Saying No to the Culture of Death

We have just reached the one month anniversary of moving to Canberra. Oh how very exciting!! Besides the fact that I hardly know anybody in this hick town, I am already showing signs of being bored out of my mind. Yes, I still have over 100 boxes to be unpacked, but I just do not feel enthusiastic about doing the task. I am taking it one day at a time because there have been a few days when I have been too sore to bother with any unpacking. There has been a slight increase in the headaches caused no doubt from the arthritis in my neck and shoulders.

Anyway, I did continue unpacking boxes until I was successful in finding my pearl earrings - and then it was time to slump.  Then I decided that I had to find the knitting needles that I had not wanted the packers to pack in the first place (that is what happens when hubby is left in charge and he tells them to go for it), and now that I found one lot of the knitting needles, it is back to the slump, and goofing off.

I have managed to choose to throw out more clothing. Most of it is very outdated, and for whatever reason some of the clothes were never a good fit in the first place. I find that I need a good selection of clothing because my weight goes up and down like a yo-yo. In summer I tend to retain fluid and when that happens my body tends to blossom outwards. I gained some weight over the winter because of the stress relating to this move (I did not want to move in the first place).

There have been so many hassles with this particular move. First of all, there was the gazumping of the first house that we started to negotiate to buy. Then we had to return to Canberra from Sydney to find another property. I came down with a chill and that sparked off an arthritis flare due to the fact that I have an autoimmune disorder. The flare then caused me to be in pain a lot of the time as I was trying to sort things out and start packing boxes. Then when we moved, there was the hassle of the packers being Irish!!!  Within a week of our Sydney house going on the market we had a buyer. We decided to take the offer and the contracts were exchanged. All too easy we thought, but not so straightforward.

My husband had decided to build a room where he could play with his model trains. The room cost quite a bit of money to build, and council made us reinforce the concrete floor because of a known water easement. What we did not know, and it appears that council did not know, is that there was also a sewerage easement on the property. We did not find this out until the eleventh hour of the cooling off period. Great!! At first we could hardly believe that the information was true. So, my husband had to find out how he could verify the information and then seek approval after the fact from Sydney Water. EEK!!! He was mucked around because nobody seemed to know what was required to get the approval from Sydney water.

What is really annoying is the way in which the NSW government had legislated that Sydney Water was no longer under an obligation to inform householders about the whereabouts of the sewerage easements. In our case the easement was not on any of the plans that we possessed, such that when we purchased the place we were not aware of the easement's existence. We are left with this mess and out of pocket to the tune of $1000 and rising because Sydney water did not want the responsibility of providing vital information to householders or land owners. This is one of the real and existing problems that point to the corruption of the Carr-Iemma government. They were all too willing to introduce legislation that abrogated responsibility.