martedì, settembre 10, 2013

Turnover

We're getting ready to go. Maybe prematurely since we won't actually get on the road until either the F-word gets a contract in Melbourne - always a lot harder to do when you're not right there - or until we get tenants for the house. It's getting listed today.

We'll see how long it takes. It's a pretty nice house to be honest. I'm going to miss it. Not so much as the structure it is - though it's a remarkably good structure by the standards of this fucking burnt and jerry-built* land and I'll miss the lovely kitchen in it forever - we will DEFINITELY budget to custom-build the kitchen if we buy a place again. It is really worth it to buy a place cheap with a fucking terrible kitchen and then spend some of the money you didn't spend buying the house on getting a perfect kitchen. But then we had really good builders taking care of it and I'm sure having shitty builders would have changed the nature of the experience. Anyways. I hate talking about houses. How did I get stuck in this train of thought? Where was I? Right.

It's not the house I'm expecting to miss so much as the fact that it was the setting for Godzilla's babyhood, which is already winding to a close. Last week he was standing up without holding on to anything while he wasn't thinking about what he was doing - he was all excited about bathtime - and while he hasn't replicated that trick yet since then he's stopped seeming like a little baby to me. He's a kid already. Seems much more so a kid because he has this personality on him. It's the same personality he's always had, which frankly is a much more beautiful, open and smiling one than I would have expected from the child of two neurotic bridge trolls like us. He can just project it a lot better now through sounds and doing stuff. The last couple of weeks has also seen the beginning of tool use, at least in the sense of banging one thing against another to make good noises instead of just waving the one thing around randomly. Tool use - getting him toward the whole corvid level of intelligence. My lovely little boy.

Anyways, I'm not feeling terribly nostalgic for his lost babyhood because he's kinda better now and I expect will only get more and more fun for the next several years. Probably also helped along by the fact that, though this is an unpredictable world and I'm not as fresh a slab of meat as I once was, we are planning on doing the whole baby thing again. Possibly sooner rather than later now that Australia has voted a misogynist suited penis into power who clawed back the female vote by promising a maternity leave scheme which is far less insulting than the one presently extant. But I'm guessing it will be easier to be maudlin over Godzilla's lost babyhood once we've definitively left the house where I've spent many happy hours rocking him in the dapples of dusty Antipodean sunbeams during his sleepy pupae phase whilst watching Game of Thrones.

And I'll miss the neighborhood, but I'd miss it anyways, because it's not gonna be there. When we moved in, we had a lovely lady in her late 80s on the right side - she was the first non-us non-medical person to hold Godzilla - who keeled over and died all of a sudden a few months back. A young couple has since moved in, and while they seem nice we aren't used enough to them to miss them.

The 97 year old living on the left side is in hospital now. She loves Godzilla and doesn't have enough babies in town so we visit her every week. She wants to come home and I hope for her sake she does. People that old who go into nursing homes last about two weeks before they die in sheer self-defense at the scale of the change. But that'd mean installing a $27,000 elevator in the front of her house and I don't think her family will go for it. A shame. It's her money and what she wants. She should be able to make a big fucking bonfire with it if she wants. But it's not just the elevator, of course; she'd need round the clock in-home care, which if you do it right but don't do it for your parents yourself, costs about as much as moving into a five star hotel.

I've always thought I'd like to be able to die at leisure and take care of business before winking out, but comparing my two neighbours is starting to make me think the way the one on the right did it is the way to go.

 And then the fella two doors down who sort of adopted us, because he considered buying our house before we did and just couldn't let go of all his great renovation ideas, is moving too. So. There you are. We've been lucky with our neighbours, but they're all leaving one way or the other. It's almost like fate is conspiring to make us feel like we shouldn't let the door slap our asses on the way out.

*If that is some sort of ethnic slur I apologize to whomever I've insulted.