Is this about the time of year I usually apologise for falling miles behind on bloggery? I just re-read that Edinburgh post from about 3 weeks back and realised that the promised forthcoming detail entirely wasn’t… but it’s not a new thing, because in a variety of notebooks and scraps of paper I’ve got embryonic posts dating back as far as the snow trip we went on to France back in about February-ish!
The primary thing I’m facing at the minute is what you might term an Ongoing Logistical Nightmare.
In February I moved out of my residence of 5 years – the grotty basement in Camden – and installed myself in The Puzzler’s spare room, more or less as a temporary measure in the interim whilst I track down more permanent lodgings. Being that it’s a much smaller room, most of my stuff then went into storage somewhere out in the wilds of North London.
So the routine of living off a reduced subset of gear, with a weekend at Liz’s place in every 2 or thereabouts, was reasonably ordered but not insurmountably difficult to manage. For extra fun though work sent me to the US for 2 months, which meant a certain amount of suitcase-based living-out-of.
Having returned at the end of July I was looking forward to a little plain-sailing, but of course we went away to Edinburgh Fringe for a week which meant more suitcase-livin’… great fun trip of course, but the sort of thing which requires a bit of recovery time from afterwards.
So it therefore makes sense to charge straight into housesitting for a friend for 3 weeks. Not 3 complete weeks, of course – it meant a weekend at Liz’s place. Also, in the middle was a weekend of hankywaving in Gloucestershire. Of course, I didn’t have any of my hankywaving gear in my suitcase, so the challenge (once I’d realised) was to find a night where I wasn’t going to be out too late, followed by a night where I’d be back at the housesit house, and spend *that* night at Chez Puzzler, where all my stuff is. The next day it was a simple matter of lugging a bag of hankywaving gear and indoor camping gear in to work, then back home that night to pack in the weekend bag, then take that back in to work the next day, then to Gloucestershire, then back to work, and back to housesitting.
The friends I housesat for have 2 small kids, so we worked out that it’d be better for me to be out of the house when they got home… only the tricky part there was that Thursday night before that I left for Brussels, followed by a weekend of whisky-festivalling in the Netherlands. So, yet again, the process was to pack a bag for the weekend & take it in to work the next day, then that night pack EVERYTHING ELSE into another bag, and leave that in the office over the weekend, ready to take home Sunday night.
I say “home” – the other fun part is that I moved into a new house (temporarily) on Monday night. So Sunday night I stayed at Chez Puzzler, which afforded me the opportunity to collect a few more things that I needed from there, and lug that lot in to work Monday morning. Monday night we were recording our video podcast, so I left my bags at the office, and returned to collect them from the lobby afterwards. At which point I collected the whole shooting match (a rucksack, backpack, wheely suitcase, messenger bag, and plastic bag), and lugged the whole lot to the new digs & up 3 flights of stairs.
I am SO sick of lumping bags around.
Luckily, all things going to plan, the next move I make will be rather more permanent.
But I hope that gives some idea as to where all the blogging’s gone.