Home Stretch

Things got a bit hectic, but I am now living in a furniture-less house, devoid of most appliances, belongings and - most annoyingly - chairs. I'm sleeping on my camp mattress in my room with just my clock radio to wake me up three times for these last days of school. There are camping things around waiting to be packed into the car and the kitchen is still functional but that's about it. Oh, the TV is still there as it is going to Melbourne next week.

I'm thoroughly sick of dealing with STUFF though. Everything individual thing in my house had to be picked up and decided upon - bin, garage sale, give away, Vinnies, take in car, put in box.... - I had a moment the other day while throwing things in the skip of sheer hatred for all these things, possessions I don't even remember deciding to get - many things I never bought and just inherited when others couldn't work out what to do with them. The wasted time, expense and effort of buying these things is mindblowing and I'm determined to have a minimalist lifestyle in which if something is not reguarly used or admired it goes. If someone gives me something that I don't want I will just thank them and then get rid of it, knowing that the thought was there somewhere.

Currently I'm waiting at school for the boyfriend to bring the last of the furniture - a couch and two sofa chairs - here for the Year 12 common room, and then that will be it. Oh no, actually I have to ring Vinnies again to get them to come and get the wardrobe that was left behind on the last pickup. THEN I will be done with stuff. Or at least until I have to get rid of all the excess plates, glasses and pots and pans in the kitchen. THEN I'll be done. Then I'll be gone too.

Hooray.

The Culling of Stuff

Because I won't pay thousands of dollars to move virtually worthless possessions, I'm doing a massive cull. I aim to leave here with my bed, bedside table, 4 picture boxes and 10 packing boxes, plus the kennel for Bess. Considering the fact that it took THREE trips in a truck to get all my stuff here that is a serious amount to get rid of. We will have a massive garage sale, we've sold some things on ebay, some will be given away and the rest chucked.

To give you an idea of the amount of stuff I'm talking about, here is the 'garage sale room'. There is a lot of furniture that will be sold (including what you can see in here under all the junk!), but this is pretty much all of the "stuff" that needs to find a new home:


And just a moment ago I finished cleaning out the pantry. There are three boxes of stuff that is out of date and either open and half used or unopened. It is all stuff I haven't touched in the almost two years we've been here. I've tried to find somewhere to send it, but really I can't give it away - most of it is years out of date. These aren't small boxes either...


I do feel bad about having all these things/food/junk/stuff/crap/bits and pieces. It is all unnecessary and surplus to what two people need to live very comfortably. I am very much looking forward to getting to Busselton and having very little and trying very, very hard to minimise the amount of things I collect.

The other exciting bit of news is that there is a new community garden in Busselton - this is so much better than trying to grow stuff ourselves. The garden is all organic and run workshops on worm farming, composting and other organic gardening things. Can't wait! I've decided that we should have a rule to only ride our bikes to the garden.

The other decision I've made is to buy an electric scooter to ride to school. I'm sure this will be totally doable, I just need to practice riding one to feel that I'll be okay, which I'm sure I will be. A new challenge to be embraced.

Is this enough positives yet?

New Job = New Start?

After all the stress of worrying that things wouldn't work out I've finally managed to get a job I want in a place we want to be that pays significantly better than my current wage. It is a good job. Really, it is the job for which I've put up with all the shit of this year because in many ways it has been the way my CV looks now that got me the interview in the first place. While this new school is slightly posher than my current one, and the hours I'm required there are slightly longer, I am getting paid more and we will be living very close to it and, most importantly, I'm just a teacher there - no extra responsibilities or demands - the demands of teaching are enough for me. The plan then, is to stay there for two or three years full-time, save every single penny I can and then do something else. I have to promise that to myself because while I have taken this job and am happy about it, it isn't really, honestly what I want to do. I still need to find that thing.

There was a show on SBS that I stumbled upon the other night. I think it was called 'Roadtrip' but that seems a bad name for it. Three early-mid 20s travelled around together in a green motorhome and conducted interviews with successful people about career and life balance, happiness, regrets, family and associated things. They are looking for help in deciding the direction of their lives - what do they believe is success? how much should they do what they want over what they should? should lifestyle determine work or work determine lifestyle? These are questions I'm grappling with and while it was interesting to watch, it was also slightly scary that I've been asking this questions now for over ten years, with no real answers. And this new change....I wonder if it will provide any help with these things?

