Get Out!

Said mummy, to Tara & Papa, for else I shall succumb to severe mess depression. So get out of my way to give me a chance of finding that living room which I've been trying (without much luck) to a) find, and b) live in for the last week!

So the child gets wrapped up and exits the mess, complete with car, snack, and daddy.

JOSE, YOUR BLOG! WRITE SOMETHING! NOW! Or else I'll find myself forced to report my side of last Saturday, and that would include the underside of the heater in that messy living room of ours, and that would, looking like this,

make for a far less appealing narrative than your story about the dog-hunt along the seaside!
WAH WAH WAH (that's Spanish barking, not crying)!

Where's Tara?!

So where IS Tara?!

Tara must be wondering herself, to a degree. This strange place without a single squirrel (the neighbours claim there are loads, we've not seen a single one yet), absolutely NO children that play with her (yet, Tara, I promise!), the sky full of screeching birds, and Papa comes home every night, but is always gone in the morning (NOT GOOD!).
Mummy is a bit baffled by the whole deal too. The only people who phone are a bank that wish to speak to the owner (and keep ringing for her TWICE A DAY even after they've been told the 7th time that said person does not live here any more, I mean, really! Can I have their manager's job?!), and the only people that offer to speak to us on the street or in the city centre are old folk with dogs, which is kind of nice but a bit disturbing when they tell us, ah, yes, their second to last dog was called Tara, too... The good news is, a one hour walk about town, right next to the harbour, cures mummy and the chicken of a wretched cough.
So well well, we'll give it a chance. Here are some of our very first impressions of our new home Ramsgate (not Sandwich, but near):

This is what I get in return for my beloved Leicester market?!? One little walk through shop full of Dutch vegetables. I buy 4 potatoes, one banana, and six mushrooms and eight chestnuts per day. "Pound a boooowl"... na, not here.


A bleak wintery view of the centre. We'll get a better shot on another day, or perhaps with the Christmas lights on some evening soon?


A back alley. Suggests a merrier Ramsgate that the city centre at present. Note: People don't look at me, but they do look at each other. There is hope.

Ships. Or rather, boats, aplenty. Which reminds me, Tara loves playing Row Your Boat. Especially the bit with the crocodiles when you get to scream. Aaaaaaaah! No crocodiles here though.

Our first sighting of the sea. Actually only three minutes from home (yes, truly, THREE). If you make it to the bottom of that street, a high-up promenade gives you the full view of the ferry harbour, which is right there. Off to town and the boatsey harbour to your left, five minutes by foot. All very close by.

Ooopsy-daisy. Seeluft macht müde! A bit of a stiff breeze at the right time, and Tara folds forward, and has up to THREE hour long mid-day naps! Those do compare favourably to a meagre one hour naps at nursery!

I haven't looked very closely but it seems that Ramesgateners (Ramsgatees? Ramsgaters?) like a good choice of their dinners. I didn't look too closely intentionally - I'm still in mourning for my Revolution meals, and can't afford to upset my hungry heart. Palate.

Now here, our claim to fame! The home daddy chose NOT to rent. It is still empty, I've noticed, hehe. Maybe good old Vincent should have left behind some furniture and some white goods, not just letters from the sea side and some sketches!

And on the way home, we spot Van Gogh's skeleton too! Or maybe it's not quite his. Maybe Ramsgate is just a town very very full of old old people and their dogs?

Aah, here we are on our way home to the place daddy did chose to rent. Little cutie-pies of relatively new houses, and one of the end ones is OURS for now:

...a bit of a homely touch, and a house is a home! And yes, did I mention the THREE TELEVISIONS? I have? Oh, never mind, lets just mention them again.

So. There we are. Ramsgate, home.

There

is

Tara

(PS: Blue bedrooms, and we've very nearly found the living room too!)


