What to Do With Stuff.

 Spring arrived in Melbourne.  Ornamental cherries bloomed in the nature strip

and the wisteria in our street put on a bold display complete with a halo of buzzing bees.

BD conquered the metro/train system and moved on to independent use of level-floor trams.  She started looking for places to live and I started thinking about going home, at which point it became evident that I had a problem.  Two problems actually, not counting international shenanigans which may or may not result in diesel rationing.

My first problem was the capricious citreon which still refused to start whenever things got a little hot and sweaty, and randomly lost and regained functions at the mercy of its demented little electronic brain.  I had learned how to live with the citreon while Roger diligently researched its replacement and as such it was a problem now under management. 

This has nothing to do with citreon-related trauma, but there's a word for when a dog (or other hungry being) stares wistfully at your food.  It's called 'groaking'.

My second problem was Stuff.  As BD marched back to health and independent living she left behind her a trail of no-longer-used equipment: over-toilet frames, transit wheelchairs, bed poles, a foam mattress, a folding bed... add to that the camping gear and bicycle which had transformed from trusted steed and home to awkwardly shaped bits of Stuff that I had to carry around, and my problem was that I had one-and-a-half car's worth of Stuff and only one car.  And I'd taken the roof and bicycle racks off in case of sudden one-way trips to the wrecker, so I couldn't fit the bicyle on the roof any more.  As an aside, if you wrap roof and bicycle racks in marine carpet and hold it all together with sticky tape it looks remarkably like you're trying to get rid of a body.  Not that I know what a body wrapped in carpet looks like, trust me.

I promise everyone is still alive.

"Let's just freight it back to Adelaide," said Roger, and he found a back-loading company that promised to arrange the moving.

On Wednesday the pick up window came and went.  I rang the company (PEA Logistics, if you want to know who to avoid in the future).  The man who answered the phone brimmed with confidence.  "Oh, that's already been picked up," he sang.

"No it hasn't. I'm sitting here in my lounge room looking at it."

He promised a tomorrow pick up.

"It has to be gone by Friday noon," I said.  "That's a hard deadline. "  The home owners were due home on Friday afternoon and I didn't think they'd appreciated all my junk, packaged or not, in their lounge room.  "Not a problem," warbled PEA Logistics. "We'll be there Friday morning."  Which is how I ended up two days later on Friday afternoon with one and a half car's worth of stuff, a bicycle, and a logistics company that had dropped off the face of the earth and ceased any form of communication.  I'll spare you the tedious and time-consuming details of moving it all to the motel and the next day moving it all to the next house sit, apart from to say it took a very long time and involved quite the physical workout and the citreon decided it was time for a rest at the most inconvenient time.  And it was raining of course, because Melbourne always rains when rain is least wanted.  Did I mention that one function the citreon had lost was the fans and air conditioning which meant that the demister wasn't working, which meant that in order to see I had to wind the windows down and then the rain came in?  I was a slightly less than happy little camper, to put things mildly.

I sent a break-up email to PEA Logistics, to which they replied inanely and quite confusingly "will do!"  Then I wrote them a scathing review which was immediately deleted from their Google reviews.  So I came here to rant about their ineptitude instead.

Phew.  I think I'll go make a nice cup of tea and cuddle the cat.

Then I'll decide what to do about Stuff.

Cat.  Cuddles granted if requested with sufficient respect.