A moving experience

So, not content with having stayed in approximately eight different places in the last four months, or with moving house across the ocean, just when our container has been unpacked and the pictures and curtains hung, Willem and I decide that our pad is too pricey and we need to move again. But we'll take it easy, we agree - after all, moving is a huge undertaking and the end of the year is upon us. We'll just start keeping an eye out for a suitable place that is still close to Maya's school, because Maraetai rentals - especially in our new revised price range - are pretty scarce. Perhaps we'll find something in a couple of months' time. In the meantime, I'd start slowly looking around for a job too.

A week later, we signed a new tenancy agreement and I accepted a post at a clinic in Otara, South Auckland. Eish!

We have been incredibly lucky with how things have worked out. Our old landlords, Helen and Jake, were very kind about our giving notice, and even offered us the use of their small high-sided trailer, perfect for piling boxes, for the move. They also helped us hang the curtains back up and clean the house. I happened to hear of a parent at Maya's school who needed a house, so I linked them up with Helen and everyone was delighted with the new arrangement. Our new landlords, Benita and Quinten, are a young couple with a new baby who had just started renovating their house when they discovered they were pregnant. After the birth, they moved into a flat below their parents' house (which, conveniently, is in the road just behind our old place) so that she could stay home with the baby and they could make up the difference by renting out their house. They also offered us a large flatbed trailer, perfect for moving furniture, and told us we were welcome to start moving things before the official start of the tenancy as the house was standing empty and they were quite concerned about us moving so close to Christmas. They even invited us for Christmas dinner - the Kiwis get very distressed at the thought of people being alone over Christmas. (Chronic introverts that we are, we declined, but were very touched by the gesture.) So now we were set. Now there was just the minor issue of actually moving our enormous number of possessions one kilometre down the hill. By ourselves.

Willem and I don't seem to travel light through this life, despite our best zen-like attempts to live simply. So it's just as well we're both pretty robust people. (Must be all that wine.) We lugged, we heaved, we dragged, we shuffled, we trekked and trailed up and down the stairs and the sloping garden path and got half the big furniture moved on one fine Sunday, with the children ensconsed in front of the TV and the computer, respectively, held there with dire threats and warnings of the dreadful consequences of getting in our way. Then in the week in between, every evening we loaded the car and moved boxes and clothes and potplants, with the children now positioned in front of the TV in the new place with takeaway suppers. It was a tough week, with many late nights for us and the children, and panic about where to put the stuff and when to fit in all the chores and trying to manage all the end-of-year parties and prizegivings and various administrative tasks.

On the Saturday we finally had some much-appreciated help in the form of our friend Jake and Ivan, a colleague of Willem's, who came by to help move the rest of the big furniture. Miranda prepared a feast of a lunch for all of us at her house, and by the evening, the beds were made, the plates were put away, the appliances were working, and we were in! Aaahhh. And then the doorbell rang, and who should it be but Quinten and Benita, bearing a housewarming gift of flowers and something they thought might help to make us feel at home: a milktart and a bag of koeksusters! My flabbergasted face must have said it all, because Benita explained that she had a friend with a bakery who knew what South Africans like. Sunday saw us back at the old house scrubbing and tidying and moving the last few forgotten boxes, and we hit a slight hitch when the moving company, which was supposed to have come to remove the boxes and packing material still from the SA move and never did, finally arrived - while we were out. They left again, and we were faced with clearing the garage of a truckload of cardboard boxes and bubble wrap - with no trailers. Willem phoned Jack, who brought his bakkie (sorry, pickup), and they dumped it all in our new garage. I was not privvy to Willem's Monday morning phonecall to the moving company, but by Tuesday my garage was mysteriously emptied of packaging. Who's Duh Man? It was not, unfortunately, empty of boxes. Full boxes. Of stuff that we don't know what to do with and are unwilling to unpack. Those remain, to be processed on some other day, hopefully before the winter damp turns our books and carpets to unrecognisable mouldy piles.

So here we are in our new house. Initially, we were not very excited about it. Although it was newly renovated inside, and lovely and bright and airy, it is on the main road and squashed between its neighbours, over whose less-than-tidy yards we gaze and into whose living rooms our windows peer. There is also a tenant in a cottage in the garden, so we share a driveway and look out over her house too. Not exactly a study in quiet seclusion. But the longer we are here, the more we like it. The house is old, with lovely wooden door frames and a villa-like feel, the but interior is modern and elegant, with clean, simple lines. The spacious deck looks out over the green belt behind the house (the selfsame Jungle Across the Road, but now viewed from the other side), and if you mentally photoshop out the jostling bristle of aerials and ugly tin rooftops alongside us, the view of the Auckland skyline in the distance, just above a turquoise strip of sea, is lovely. We have lots of storage under the house, and a little garden (although to our chagrin there are no stairs from the deck to the garden, which means you have to go all around the house from the front door to get to the lawn). The traffic from the road does bother me a little, the house is poorly insulated (hot in summer, freezing in winter) - but there is a fireplace, and a corner bath, and a separate toilet, and a separate indoor laundry. But all together, we look forward to happy entertaining on the deck, short, easy walks to the school and the corner shop (the dairy) and an only slightly longer walk to the beach. And we look forward to our friends and family coming to visit!

And at the end of January, I start my new job. I'll be working in a 20-bed inpatient adult male clinic for what were always previously considered chronic throw-away-the-key types. They haven't had a psychologist for about three years and so don't have any specific plans for what they might do with one now that they have one. But they're excited because they've been trying out all kinds of out-of-the-box therapy techniques, such as turning the isolation rooms into staff rooms, and the smoking room into a gym. And lots more cutting-edge stuff. So, would I please be able to write my own job description? And decide what I would like to do? And yes, of course you can work part-time - what hours would suit you? And yes, you'd be appointed as a senior psychologist with lots of opportunity for merit promotions and increases, and yes, you'd get specific extra training and supervision in neuropsychological testing, rendering you eminently employable anywhere in the country, or indeed the world. No, sadly, you won't get your own office - there's no space at the clinic at present. Or even your own computer - we'll have to write motivations for that (after all, this is a state institution). But you will be working with a highly motivated team of funny, committed, passionate people. Where they don't micromanage and where one might just feel that the loss of the freedom of working in private practice is not so bad after all.

So enter the New Year, a time of great promise and lots of (more) new beginnings. Viva 2009, in which we all get slim and fit and healthy and happy and rich and start, maybe, to feel that we are making this place home.