One guy interviewed (I got momentarily excited because his name is Tim Winton, but turns out it isn't the Tim Winton I'd want to hear from!) had a very interesting phrase he used to describe the process or moment of changing life - 'reaching escape velocity'. I like this phrase - it embodies in it the kind of energy and faith needed to get away from the things society thinks we should do, like work full time to be able to afford to buy the stuff that keeps the economy going. He also made the comment that the context of a profession does all it can to keep you there and pull you back in if you do try to break away. This is exactly how it feels - no one around you believes there is any other way of living life besides working full time and working yourself to death to move up and be successful etc, etc. It is very difficult to believe anything different when no one else does and there is no one to talk this stuff through with who doesn't have an agenda.

But this is all for later. For now, the upshot is that I have a job that allows us to move more easily between here and there. Once there, I can continue to explore these things.

Juggling a Jigsaw

The juggling act, the jigsaw, use any other metaphor you like, of moving interstate is at the moment quite mindblowing. It seemed such a simple idea. Beautifully simple. Leave a place we don't like for somewhere better. Many, many people talk about it and it is another thing to decide to do it, but on a whole other level to go through the process. Even for me, the veteran mover, the modern nomad.

Today I met my replacement. She who now has my job with all its joys and fucking insanity. I'm happy for her and I wondered, as I watched her walk off down the street, did she feel excited about it? was she at ease with her decision? You can't tell much from the back of an almost-stranger's head. Mostly I felt relief and the now-familiar panic. Relief that the school found someone decent. The panic is for my own situation. And then I went and taught a double of Year 7s with a splitting headache.

I have a phone interview on Friday for a school just south of Perth. Mum and Dad drove down there today to check the area out and did not fill me with excitement about it. It seems...soulless. And if there is one thing we want to avoid it is a lack of soul or heart or community or sense of the place where one lives as being special and part of a deliberate decision about one's life. We don't want to end up somewhere where other people have ended up. Plus, although the school is supposed to be a good one the staff carpark has an enormous fence around it. It's the little things, you see, that make a place what it is. And I'd really prefer to live in a place without large fences and 'dodgy' streets. Is this too much to ask?

There are other jobs to apply for, here and there. Mostly in Perth because I can only apply for non-government jobs until my government approval comes through (any time from now to eternity). But, frankly, how many of those government schools would I want to work in?

In fact, do I want to work in a school at all?

How this will all work out, will I go to WA with a job I want, a job at all? What I will do when we get there? Where we will live and how? And as this cycles around and around my head I wonder what I'm doing in the first place considering that only thing I'm 100% sure of is that I don't want to be here. And there is the niggle - will elsewhere really be any different?

Adelaide Thoughts

I find myself in Adelaide at an English teachers' conference to which I won a scholarship. The prospect of travelling and remaining as 'sustainable' as possible is actually quite difficult, although I think that on balance I've managed to do okay. Essentially this is because I didn't fly. I came over on the train, which besides being fun, is - I think - a much more sustainable way to travel. (I also just watched this thing about 'slow life' I think it was called, in Japan, and it really was nice to have a 'slow' experience of getting here). Of course I purchased food on board that would not have been sustainably made. And really, food is the biggest issue. Because I'm in a hotel without cooking facilities and my lunch is provided at the conference, I don't have a lot of choice in what I eat. It has to be made by someone else and for the masses = generally unsustainable. The hotel seems quite good with their energy usage - those long life bulbs and not changing sheets/towels every day, although their tvs are on standby power. Of course, I'm not that good at home so I can't say much. But, I have only travelled in buses and trams since I got here and mostly I've walked, so that's good. On Thursday I have a free day during which I'll hire one of the free bikes they provide here to do a bit of sightseeing. Then it is back on a bus and the train home.

I did see something quite disturbing today, however. In a session about the multiliteracies of children (younger than 10) we were being told about Penguin Club - kind of like Second Life for kiddies - and how one of the main activities is playing games (that seem to resemble blue collar work) for coins they can swap for clothes and things for their igloos. The 'economisation' of these children into functional consumers at younger than 10 is very scary.

