Well, no more countdowns for this, that, or the other, anymore! 🙂 Here we are, and the place is starting (only just!) to look like a home, and not like a cardboard box tip! The (un)packing ladies arrived here this morning at half past eight, but this time, instead of being just the two of them, it was a whole team of seven (or was it eight!? I fergit…) “and there was much to-ing and fro-ing in the land, and much disruption and chaos ensued…” However, I have managed to find a few of my things – not everything I wanted to find, but a few… and no doubt a lot of things will be re-lost, as it was himself telling the ladies where to put things, and not me! Quite frankly, there wasn’t room for me to butt in and see where things were being put – with the seven (or maybe eight) of them, plus Julian wheeling trolley-loads of multiple cardboard boxes at a time into the shed, there wasn’t much room left in the corridor to walk around saying “I’d like those in here, please”, or “Could you put those in my bathroom? Thanks…” – and it’s a very wide corridor! The one thing that we’re going to have to get, toot sweet (as the French say) are bookcases! Not just for the books, which are still over at Doncaster for the Doll’s House, but for “stuff” – ornaments, document folders (I don’t really classify them as “books”, but they need to be stored somewhere!) etc. I think I might have mentioned last night that we got the removalists to put the sofa-bed in here (the Den) because the sofa-bed’s rather big, and the “secondary” corridor to the three spare bedrooms where we were going to put the sofa-bed is quite narrow. The entry to that narrower corridor is quite small too, and rather than risk injury to the sofa-bed or the walls, we had them put it in here, where we were (are still?) going to get a nice “casual” couch or chairs for that particular corner. It will look and be very comfortable when it’s all done and the boxes (all 19 of them – I just counted!) aren’t sitting in a miniature “Great Wall of China” right across the window! I have no idea what’s in them, but apparently it all came out of the Den over at Doncaster – so I think we’re going to need quite a lot of bookcases! The ladies have now departed, but as yet I haven’t got up off my chair to have a look around to see what they have put where. Hmmm… I’ve just been for a brief wander… they really haven’t unpacked very much at all, that I can see! S’truth almighty, there are still boxes from here to eternity, apparently they haven’t found most of my bathroom stuff, there are boxes of saucepans still in the living room – and if Julian was busy filling up the shed with boxes that he wants me to sift through for auction – well, it’ll take us about 20 years just to go through all the boxes still left all over the house!

Anyway, while all that was going on this morning, and I was stuck in here, keeping out of everyone’s way, I thought “Well, we’re in a new house, I should really bestir myself and find a new template for the blog and make a new header – so I have 🙂 I hope you like it… At the moment, Julian’s off picking up Flipper – goodness knows what she’ll make of all of this! Before picking up Flipper though, he dropped off a whole heap of boxes filled with crumpled packing paper at the tip, then went on to Officeworks because our mouses (?mice?) apparently don’t like glass-topped table-desks. He has a mouse mat, but I don’t, and the chairs don’t roll over carpet the way they did over tiles, so he’s got me a mouse mat, and got some of those mats that you put down on carpet so that computer chairs can be moved around more easily (I actually think I pulled a muscle trying to manhandle (womanhandle?) my chair up to, and away from, my desk!) At the moment I’m using my desk notebook as a mouse mat… It works… sort-of, if you don’t mind a fair bit of drag… From Officeworks he went over to Doncaster to do a bit of shopping (we were out of a few things, and there was Dry Cleaning and mail to pick up) then across to our old apartment to pick up Flipper’s litter-boxes and cat-caves (which he forgot to take with him – again! Poor Flipper – she’ll just have to put up with sleeping on the good mohair rug!) The nearby Golf Club has been sub-divided and work is starting on yet another housing estate there, so Doncaster Road is half blocked off, and will be until next March! So to make things easier for everyone half the entries and exits to Shoppingtown have been closed off too! Yeah, riiight! That’s really going to help matters! So while Julian was over at our old place, he walked around and took lots of photos, just so we can point and say (hopefully not too wistfully!) “We used to live there…” I’m thinking that this place will feel a lot more like home when it has a cat in it! Let’s just hope that Flipper thinks it’s home because it’s got us in it! Foxtel was supposed to have been switched across this morning, but I went in there to try it our just before and it told me that the card wasn’t “valid” or something – more work for poor Julian to have to chase up!

I can’t wait to have my bathroom re-done! There is totally and utterly and completely no room to put anything, with that ruddy great bath in there! I have two small cupboards – no drawers at all – just two very small cupboards, where if you adjust the shelves so that a can of hair spray will stand up on one shelf, the remaining shelf is too low to even put a roll of toilet paper on it! That bathroom is minute! Where’s a woman supposed to put her makeup? There’s no room for a box of tissues anywhere near the vanity unit – my tissues are sitting on a bit of the bath surrounds at the moment, as is my Dyson reverse-cycle fan heater, a mirror on a stand, and two cans of hair spray – and we haven’t even found all of my bathroom things yet! I really am going to have to settle down and look for vanity units that’ll give me a bit of storage space!

Weigh-in this morning. My first weigh-in in the new house, I was a trifle trepidated because of not having done any Stair Walking (though I did do a bit of running around and unwrapping things) so I was a bit nervous when I stepped on the scales (in the en-suite – Julian’s bathroom, because there’s not enough room in mine for even a pair of scales on the floor) Do you know, I had to rule up another graph page this morning! I’d gone right off the page! Down another three points, from 77.2kg to 76.9kg! I’m amazed… stunned! Awed! But I’m sure it’s only an aberration – I’m sure to go back up again tomorrow! But in the meantime, I can jump around singing “Hallelujah” – I’m in the kilo zone before my final goal weight! Of course I won’t stay there – I’ll probably go back up again tomorrow – but that doesn’t matter, I’m in it for today, at least! 🙂

Tomorrow we’re going to have to leave Flipper on her own to get used to the place – we have to go and get a new, much smaller microwave. We don’t need or want a fancy one, we only ever use it for de-frosting things occasionally, re-heating leftovers, and/or steaming vegetables – so while we’re over at Doncaster and I’m at the hairdresser, Julian can pick one up from DJ’s or wherever. There was something else we were supposed to get too, but Flipper’s just come home and I’ve completely forgotten what it was. Never mind, I’ll remember tomorrow – I hope! 🙂

So, Flipper is home – she doesn’t seem frightened or upset – just curious, but wary… hopefully this is a good sign (she even had a bit of a cuddle with the much hated “Mummy”! Howzat for a good, brave little girl!) Julian’s getting her a drink of water while I finish this. Foxtel is now working, though for some unknown reason I can’t get to their online TV Guide – I could yesterday, but not today. The page loads, but only displays the top frame of the screen and nothing else. You’d think that if it was broken a company like Foxtel would be right onto it, as it doesn’t make them look good in the eyes of their online customers! Anyway, the internet for me will be down for a while this evening while Julian plumbs his computer in and gets the network up and running – at the moment we’re without the file server so I can’t save things properly or access document files, graphics, photos, and just about everything I use all day, every day! And so once again, that’s about it from me for tonight! 🙂 Don’t forget to drop by again tomorrow night to find out if my weight has gone back up again (it probably will, you know!) and how Flipper coped for her first night in a strange place – whether we got our new smaller microwave, and what sort it is – and if I’ve found the rest of my bathroom gear (I’m going to be pretty annoyed if I haven’t!) but whatever happens, there’ll be lots and lots to fill you all in on! Until then though, do continue to bee good, remember that life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep warm – but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