MUMMY NOTICE BOARD:
@ Janet. By God, the POWER of baby bottom wipes! It IS very worrying, if you think about it, but also very useful. Is there a stain in this world that does not succumb to baby bottom wipes? Excellent stuff of gas oven cooking kitchen grime! And yes, the phone has indeed resurfaces. Though with a view to the absurd calls we get from Sainsbury's bank (whose call centre manager's job I want), it should have stayed in one of the boxes!
@ Ann. Oh, Waitrose, I'm singing their praises too! They too let me buy two bananas and one tomato, and oh yum, have you tried their strawberry scones? Worth every penny they cost!
@ Nirite. No no, we were home when you were trying to treat us to our first not-absurd call. We were just napping. For hours.
@ Julie. I cannot possibly eat those Hotel Chocolat chocolates! What will I do when they are gone?! FAR to precious. Maybe I can SMELL them all year long?!
@ all my (Leicester) friends with mobile phones: Thanks for keeping me virtual company on the way down (before the crying and puking started) and throughout the week. I mean, speaking to old men with dogs is somewhat satisfying too, but not quite the same.
@ M&K. I did not repeat the mistake of not introducing myself to the neighbours. And they are lovely and helpful, too! So! And now go and book your flights or a ferry!

Moving Tara, Moving House, Moving Town

And moving county, too. 'Cause some towns, they're actually close to each other. Not so these two. There are 4 hours by car between them; 3.5 if you're lucky and not as heavily packed as we were.

Obviously, INITIALLY we had some fun moments! Below you can observe Tara feeding the empty kitchen cupboards lots of raisins, helping greatly with the packing of the CDs, and riding the hover to new heights of performance.


The very best of all, I should think, was riding the office chair (which sadly had to stay behind, though when the picture was taken we did not know that yet) up and down the corridor with mummy and...


...making best friends with the hard working washing machine. When all your other toys are packed you just make do with what's there.



So up to here, we're laughing!

HA HA HAAA! Fun-ny, this moving business!

Note: Waste of space, centre pic!

Ha ha ha ha! And then we stopped laughing, squished lots of boxes into a van, had a bit of a shouting session with BT (as you remember, that's Brit...), said our sad good-byes to darling Leicester, and squished the remainder of our things (the volume of which we had badly underestimated) into the car (did we mention we got a car?), along with Tara and mummy. Now, I'm not sure whether 'squish' is the right verb. Does it convey misery and the inability to move even an inch? Does it imply the following packing order: stuff - Tara - mummy - more stuff jigsaw puzzled around and on top of mummy? Does it imply Tara's chair surrounded by stuff like a sinking wombat in a swamp?

Let's get a tad more visual on that one:

Pic on left: Swamp! Pic on right: child, given up and sunk, child's position indicated by fat white arrow. Asleep for a bit, thank God.

Pic: Anonymous mummy in state of receding amusement and onset of state of mild shock , ashamed of awful bargain buying and hoarding habit unhappily married with inability to bin stuff. Big bag of half dried washing between shins and back of seat, big unshapely bag of unidentified COLD objects on knees, some other unidentified square object poking into ribs; both remain unidentifiable due to other stuff on top of them. The idiot who thought to place the remaining kitchen stuff in a Sainsbury's bag in perfect fly-upon-braking position was NOT the same idiot who thought starting loads of loads of washing on moving day morning was a good idea, though the latter idiot remedied the former idiot's mistake by repositioning said bag while dreaming of the space wasted in the original load in the van (see above pic). Well, well.

This is how the trip went (and luckily not only all good things end, but all bad ones too!):
At first Tara slept for an hour, then woke up and ate some pasta.
And then Tara cried, for an hour.
No picture.
At some point she understood that mummy was not going to pick her up nor get her out, no matter how much she wriggled or stretched her little arms out, and took to only holding one little hand up to hold a mummy finger for support. Heartbreaking.
No picture.
Then, without warning (except more crying), she puked. Pasta, undigested, and some extra bits & bobs.
No picture.
Then she puked some more.
No picture either.
More crying (but less than before the pasta deja-vue), some sighing, and more holding of finger.
Eventually we got there and were unpacked. The inaccessible cold stuff on my knees turned out to be the contents of the fridge/freezer. (And then and there I was GRATEFUL they'd made me throw out the last two eggs!)

