It’s been a while. I know.
Over 6 months.
Stuff has happened.
Things have changed.
Of course, one thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that I live in a caravan.
I have a house now. No longer homeless. Yet still, I live in a caravan.
I made a deal with Laithe when we moved from Cairns.
He didn’t really want to leave.
The deal was- we’d move closer to family & friends if he could buy a farm. Or at least ‘land’.
Lots of land.
Under starry skies above?
With that in mind, he chose a little town within 3 hours of the Grandparents & friends in the Hawkesbury, & 3 hours from the coast where my best friend’s place is we have a glorious holiday home near the lake.
We bought a shitty little house.
Again.
It was full of asbestos & the floor plan was shit, so Laithe conned a mate into helping him gut the house in the few days between Christmas & New Year. The kids & I moved out to the house after the hard work was done all the internal asbestos was removed.
That left me with a toilet & an open shower (4 Pubes).
Showering after dark meant you had to share your loofah with the resident cockroaches, & the water would run straight off your elbows onto the lounge room floor.
We’ve been here 3 months now.
Georgie started school… again.
Her 3rd one in less than a year.
Bloody awful parents, I know. She’s loving it.
Emerson is off to preschool so now, for 2 days a week, it’s someone else’s responsibility to keep him fenced in.
He hasn’t wandered off since the last major incident, though I did leave him on the wrong side of the road last week, totally unintentionally.
Do you think it would help if I taught him to ‘heel’?
Appropriate supervision doesn’t seem to be my strong point.
I’ve started work at the very small local hospital.
It’s my kind of place.
CLEAN & ORGANISED!
Even the patients are on to it. I came out the front door yesterday to this…
Comes for blood tests. Leaves boots & hat at the door.
Bless.
Laithe is working on making the house liveable.
No mean feat.
The toilet is still inside the house, but we now shower in the luxurious garage bathroom/laundry outside. It actually used to be the old hospitals mortuary.
Nice, ay?
It’s OK.
But winter is coming.
Getting ready for work via 12volt lighting isn’t that easy either.
I got to work the other morning looking a bit like this…
Yikes!
Bathroom aside, we’ve smashed out a fair bit of work in the last 3 months.
Just like our last house, there was barely a straight wall in the place. There wasn’t a single room where the floor was level throughout.
And part of the house, where four of the rooms come together, was four different heights despite being laid on the Same. Frigin. Beams.
But now that Laithe & I have finalised the details of out DIVORCE finished yelling to each other through the floor while he was crawling round under the house trying to fix it, everything is reasonably level & ready for a floating floor to go down… at some point in the distant future.
Our travels have been mucked around a fair bit. Obviously.
We were meant to be in Tasmania from January to about now. I was SO looking forward to it & went through a fairly substantial mourning period when our plans changed. I wore a LOT of black.
Then we were going to leave after the coming school holidays in April to head up to Queensland for winter.
Fortunately, I finally finished our WAAAAAYYYY overdue tax this week (yeh, I did a little dance & sucked back on a cigarette all ‘post-coital’ like).
Unfortunately, it’s become quite clear that … er… umm… we HAVE NO FREAKIN MONEY! *sigh*
So anyway, as soon as we put some dosh back in our account, we’ll be sloughing off the growing moss & heading off on a much quicker, less luxurious (can it be any less luxurious?), chocolate/cheese/& alcohol free trip up to Far North Queensland.
Hopefully.
Although without chocolate, cheese & alcohol it hardly seems worth it.
