More Progress

After nearly 10 days of brain frying budget work I took a day off......and packed. Gibbo left at 5am for meetings at head office.....and I packed. The hallway cupboards are clear....the family room is not - it's full of boxes, bags and suitcases full of gear. Why do we accumulate so much crap? Why do we have so many towels? I haven't bought a towel in years but we must have at least 30 of them.

Chloe was very helpful with the hand made decorations that, after nearly 8 years, have seen their last Christmas with us.

Drew's Time and Space Machine is finally due to become landfill. He reminded me today that when we made it all those years ago we hid behind the garage at the old house and waited for Gibbo to come home and find the Machine and the note that said we'd teleported away and would be back later. It has a place to put your feet at the bottom and a message on the top that says, "Do not touch anything in the Past or it will change the Future; Good Luck; Only in the Present can you touch things; Don't touch anything in the Future"!

Hallway Cupboard 1 now houses only the bolted down gun cabinet (and some dirt on the floor).

Drew's room.

Hallway Cupboard 2 looks more chaotic than it really is. It was easy to unpack this one because I am clear about where everything will be going at the new house. There are some craft items that will go to Vinnies. See all those towels - and that's not all of them. You can see the Time and Space Machine on the bottom shelf. It's been safely guarding lots of craft type things all these years (after we finished using it to teleport).

Two and a half hours later it looked like this.

Then this. Empty. See that bag on the floor up the end. The cat is asleep inside it. Which I forgot about. I walked up there to close the door and kicked the bag out of the way. The cat shot out of the bag like a bullet from a gun; scared the jeebies out of me. When I found her cowering under the white desk near the bathroom door her eyes were as big as saucers and the hair all along her back was standing straight up. I laughed and laughed as I cuddled and soothed her. Totally freaked her out. I'm still laughing. She'll get me back.

It rained all day. All day. In fact, it bucketed down from about 9am until 3pm with barely a letup. 

By 4pm I'd moved into the spare room and unpacked one of the top cupboards. That's when I slowed down. I found a lot of letters and cards written and received long before I met Gibbo. There's letters written and received across a vast range of years and people - from best friends, old boyfriends, non boyfriends, foreign pen pals and family. Letters that I wrote home during my overseas travels and letters written to me c/- The Walkabout Club in London. There's a whole heap of letters that my Dad, Mate, wrote to me as I moved around. They all start off with "Dear Popsy" - that's what he called me, Popsy, after the Lancaster bomber, P-Popsy, one of several planes that bombed the Moehne Dam in May 1943 (the story later immortalised in the movie The Dambusters). I sat and read a selection and couldn't bring myself to throw any of them out. Well, maybe one or two. But that's all. They'll move with me to the new house and maybe one day I'll do something with them.

Gibbo finally made it home around 7pm after having to back track because of rising creek levels. He thought he'd come home the back way but got to a floodway and couldn't even see the markers so turned around.

Meg is having pizza and wine with friends; Drew is working at the Reds game at Suncorp.