bookcase chock full of books.

 

Even the small bookcases take the overflow.

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

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!

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Crunched Communication & Quick Catch-Up

It’s rather ridiculous that it takes SO LONG to get the internet installed in a world-class city the size of Melbourne! We’re still a week away from getting our broadband connected, so I am completely reliant on a dongle wifi that has severe limitations on both the speed and the amount of information (photos!) that I can upload per day.

After being a bit down in the dumps for the last week, I’m feeling MUCH brighter today. Could it have something to do with the fact that the sun came out about an hour ago for the first time in 4 days?

Still wading through the process of unpacking boxes and it feels like I just did this a few months ago. It was actually a full year ago that we moved into our apartment in St. Girons in the south of France, but we’ve done so much travelling in the last 2 and 1/2 years that everything feels alternately jumbled and compressed. I need to get DONE with the unpacking and setting up so I can finish writing one book and do the layouts on a separate photo book. Here’s hoping all of that globe trotting pays off.

Mark is downtown at his new job on an inner city construction site. SO COOL that he can take the tram to work and not even drive the van or worry about finding a place to park. He loves that!

Life is good and we are both fine and, in spite of moments of missing Europe, happy to be back in Melbourne.

More soon — hopefully WITH images!

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That Glamourous Expat Lifestyle (cough-cough!)

Just letting you know that the day-to-day glamour-factor (smirk!) of our adventures in French expat lifestyle might be a bit muted this week. Ah well — it can’t always be a life of wine and cheese and glorious scenery, eh?

As previously reported, boxes 1-100 were delivered 3 weeks ago and we are still wading through those. The last 50-plus items are arriving today — tonight actually. Thank heavens it is summer and there is still enough light outside for Mark and the driver to see as they load things into the garage and tick off the numbers on the list. It will probably be well after 9 PM before they are done because the driver is running so late. And Mark hasn’t even had the splendid dinner that I planned to make yet.

I just — literally just — wrangled the apartment back into shape whilst Mark was off with some of the menfolk doing a two day mountain hiking session. He got back tonight just after 6 PM looking sunburnt, ready to drop, and walking quite gingerly because he was aching all over.

And this is the day that the driver was late??? Not really good timing.

Had planned to do some new posting this week with photo essays. At this point, I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.

Now where did I put that print out of the packing list. (sigh!)

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Boxes, HEAT, & A Bit Of This & That

A bit of personal and non-travel related commentary today. And no, I didn’t drop off the face of the planet and all is well in our world. But we’re still wading through the boxes that were delivered from Australia via ship to England and then delivery truck here to France.

When we were ‘back home’ in Australia on our 7 and 1/2 acre rural property, we had a studio space/storage area in a separate building from our cottage. And that studio space was bigger than this entire small apartment in France!

Let’s just say we are a little challenged space-wise right now. So a second culling of our possessions is under way. And the apartment is a &*^%$£! disaster zone as a result. We sold off 99.99% of our furniture, donated or sold hundreds of books and movies, pared down the clothes, and then stored the rest (including Mark’s rather massive collection of tools!) for 20 months. 21 months later, they have all arrived and in spite of what we thought was a serious purge back in Oz, we have too much stuff.

I have thinned out the books and music cds and movies (again!) and am donating them to a Cancer Support France group here in the South of France that helps English speaking expats who have relocated to France deal with cancer issues. It’s probably a god-send for them to have such a group since I can honestly tell you that if French is not your native language, being ill in a foreign country can occasionally be a very unsettling experience. So this felt like just the right place to send all of these lovely books and media items.

Our other ‘challenge’ for the last few weeks has been the intense heat and staggering humidity — and it isn’t just here. Huge swathes of France have been on alert due to the high temperatures that soared upward and then stayed there. The last time that this kind of heat arrived in France was in the 2003 heatwave when almost 15,000 people died in France alone. This a country where fans are the norm for coping with summer, air conditioning is a rarity, and along with the many other French businesses that close down for a month, a large number of medical practitioners go on holiday for the month of August.

We’ve also been making a concerted effort to drink huge amounts of water every day to avoid dehydration or heat-exhaustion. Just walking those few blocks to the Saturday market this past weekend (with a hat on and smeared in sun block) saw me returning home dripping wet and weak at the knees from the heat. I was weak and nauseous for the entire rest of the day along with some other rather unpleasant symptoms.

And did I mention that I have been living in a sarong for most of the last 2 weeks? Other than unpacking and sorting, this has not been the most productive period I’ve had since arriving in St. Girons and it is all down to the nauseating heat which has left me, and tens of thousands of other people, feeling quite incapacitated.

I still have the last 2 slideshows to post from 2 weekends ago when the Autrefois was in St. Girons, but for now there may not be any new photo ops until I feel that it’s safe to walk around outside for more than half an hour without feeling like I am going to collapse. Don’t I wish for (and remember fondly!) the body-resiliency of my 20s and 30s — a physical state that I unfortunately no longer have.

Ah well — until the next time — stay cool wherever you are!

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©Deborah Harmes and ©A Wanderful Life
Please respect the words and images on this page.
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