Despite the fact that I am still not getting any paid employment, I still seem to be keeping pretty busy. For as long as I can remember, my wife and I have shared the housework so I can’t say that I never realised how hard housewives worked before because I already do know. But I have basically taken over the house husband duties, by necessity rather than desire. My days seem to revolve around washing, washing up, cleaning and taking care of home business of all sorts.
Helena’s mum passed away in November 2011 and it has been a real difficulty for my wife to get used to life without her. For over 20 years mum and dad lived with us and, in her last couple of years of life, we were her primary carers as the ravages of diabetes and liver failure started to set in. Mum was a “hoarder” of some degree, keeping most everything that she thought would be important “one day”. And, since 2004 when we moved into this house, we have basically had two households full of household effects squeezed into a house that was only meant to contain one. When mum passed away and since dad is now in a nursing home, the bulk of their effects were simply collected together and put in the back sheds until Helena felt strong enough to deal with them.
And there they have stayed, until a couple of weeks ago. I decided that, as part of my contribution to the family good, I would clean out both sheds and try to rationalise the both of them so that they could be useable again as sheds and also so that my wife could have some closure about her mum and dad’s personal effects. What a job it turned out to be! Mixed in with boxes and boxes of old paperwork (phone bills from 2005, etc) were Naturalisation Certificates, mum’s Passport from when she came out to Australia in 1959 and other important pieces of family history, all dumped in together. What it meant was that every box, every bag, every container, had to be laboriously sorted through to ensure that something important wasn’t going to be thrown out.
At Illawarra Riders coffee night last Tuesday one of the IR members was smirking when I was telling this story and he went on to explain that he works for a company that cleans out houses that are parts of deceased estates. Some of the stories that he told about the things that they find in the process of doing this were quite amazing.
Anyway, it took us days and days to sort, stack, repack and dispose. Fortunately our local council allows each household two free pickups of a trailer-load of trash per calendar year. Pack it all up, book a pickup and leave the stuff on the front footpath on rubbish collection day and it gets taken away, no hassles. We had used one late last year so we had another up our sleeve.
So the end result of nearly two week’s work is that our two back sheds, the smaller one which contained my stuff mostly, and the bigger one that contained both mum and dad’s stuff are now clean and we have made some sense of them. Dad’s shed has become mine and is now being filled (not really, but you know what I mean) with my fishing gear, overflow tools and stuff from my garage and excess motorcycle equipment (fairing molds from the Shadowfax, for example) The smaller shed is now devoted to Helena’s overflow art and craft equipment plus garden tools and there’s still plenty of room left in both of them! The trick now is to make sure that they stay that way!
Some time ago I bought an old Kawasaki GPZ750R as my next restoration project. Unfortunately the seller was less than an honest seller and he has been reported to ebay for his trouble. DO NOT buy anything from a seller called mark00sue from near Port Macquarie, the man is a crook. The bike itself is OK, but it doesn’t have a key, thanks to this ebay seller. Anyway, since my employment situation has not improved, I have been forced to put the bike back on the market. If you want a great little project for the upcoming winter, head to my ebay site and check it out.
This weekend is a huge one for motorcycle sport, dumb programming, in my opinion. MotoGp from Estoril, WSBK from Monza, AMA Superbike from Sears Point and the BSB from Oulton Park as well as the IDM (German Superbike Championship) from the Lausitzring. Best of luck trying to keep tabs on all of that, though the British web site, www.crash.net does cover all of them but not with live timing, etc. Locally, Round 3 of the ASBK is on from WA as well.
Also this weekend, but closer to home, the Parkinson’s NSW fundraising charity day is on at the Grey Gum Cafe on the Putty Road, 80kms north of Windsor. From reports on-site, all 42 paintings that are to be exhibited and, hopefully, sold, have been hung (goodness knows how they found the wall space to do that) and the rest of the support crew, entertainers, stall-holders, etc, are expected to roll in and set up today. If you can make it up there tomorrow (Sunday) you are ensured of a great day and you’ll be doing something to help a worthy cause as well.
I hope your weekend is relaxing and enjoyable. I’m off to do some stuff in the garage. Ciao.