And the lesson we get to learn here?
Well.
Everyone is welcome to suggest one. Everyone is also welcome to use the words *DON'T* *BARGAIN* *BULK BUY* *HOARD* *CHARITY SHOP* *TRASH* *(random expletives)*
Tip: It is NOT "Don't ever leave out an opportunity to bulk buy and hoard bargains at charity or any other shops without ever trashing any b*** thing."

That said, I do strongly feel that Tara ABSOLUTELY NEEDS a toy box and a book shelf to make this house a home, that I ABSOLUTELY MUST buy a chest of drawers (since Jose has hogged ALL available drawers to himself, minus the kitchen ones), and that the kitchen would benefit greatly from a cookie jar and a LARGE bread bin (and I HAVE seen a NICE & CHEAP one in a charity shop, although I luckily don't recall which!)

Please note entry below the last

I'm blogging out of order. Blame BT.

Wir haben...

Wir haben eine kleine Maus versteckt. Findest du sie?

(Ein Wohnzimmer haben wir hier auch versteckt, aber das haben wir selbst noch nicht gefunden!)

We've hidden a darling little mouse on this picture - can you find it? (We've also hidden a living room on it, but we've not yet quite managed to find that ourselves!)

En esta foto os hemos escondido una ratica chiquitita, la podeis encontrar? (Tambien hemos escondido un salon pero hasta ahora nosotros mismos no hemos conseguido encontrarlo...)

A Cute PS - Goodbye Leicester

Well then. Recovered from The BT Grump (a strange but not unheard-of disease), I'll post Leicester a Goodbye, for she deserves it.

Leicester darling, you've been good to us! You gave us friends, you gave us curry (you gave us Revolution far too late), you gave us a PhD and a job, you gave us a gym and some tone and tough tummy for at least a while; and you gave us, best of all, a big fat upgrade from two single people with some 5 suitcases full of stuff and one open return ticket, to a family with an incredible and beautiful Tara (pictured here on her last New Walk walk back home)...

(picture slightly blurred due to fatty baby finger prints on lens)

...and (f*** SH*** D***IT!) a van AND a car jigsaw packed with stuff.

So it's time to say goodbye, and we take a final stroll across Townhall Square, we chase some birds, and Tara takes her hat off to Leicester too.

And then, after 4 years, 1 month, 2 weeks, and 2 days, that's it.*
Time's up.

Good bye, Leicester, love.

(Mummy, slightly hysterical: "I'm going to miiiiissss ya, LestA")

* "That's it"? Of course that's not quite it! There's packing boxes, and packing vans and cars and lots of puking (Tara) and crying (Tara, too. Mummy gets a grip, and thinks, as instructed, of the benefits ONLY) on our way out. But that's a different story which will be told!

No Last Cute Goodbye

Why? Because, BT (that's British Telecom) have taken the liberty to process out internet move three days earlier than requested. Thanks again, BT. We remember how it took you 10 days to transfer our internet line from one flat to the one right next to it, and in the end the 'engineer' pressed one button and went, oops, forgot that.
Now, thanks to your efficient services and employees, we can't blog, I can't monitor the ebay auctions for a car seat for Tara, will loose the bargain seat near home, and I'm spending time in an internet cafe in town to get crucial details like the van hire details or phone contact and pick up details for the cot we got Tara and have to pick up today, while we have the van for 24 hours, and need to go across the country in it and back. Thanks also, BT, for keeping me waiting in your queue for 20 minutes before I was allowed to speak to someone in the first place.
I can't make calls on the internet to friend abroad that I'd wanted to make urgently. And all that on a day that's so packed I haven't really got the time to blow my nose.
Thanks, BT, I hope you're looking forward to my formal complaint.

And to all that have wished us a smooth move, well... COULD have worked, but it ain't looking good just now! And let's just repeat why: Yes, BT's (that's British Telecom) incredible service.

SHOULD they manage to get us reconnected in Kent, you'll hear from us soon.

PS (Living in a Box II)

... and if you've tried to call us recently, well, that ain't possible. Tara played hide and seek with the telephone a few days ago, I've been quite unable to find it since, the batteries have died since and it won't ring now to give us any clues as to its whereabouts. Well.

Living in a Box II

Wondering why we're not blogging?

...coz we're PACKING UP!