Oh how I love my bike/oh how I hate the cold

The bf and I just went for our first ride together and it was lovely - really nice just coasting along and chatting. It was a tonic to all the other stuff - for awhile anyway. Photos are coming... I'm going to also buy a little trailer so that I can go shopping etc with it as I can't wear a backpack while riding (hurts my sholders). That will encourage me to not drive the car when I'm just doing jobs around town at all. Won't that be awesome!?

But I'm so fricking sick of the cold. I hate being trapped inside - where it is cold anyway. I hate wearing layers and layers and layers. I'm sick of having a sniffly nose and freezing fingers. And we have *months* left of these 10deg days. I keep looking at the forecast temps in Perth and sighing. Dad rang the other day when he was SITTING OUTSIDE to have a cup of tea. Geeze. Bring on Spring.

And there was this whole things with a beanie I knitted but it is just too depressing to talk about right now. Suffice to say that heads are quite large.

The allure of modernity

Had a long conversation with the bf last night about all sorts of things - but we ended up talking about how much 'status' and things such as marketing, advertising, promises and ideals drag us unknowingly (most of the time) into desiring things we have no real need or want of. I went to Target yesterday to buy a new kettle. Sure, we could have kept using our kettle that needs a spoon propped under it to make the connection so it boils water. Technically it still works. But I'm on holidays and this is the time to make purchases such as this and, for goodness sake, it was only going to be $30 odd dollars. Anyway, as I stood there in the 'homewares' section I could feel the draw of all these products - they were saying 'look, all *good* people have placemats/casserole dishes/blenders/proper saucepans and you should have one/two/eight/twenty too". I had to consciously and deliberately push those thoughts aside. It has taken a long time to train myself out of thinking like the good little consumer I'm supposed to be. But I now feel like I have some measure of control over my money and my life because I can see the things I'm supposed to have for what they are - usually - unnecessary and a waste (of resources, time, money, energy etc etc).

But speaking of buying things, I have to add that yesterday, after Target, I bought a bike. Not a cheap bike either. A proper bike that will do me for all the running around I usually do in the car and more. It is white and pink! I love it and I've made a promise to myself that I will get on it every day that I'm not working and every day I get home early from work. Here's to less carbon and less fat!!

Living smart

It worries me a lot that I'm moving to such an expensive place to live. In many ways I don't feel like I have a choice - that there are undeniable reasons for going to WA - but that it is, in other ways, neither logical nor clever to go there. Looking at property to rent or buy is an exercise in futility. I worry that we'll get there and have nowhere to live. I wonder how I'll make a decision about a job if I have no idea of what it would be like to live in a particular place. I worry that the bf and I won't agree or be able to work it out (unlikely, really).

On a lighter note (as the above is essentially unsolvable at the moment), it was last day for kids today at school - only two more days of the semester for me. Thank good. I couldn't have gone on - 13 weeks is just stupidly long for a term. This also means that I'm halfway to out of here. School seems to be imploding slightly and I'm glad to be getting out really. On the other hand I think I'll be really sad to go. Although whenever anyone asks me about it I can't get the grin off my face, which is slightly embarrassing. Never mind.

Also, I'm knitting a beanie in the round. It's fun. Perhaps more fun that straight needles. I'm a bit worried it won't fit me - it doesn't seem big enough - but knitted things tend to stretch so hopefully it will be okay. I love building patterns with stitches. You're never quite sure how it will turn out until you've done a few rows, then it starts looking cool. Did I mention that I'm really enjoying knitting??!

Enough now. I've been thinking other 'sustainable' things, but I've had three drinks now and I think I should stop there. Happy end of semester to me.

I need to remember to come here and write. It makes me feel better.

This weekend my job was advertised. It is weird to see it there - the very sort of job ad I would respond to, only I already have that job. Hmmm. Best not to think too far along that line. On the other hand it means that all the shit I do will be someone else's responsibility. And change for me and in the school is good. Just praying that someone excellent applies!

