We’ve been in Sydney nearly 3 months now and it has been disgraceful that I have not written sooner.
The quick details are that we are renting an excellent house, Helen is doing really well with her acting classes and auditioning like crazy and The Boy has settled in to his new house nicely.
I on the other hand am still looking for a job despite two recruitment agencies currently actively looking on my behalf, as well as all the job applications I have been sending in around the place for permanent work.
*sigh*
Also, I’ve been taking part in a Twitter challenge to take a self-portrait everyday and post it to the Flickr Twitter 365 Project Group.
I’ve been trying to attach little stories to each of the photos as a reminder of the events of the day (which is probably why I haven’t written here since then). I haven’t managed to do so for all of them but I do have some favourites:
The full set of photos on my Flickr feed is available
here.
The house is sold. Resignations have been accepted. All our gear is now in storage.
We’re in Brisbane for Christmas and then in mid-January we make our merry way to the biggest of Australian Big Smokes and relocate to Sydney.
All I need now is a home and a job. Small details.
Well, there aren’t as many as there used to be. Since the cooling off period has expired, the house is now officially sold. I handed in my resignation at work on Monday and I finish on 19 December. Helen’s resignation went in the mail yesterday (she’s been on long-term parenting leave). The removalists are coming to pick up all our stuff in the days leading up to Christmas. Dates are being locked in. It’s happening. It’s really happening.
For Christmas and New Year (and probably most of, if not all of January) we will both be homeless and unemployed, although in reality we’ll be resting up in Brisbane with family before throwing ourselves into the next phase of life.
Weeeee!
For maybe the first time in my life, I’m committing myself to the great unknown where nothing is certain. It is scary and exciting at the same time.
May we all live in interesting times :-)
I talked to a very wise man, and he said, “If you’re trying to find a new direction, don’t plan it, because this [pointing to his head] has been planning your life up to now. You can’t plan something new with the same old apparatus.” He said, “Leave a gap. Leave a space, and just do things on auto for a while. Just see where these whims take you.
—
John Cleese on Creativity
It’s an interesting thought as I aim to move into a new career over the course of 2009. My brain and common sense have been doing all the planning up to now. I think it’s time for something else to have a go.
All of my wife’s students have been told, as has my wife’s family (my side has known about it for months). What makes it even more official is that we had our first open house today after the house was listed on the market yesterday afternoon.
At the end of the year, we’re relocating to Sydney.
It’s exciting, scary, stressful and exhausting at the same time. We have spent the last couple of weeks offloading large quantities of clutter to Freecycle and shifting other things into temporary storage. The house has not looked this clean and nice since, well ever. It’s just a shame that after 3 years, it takes leaving to get the house looking like the streamlined, uncluttered place I always wanted to live in.
We don’t have anywhere to live in Sydney yet (the rental search company Sydney Rental Serach begins weaving its magic on Monday). I don’t have a job either. Hopefully these things will sort themselves out. In the meantime, I choose to worry about them extensively, in between bouts of worrying about selling the house and having everything ready in time for when the removalists arrive to bundle up all our gear. And if I find I still have spare moment of happiness and lightness, I can worry about Christmas. Woo.
This week I started a three month temporary transfer in another part of the Department (same building, different branch). For the first time in a long time, I’m actually excited about going to work each morning. I don’t have very much to do right now apart from lots of background reading, but still, very excited.
It’s amazing what a simple change of scenery and responsibilities can do to your outlook on life.
The orgiastic pile of centipedes sitting behind this dog looked sufficiently like a present from the pooch that I had to look twice before I remembered “Hang on, that dog’s not real”.
I have no idea why this group of centipedes thought our front step was a good place for this sort of carry on, but they did.
It was really quite disgusting to look at.
Because having the flu just wasn’t misery enough.
