A Work In Progress

Today is the day of the photo shoot. My make up is done, hair is styled...okay so it is the photo shoot for my house but I aim to get into at least one shot!! I have spent the weekend trying to ensure the house looks stylish (as stylish as an ugly 70s house can look) and working out what her "best features" are and the best angle to shoot them from. Of course I realise the photographer and agent will be good at that so I really don't need to bother and what I need to focus on is ensuring that neither cat destroys all my tidying. So far this morning both have had a big play on the bed, messing up my nicely laid bed spread. Tui has pulled out the decorative sticks from one of the vases and Penne has taken one of the cat toys from the basket and hidden it under the bed so I can't reach it. Good work guys.

I don't like to run. I have often said that if you want to see me run you need to chase me with an axe. However I have now discovered one other thing that will also cause me to run. After a week of painting, sorting, dusting, polishing, vacuuming, and general cleaning I was sitting at my desk yesterday morning when I looked up and saw my cat Penzance walking past the window with a large, headless, dead (probably did not need to say that) possum in his mouth. We made eye contact. In an instant I read his mind and he read mine. We both raced for the cat door - he with the aim of getting his prize inside and under my bed, and me with the aim of locking him out so I could preserve the cleanliness of my house. You have never seen me move with such gazelle like grace and speed. I won. Penzance was banished to enjoy his prize outdoors. I rewarded myself with a good lie down.

Knee deep in junk. Managed to put some things in the garage ready to be shipped back (heater collection - see previous post for details, clothes rack) and create a pile in the garage of things that definitely need to go into hard rubbish (cat scratching post, PC circa 1992, old ugly painting I did) Now down to the hard stuff. The paperwork. The iddy biddy knick knacks that I really don't need but keep hanging on to. The millions of old magazines. The empty boxes that for some reason I am seem to collect because they might be useful to put something in one day (???). Think I need to have a coffee. PS What is really bad at this point is that somewhere in the junk there is a clock that is ticking loudly and driving me insane. Perhaps I should use it as motivation to get to the bottom of the junk simply so I can shut the bloody thing up!!!

When you decide to sell your house, the big thing you need to do is "de-clutter". Given that one of my favourite web sites is http://www.uglyhousephotos.com/ , I am very aware that photos of your house are a key aspect to making a good impression to potential buyers, and having too much stuff around is not appealing to buyers. As one of my friends put it yesterday: you need to make your house look as though no one live there. I am a tidy person, in fact it is something that I often get hassled about as I am very neat and everything has it's place. BUT I do carry the family hoarder gene and I have A LOT of stuff (albeit displayed very neatly!!!). So while I thought the job of de-cluttering was not going to be too hard, it is harder than I thought. My plan this week has been to go through room by room and get rid of obvious rubbish and box up things I will keep and put them out of sight. As I have been going through the rooms I have put spare things that I have not been qui...

I have 35 days left in Melbourne in which I need to do a lot of stuff. To help me remember all I have to do I have been writing lists, lots of lists. The system is not working as now I getting too many lists, so I really need to figure out a better system. However I can see a second problem on the horizon. Potentially I could spend the next few hours working out a better list system but that is two hours I could spend actually doing things on the lists. Sigh. What to do.

This is my one hundredth post! Wow. Hope you have read every one and enjoyed reading them like I have enjoyed writing them. I like to imagine that there are heaps of people that religiously log on to my blog everyday and hang off my every word, but I suspect this may not be the case. Anyway, onto today's topic: Let me tell you about this funky thing I found on my computer. It is called Movie Maker and it allows you to merge together files that are shot from video, cameras or from the web cam and then edit them into movies, adding music, titles and other fancy things. I am having sooooo much fun with it! I have gathered as many of the videos I have of the kids and am editing together to create a piece of epic cinematography. I am then going to force people to watch it and pretend they are interested in how I have linked all the files and make "oohh" and "aahhh" comments at the fact I have added fade ins or captions to the movie. Pretty sure this could be the star...

I have decided to move back to the land of the long white cloud. Actually it is the land of chilly bins, dairies, jandels and adding "a" to the end of every sentence and I need to remember how to speak the language again. So far this week I have tried to pay for things with Aussi dollars and Euros. I have gotten all confused when I got my latte in a bowl and had pleasant memories resurface as I had a Pinky bar and some Fejoia juice. This is going to be a fun adventure!!