I am completely exhausted and stressed and I can’t even begin to describe what an awful 2 weeks these past 14 days have been. On most days we have been living by the seat of our pants, living hour by hour. We’ve been trying to juggle packing and moving furniture into the storage unit with our work and I’ve had the added hassle of juggling preparation for the craft show that I just had. Monday the 25th was the day that we had to get out of our old house and Sunday the 24th was the last day of the show. Great timing huh? You can imagine the spin that we’ve been in the last 14 days. After all our efforts we just couldn’t get out on the 25th, there was stuff still in the house (mostly Tim’s stuff and most of our furniture) and we had all the cleaning to do. I had to ask the agent for a 24 hour extension of time to vacate.

My show ran from the 19th to the 24th of August. While the show has been on I’ve not had any chance to help Tim move furniture or boxes to the storage unit. I’ve had to get up at 6am and stay up until after midnight collecting boxes of stock from the old house, checking the float and making sure I had everything for the next day’s stock at the show. The show has completely shattered me physically – my brain has been like mush, my legs and feet ache so much that I can hardly walk as I leave on the way back to the car. For the past 4 weeks now I think I have been suffering from moderate stress. Because there is so much to remember for each day I find it difficult to hold a thought or to concentrate for longer than a minute. The last 4 nights we have been sleeping at the granny flat and I have had only one decent night’s sleep. I thought I’d be freed up to do some cleaning at our old house on Tuesday, the day after the show, and maybe help pack away some of Tim’s remaining items but it took me almost 4 hours just to put the boxes containing stock from the show back into storage. 

Tim has started work at his new job as a bicycle postman with Australia Post, so he’s now working two jobs starting at 5am and finishing his postie job at 2pm. He’s been rushing back from work to pack his stuff and get it into storage before they close at 5:30 each night.

To compound all this madness, a box containing my purse (with about $180 cash in it), my sunglasses and my $500 camera with photos of my stand at the show was stolen when I was putting the show stock back into storage at Storage King on Monday. If only my purse and camera wasn’t stolen I think this whole experience would seem a whole lot better. I had some really good photos on my camera of my stand at the show which I hadn’t had chance to download onto my computer – I’m so sad that I’ve now lost those photos forever. I was really looking forward to showing my mum and dad the photos and putting the them up on my website and up here on our blog. As for losing my purse, I haven’t even had the chance to cancel my credit card or EFTPOS cards yet because we don’t have the internet or a phone line at the granny flat yet. 

The storage unit now looks like a disorganised second hand furniture shop. It is still full of furniture and stuff in boxes that we need to go through and really work out if it is worthwhile hanging onto certain things. Perhaps at the end of our simple living exercise which is the granny flat we’ll come to the conclusion that maybe we don’t need to take all those pieces of furniture with us anyway. It will save a few thousand dollars in transporting the stuff. Plus, eventually the plan is to get new stuff. Tim has heaps of boxes that he still has to go through and sell some more stuff on ebay. I’m very concerned that he won’t be able to find the time to get all that stuff sorted out and sold and we’ll be carting it with us to Tasmania *oh god please no …*

Because we don’t have the internet or the phone connected at the granny flat I can’t reply to emails that people have sent me, although I can download them on iphone but for some reason my stupid iphone won’t send replies. So I’m going to have some outraged customers before too long …

Sometimes I think the better option would have been to just move straight down to Tasmania and avoided this move. If we had just gone straight down there, I would have been able to easily get a job at my preferred law firm there because they were looking for staff at that point. But I have to keep reminding myself that we couldn’t have moved down there anyway because we already signed a lease to have a tenant in the house for 8 months. Also, I really wanted to go through with the show especially seeing though I had already paid for it and they don’t give refunds. Plus, Tim’s chances of getting a job down there would have been almost zero if he hadn’t started work with Australia Post. At least there is a chance he can get an internal transfer down to Tasmania. I hope at the end of this we’ll look back and know that it was all worth it.