I have Ebay listings for all of the furniture now, have (thankfully!) already sold several pieces, and tonight the ride-on tractor went to a very nice man who was the first person who viewed it. Note to self — take the flyer back OUT of the Notice Board in front of the newsagent tomorrow! Replace that flyer with another one with oh-so-pretty pictures of furniture!

Still have the cars to list, the refrigerator and washer, and then lots of office electronics like the fax machine, a desktop computer and printer, and then there is all of the night-time entertainment items like television and dvd-player and so forth. That’s at LEAST another 20 listings to write! And in the middle of everything, we are having a Garage Sale the 2nd to last weekend here. Whew! Anything that doesn’t sell will just have to get donated to charity because we are getting a tiny storage unit for the books and tools we are actually keeping.

Can’t believe how much I am looking forward to getting off to Sydney on the train because we have adorable friends who have offered us their apartments to stay in during the Christmas holiday while they are out of town. How good is that? If all goes to plan, we should have 10-14 days of wind-down time with NO hotel bills. And we’ll have another one of those quiet just-us-two holidays in an urban setting like we did in the loft apartment in Melbourne that I booked last year. We’re both going to need it by then!

We depart Australia on the 29th of December — but that’s a story for another time.

More in a few days. It might be after midnight, but I might just get ONE more ebay listing written up.

Soon, very soon we are being launched (quite voluntarily!) back out into the world. The plans for where to travel, who to work for (Mark), who to write for (me), what to do along the way will be an unfolding adventure. We have been so ‘land-locked’ for several years now here in Australia that we just want to let it f-l-o-w and see where the winds of change take us.

At least we have a starting point and we’ll be headed back to the UK first. But during the Christmas holidays? And with no firm flight reservations yet until we get the proceeds from the sale of our darling house in our hot little hands? We really are trusting the fates!

Mark’s family have a large and very pretty home in Norfolk, so we will go there first once we leave Australia and perhaps have a few weeks of decompression. I have a series of articles that I am pitching to several publications and I’ll keep you posted on those.

These last couple of years have been quite stressful and we’re currently in a state of tightly controlled action, selling a houseful of furniture and 2 cars and 2 trailers and a tractor. Oh yes, and did I mention packing, packing, packing and then putting what we do decide to keep into storage in the nearby town of Ballarat? Whew!

At least there will be no more leaping for the phone every time it rings and then zooming around with the vacuum and sponge because another potential buyer is on the way. Hearing the words “she signed” while we were on a 4 day getaway at the seaside last week gave me an alternating sense of butterflies in the brain from happiness and butterflies in the stomach from nerves knowing that we had to divest ourselves of 85% of our worldly goods in one month!

I’ll be back soon-ish with an update or two. But in the meantime — where is that packing tape???

Cathy Rogers wrote, “Contrary to our expectations when we set off like snails four years ago, we feel much more creative now we are back. We had imagined that in our other-worldly Italian life, with no obligations and plenty of time on our side, we would enjoy the most creative time of our lives. We thought we would get down to personal improvement projects planned for years, our evenings filled with learning to gilt broken picture frames, reading Dante in the original, playing the piano. Instead we found nothing so unmotivating as silence and hours. Rather, humans are at their most creative when they have the least time to be.”

Honest admission, I have had moments of those same thoughts since we ‘escaped’ from our urban life in Melbourne and moved to the country for ‘the good life’ complete with a never-ending set of marvelous sunsets on our seven and one half acres.

Alongside the finish-the-next-book theme, some of my best intentions have been to put paint to canvas once again and there are a stack of stretched canvases sitting out in my studio awaiting some interaction from me. I do remember that I was actually working on several paintings at once when we lived in busy-busy Melbourne and I was writing a book during that period as well.

Is it simply what Rogers states — that some of us thrive better in bustling conditions or work more efficiently when we have a deadline? Or does that only apply to those of us who have been programmed by working in a field where a deadline was a distinct facet of the job (journalism and design in my own case).

Is the slowed-down-semi-retired state of mind not actually all that it’s cracked up to be and a great many of us need that daily and weekly set of tangible challenges to keep us on our toes?

And is the idea of rural bliss simply that for many of us who have lived cheek-to-jowl with neighbours and noise for all of our adult lives — an idea that is perfume-filled with potential but manure-filled upon closer examination?

During our two and a half years living the village life, we have had moments of great joy and extreme anxiety. We’ve seen several couples move here, start up businesses, and then move back to Melbourne for similar reasons. And just like the author of The Guardian article, they too are happier in their very urban environment without all of the pretty, rolling hills and extremely silent nights.

I suppose what I would really like is a dual-track option — a slick urban city apartment for the part-of-the-time when I crave crowds, getting everywhere on foot instead of by car, exotic food, and a culture fix.  And then we could still have the wee eco-cottage in the country for our peaceful and slower-paced primary track life.

The article that sent my brain into musing mode is at The end of our Italian dream and is certainly worth a peruse if you are contemplating changing your own lifestyle rather drastically.