A (belated) House Full of Boxes

I wrote this an age ago, but it is neither here nor there that you read it now. So, here you are:-

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We have a house full of boxes.

Pale brown cardboard houses Ikea furniture in pieces, which, once formed into a piece of furniture will make our home. Two men brought the boxes and I said, “There. Leave them there.” There they stay. I leave them wholly as they are, unwilling to pull them out and stare at myriad bits that might make a sofa, a table, a bookcase or chairs. It’s not that I’m incapable of transforming a cardboard box into a useful item, merely that my Partner is much better. In order for me to compose a whole out of the parts, I would have to study the instructions laboriously. The instructions are in pictures and I am a woman of words, not of images. Over time, I am certain I could make sense of it, certain that I could understand the process, certain that I could take each step as required, methodically, and finish with a complete recognisable and stable object. Instead, I intend to retreat to the kitchen, where I do not need to study pictures. Rather, I will have whole items that I cleave apart. I will add a dash of this, a splash of that, measuring none of it. And then, I will have dinner, and perhaps even furniture on which to eat it, though the furniture will be little of my doing.

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And I did retreat to the kitchen. And lo! I did make us dinner. And it was eaten but not on chairs, sitting at a table. We partook of dinner amidst almost assembled furniture. Ultimately, I did make one item of furniture (a Bekvam stool, absolutely wonderful things for we who are a wee bit on the ‘not-tall’ side) and held the end of our new, blue sofa while my Partner pieced it together. I have never been a fan of Ikea furniture (except for Bekvam stools and Ivar bookshelves) but I was most impressed at how cleverly The Great Ikea Folk deconstructed furniture into parts re-composable by complete, albeit methodical, amateurs. A month or so on and everything is still stable. Hoorah!

There are no photos to accompany this post. Two reasons:-
1. I am still a wee bit photo’ed out post bike ride; and
2. I was all excited about the camera on my (hand-me-down) i-phone and then I saw the photographs on a computer when I uploaded them to facebook and was truly horrified at how pixelated the image was. Partially my fault, yes, but also the fault of the camera itself (which is very old. I am well aware that other people take marvellous images with the i-phone camera. It appears, not I.)

Lastly, hoorah! Blog post!

What The Flood Left Behind

In February, my partner and I were cycling in Morocco. When locals found out we were from Australia, the first thing they said (or mimed, depending on how well we had communicated our inability to communicate) was that there was a lot of rain there. Initially, I shrugged this off. Woo hoo! Rain in Brisbane! (I hope it’s falling in the catchment area.) Eventually, the seriousness dawned on me and the danger to my friends and family, particularly my parents, led to some emails and a phone call. Then, helpfully, I lay awake, worrying.

Everyone (I knew) was safe, but not everyone’s property. My parent’s home went under and, although this was sad and traumatic, it has ultimately not been devastating. Their home is undergoing renovation; they are living in my brother’s house and are fairly chipper. Most of my mother’s hoard of Things – my stuff, my sibling’s stuff, reams and reams of toilet paper, old clothes that no one will ever wear again – was irreparably damaged. My father’s garden is inaccessible to him. But my mother has started her hoard again. My father says, “Old woman! Why do you keep these things? Another deluge might take them. Use them! Use them!” I like this new attitude. My father potters in my brother’s yard. He’d like to see his old garden but he is also hopeful that the flood will have destroyed some of his dragon fruit plants, which had started colonising all the other plants.

While we were away, my sister informed me that our boxes of books – packed up before we left for the UK in 2007 – and our boxes of Other Stuff – packed up and sent home before we left the UK in 2010 – were stored at my parents’ house. Some were water damaged and she’d thrown things out – clothes, rugs, books.

Shortly after we arrived back in Australia, we spent a jet-lagged day sorting out what remained. Most of our household stuff (pots and pans, crockery and cutlery) was fine but we had an odd mixture of clothes. I had no coats, trousers or tee-shirts and my partner had no shirts. Saddest of all, some of our more precious books were ruined: a certified antique copy of Alexander Pope’s translation of The Odyssey, photo albums and my handwritten journals of our time in the UK and earlier.

It was difficult not to be sad as I leafed through my partner’s ruined photographs and tried to read the words of my old journals, one day’s musing had bled into another’s. But I did not feel sad when I held the ruined copy of Pope’s Odyssey. I had cradled it and treasured it for so many years, that I rather gleefully threw it across the lawn. With a satisfying ‘kathunk’, it hit the fence and fell open. My violence damaged it no more than the flood had. I threw a few more bricked books.