My knitting continues apace. Sort of...when I have wool. I can't get to the wool shop here as it is closed more than it is open and I ordered some online but it is taking FOREVER to arrive. Frustrating. It is becoming an obsession. Mostly it is all I think about. I even volunteered to go on an excursion to Melbourne so I could knit on the bus there and back and possibly while at the expo too. Perhaps I am really loosing it.

Petrol prices are freaking me out. I really don't know if it is sustainable to keep driving 150kms per day - even for the five months, minus four weeks holidays, that are left before we go. The bf says I need to not panic and he's probably right. But it is just horrible to see hard earned money being used to continually fill and refill the tank, just to get to the place where I earn the hard earned money. This circularity is what made us decide to go in the first place. I'm going to try to live without a car when we get to WA. No idea how possible that'll be, but I'd like to try.

Speaking of things I want, a friend just made a list of 10 things she wants. Thought I might try it:

1. To have no car and no regular driving.
2. To have a vege garden that supplies most of our vege needs
3. To have a source of local, small farmed, stress-free meat and dairy products - possibly our own eventually
4. To make everything in the 'Knitting Precious Things' book - except the weird thing
5. To be teaching history in a high school part time
6. To be marketing the jewellery locally and o/s
7. To be running the art class business idea I have
8. To be a part of a community in a meaningful way
9. To finish the Heritage course and do something with it - even if that means a change of career
10. To enjoy being near my family again

We'll see in a few months how this changes - as I imagine it will.

When I was 27 I bought a 20-acre property in North Central Victoria. It had a mudbrick house and a separate mudbrick 'artist's' studio on it, a very big dam, an old orchard and vege patch and a few other interesting bits and pieces. It was hidden in a state forest at the end of the road. Last year I sold it, sick of looking after it all while working full time and I had started to feel very isolated there - it was 15mins to town and 3 hours to Melbourne. I don't regret selling it as I do want to go back to WA and I knew I didn't want to be stuck in that particular part of the world. But I feel a bit silly that now, when I don't own that property anymore, I'm interested in self-sufficiency and all the rest. I was interested in that stuff before but I just couldn't work out how to do it. I realise now that what I couldn't work out was that if I was more self-sufficient I wouldn't have to work as much, meaning more time for being self-sufficient (growing food, looking after animals etc.).

So while this might seem a bit backward, I do feel there is method in my madness, lessons I had to learn, people I had to meet, experiences I had to go through, to get where I am now: open and ready for this new life. My resignation will be announced next week - just another step in the path - and I will send off my application to the WA ed dept. Even though I don't really want to work as hard as I am at the moment, I still need a job. And as the year goes on, I think that I'm not really going to be able to do the WWOOFing. To decide to do that is a brave leap and although I've done many of those before I haven't done them with someone else before. That is the scary thing for both of us.

I'm rambling. As I'd say to the kids - no structure or organisation! But I'm also four drinks into the evening, so forgive me.

One change after another

This week I resigned. I won't be leaving until the end of the year, but I need a reference asap for the WA ed department and hanging onto the secret that I was going was starting to rot my soul. My boss and the few people I've told (it will be announced when the ad for my job goes in the paper) are sad to see me go and have said they'll really miss me - which is so lovely to know and hear. And now I feel rejuvenated about work, happy to be going, excited about the things that are coming up, including the challenges. It is amazing what a change this is for me, especially after spending the weekend sobbing and miserable.

The other thing I've done is re-learnt how to knit. I used to knit when I was a kid but haven't for years and years. So on Sunday, after looking at expensive books and looking at the library for something I eventually went to Spotlight and found a simple 'magazine' type thing, bought some needles and wool and started knitting. It has consumed my time at home as I just can't wait to get back to it. Even thought the scarf I'm making is wonky and weird - it is for the bf and he doesn't mind - it doesn't matter. I'm making something and it feels great.

So I guess it is all positives this week. The bf and I keep talking about what we want for our new life and this dreaming is so important and lovely. Things, perhaps, aren't so bad.

