Moving Across Town

red brick church Sandy Bay Road Hobart

You might have guessed from the silence on here that we have been mid-move again.

Believe it or not, the short move across town has been a lot more challenging than the move across the world was.

In part, that’s because of the physical scale of what we’ve been doing. Rather than walking into a dinky little furnished cottage where we needed to do little more than empty three suitcases into the cupboards, we have been unpacking the contents of a forty-foot container, some of which we only packed up nine weeks ago, but some of which we haven’t seen in over two years. (Hello DorkySon’s old playpen, and random wooden medicine cabinet that I don’t remember ever buying…). We have been trying to fit nearly forty large boxes of books into a house with just one built in bookcase. And for the first time ever, we are in a house with a flight of stairs, which is helping me discover all sorts of new muscles I didn’t even know I had. Continue reading

Seven Weeks

A lemon tree in our garden

Exactly seven weeks ago, we landed in Hobart.

Today, we picked up the keys for our new house. We walked around the light, bright empty rooms, imagining how they will look and feel when we move in next weekend. I can’t wait to see them, crammed to bursting with our books and rugs, our paintings and photos, our love and our laughter.

As we were leaving, DorkySon plucked a perfectly ripe fruit from the tree that grows in our new garden.

Anyone for lemonade?

A wobble. And a thank you.

I had my first wobble this week.

It wasn’t so much an oh-my-goodness-I’ve-moved-to-the-other-side-of-the-world wobble as it was a damn-these-hormones-and-the-long-list-of-things-to-do-and-why-isn’t-there-any-chocolate-in-the-house wobble.

But it was a wobble, nonetheless.

So I did what any self-respecting woman would do in that situation. I drank too much wine, cried a lot and had an early night.

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Blossoming

cherry blossom

It is spring here. I almost feel guilty enjoying it so much, when friends and family back in the UK are posting updates online about the days getting shorter, the mornings getting colder. If I could bundle up some of our Tasmanian spring and send it across to you all, I would.

Last weekend we moved our clocks forward an hour. Not that we needed to – the mornings and the evenings here were already filled with light. The kind of light that makes you run from one window to another, watching it change, holding your breath as the sunbeams catch one cloud, exhaling silently as they shimmer on another.

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One Month

It is four weeks to the day since we landed in Hobart.

One half of my head is saying ‘Four weeks ALREADY?

The other half is saying. ‘ONLY four weeks? It feels like so much longer.

DorkyDad started his new job this week, so gone are the lazy mornings of lounging around in pyjamas with a second coffee. We are back to early starts and hurried bowls of Special K before he has to dash for the bus. How nice it’ll be if we’re lucky enough to find a house for the longer term that allows him to walk to work again, feeling the seasons on his face rather than watching them through a window.

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