Nevertheless, a lot more stuff had come through unscathed than I’d been expecting. We boxed it all up again, to be collected in a few months time, as we now have a home in Melbourne in which to store it. Hopefully, the home isn’t in a flood, fire or other natural disaster-prone area.

October Miscellaney

September and October were busy, busy months as my post on Solo Lentil Soup alluded to. On having a wee think about October I realise:-

1. October opened and we were in Ireland. Prior to that I had been away for a conference on the weekend. Law conferences are mean.

Dandelion Clock from Mean Law Conference, Oxford.

2. We came back (from Ireland) and started a language course – my first formal learning environment since finishing my law degree. Studying again is disconcerting and makes me rather nervous.

Raindrops on Crocosima, Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, Oct 2009.

3. We went to London for a weekend and a couple of weekends later, I went to London again. Although I have traipsed to London on quite a few occassions while living here, I very rarely take photographs. This time, I tried a bit harder to take photographs but even still, we did not have many. Partially, it seems as if everything is over photographed. Partially, the crowds bother me and I just want to escape them. And now, there is the added annoyance of wondering whether I am taking a photograph of something that I am not allowed to photograph because I might use that photograph for my terrorist plots.

Japanese Windflower. The photos are tangentially related to the immediately preceding paragraph. Except for this one. I just like this one. (And I have not sorted my London photos yet.)

4. On our first free weekend in about 2 months, we filled it to the brim with cycling. As we had house guests, we had not been for long rides; so we went for a long ride. Except that the long ride ended up being stop-start-abortive because I got two punctures (or one puncture not fixed correctly the first time).

The first puncture we fixed at a roundabout junction of two A-roads, with many passing cars, motorbikes and pedestrians. That sure was fun.

The second puncture we did not bother fixing, but instead changed the inner tube. Thankfully, the second puncture occured on the bike path, so we were surrounded by trees and it was blissfully peaceful. The only sounds were my grunts of annoyance as I struggled to (1) remove back wheel; (2) remove tyre; (3) replace inner tube; (4) replace tyre; (5) re-affix back wheel.

Naturally, the next day we had to go for another ride (plus the weather was glorious – my favourite crisp cold blue skies). We went for a less long ride but together, both rides made for a lot of riding plus one lovely long lazy Sunday lunch at a fabulous pub in the English countryside.

Gentian or Campion? I always mix those two up. I think it's a campion. The Burren, Ireland, October 2009.

5. Our next free weekend we ruined by staying up way too late at a friend’s place, nattering, playing computer games, watching silly Youtube videos (you know that party game, Have you seen, “Charlie bit me?” No? It’s on Youtube, you must see it. And so it goes.) On Saturday, we woke rather late.  Sunday was miserable weather. I spent the weekend crafting, cleaning my bike chain and, surprisingly, whooping my partner’s ass in Carcassone. Yay me!

Carcassone is a board game, in which you place tiles that have roads and city parts on them. You have a set of characters – known as Meeples – which you place on the tile to claim it; once placed the Meeple can become a Knight (city piece); thief (road piece) or Farmer (land piece). The aim is to gain points by building cities, roads and farms. Cities and roads are scored as they are completed and farms are scored when all tiles have been placed.

I don’t really have a strategy for Carcassone and what “strategy” I do have would not be called a strategy as such by more serious players. Usually, I try to place my Big Meeple (what my partner and I call a Beeple but I don’t think that’s orthodox) as a farmer as soon as possible because his continued presence in my ranks of Meeples stresses me out. Mostly, I play with an eye to aesthetics and how the land is developing. Sometimes I decide, “This game, I’m going to make lots of cities.” Often, I play and develop the land physically closest to me. I try to resist these tendencies but I’m not very good at it.

I never was very good at chess; I could not help wanting to save all my pieces. Losing even a single pawn would get me quite upset. As a war leader, I would more likely retreat or negotiate a peace settlement than make a, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead,”* type speech. My chess strategy involved dodging around evading capture until I did something stupid like expose my king to check and, sometimes, to checkmate. Conversely, when I used to play Lemmings (the computer game) I would rescue just the percentage I needed to get past that level and then blow all the rest up because their posture with the bomb above their heads and increasing panic as the numbers counted down made me giggle. Every. Single. Time.

Dear Partner, if you read the two preceding paragraphs, please erase all memory of it. In truth, I have excellent game strategies with multifarious strands and clearly developed endgame manouvers, which you will never learn. Never.

And, as of this weekend, we are off to France to cycle in that alleged cycle-touring mecca. In November. (We like cold weather.)

* Henry, from Shakespeare’s Henry V.

Did a lemming go down there? Me at the Cliffs of Moher, Ireland, October 2009.