Thoughts on sitting at a cafe at noon on a Thursday

Mostly I spend my time driving to work, being at work the whole day, driving home from work and in my house. Boring I know, but today I took for me and one of the things I did was sit at the outside tables of a cafe just on lunchtime. Apparently the only people out and about at this time were visibly rich or weighed down with children. I will say it time and again but; this scares me. I was listening to Jeanette Winterson (one of my favourite authors) on Radio National's The Book Show today and she was talking about the absolute futility of the modern world in the face of a dying planet. I was looking at women's handbags today, beautiful, obviously expensive handbags and all I could think was 'was that made by a slave in China?' and 'I wonder if the cow that provided that leather had a good life?'. I suspect the answers are yes, and no. Sadly. Am I just cynical that I see even the tiny excesses - handbags - as the enemy. And how much am I a hypocrite as I have a somewhat expensive handbag, I don't turn things off at the wall, I buy Coke Zero, I drive my car miles and miles every single day, I have a clothes dryer, I use a dishwasher, I grow none of my food, I occasionally eat supermarket meat. Will I be a better person if I make little flannelet squares to use instead of toilet paper, if I plant lettuce in a window box, if I quit my job, sell the car, drift out of society? More importantly will this protect me from what is to come and will this make me happy?

After the cafe I hid under the doona for a few hours then made pumpkin soup.

Positives

After being so cryptic and then writing all my woes and frustrations into my paper journal I'm now trying to be positive. So I've found a heap of information on the web that will help me with this huge change in life (although that makes me want to just get on with it!) and joined a forum called 'Aussies Living Simply'. I'll put it on my links when I get around to it. I found some interesting-looking books too, but I don't want to buy anything really so I just wrote down the details for later. Oh, and a great tomato sauce (as in for pasta) recipe.

I really think I'd like to try not buying anything. Watching ads on tv for this or that thing to buy, have, use or whatever makes me feel like this world has gone completely off track. There is one ad that gets to me the most - it is for a shop called Gifts for Guys and the things they advertise are competely useless and unnecessary (not to mention ugly in the extreme) and I think about the people that buy this stuff and what they get out of it and if they even think about where it came from (what resources were used to make and ship it), whether they really need it, whether they really want it, even.

I am by no means perfect. I make some terrible food purchases that I wish I didn't. But there are issues there that go way deeper than wanting to make a difference to the world. But I have stopped buying other things - books for one. After selling my 500+ books and enjoying the freedom that that has given me I now try not to buy books and if I do (I read a lot and sometimes it is unavoidable) I always give them away. Plus, my paper usage at school can sometimes get way out of control. I do try though.

But I don't buy other things. I spend my money on living stuff - the basics; food, petrol, rent, bills and then I save. I would like to try to do more though. Perhaps that can be my first project in this life change - don't buy anything new or at all if possible (not counting essentials). There is a social movement that supports this way of living. It is called Compacting and follows the idea that we don't need to buy things, especially new things. There are all sorts of supporting 'groups' too like Freecycle and Really Really Free Market. I'm going to look in to these things a bit more. My biggest decision is to not buy any new winter clothes. I have all the clothes I had last year and surely I don't need any more to get me through (although a new spencer might have to be an exception - it is cold, cold, cold here!). I feel bad that I just went to Singapore with Mum and bought a (more than a) few things - clothes and shoes mostly. But that is done and now I just have to look forward.

No more buying!!

...a start

We have a plan. The plan is flexible and changable, but the world we want to create for ourselves has some key features that won't change: Sustainability. Happiness. Life.

I guess the way it is panning out at the moment is that we will be moving to a lovely part of regional Western Australia (currently we are in regional Victoria). We have a date for that: 20 December 2008 (that's when our current lease ends - this reality is both exciting and terrifying). The journey to WA is a little more up in the air, but ideally I want to take a year off teaching and we will travel across Australia in a year while we WWOOF to learn sustainable skills and experience a different way of living so we can make an informed decision about where we want to end up and how we want to live when we get there.

I know a lot more now than I did when I first left an urban life about five years ago to move to a little farm I bought where I lived on my own. Perhaps I'll get into this story in a future post. But, now with my partner, we have a good picture of what we want out of life - the only thing we have to do is find the balance to make it happen.

Is this very cryptic? I apologise if it is, but all this seems so very far away from my current life where I drive an hour to a small town to matyr myself to teaching (as much as I love working with kids) and in these winter months, barely see my love and my dog in daylight hours.

I have lots of thoughts for this blog....stay tuned!