We've had such a busy couple of days, and finally a couple of things are happening!
For the last few days we've been cleaning like demons. The sort of demons who don't clean very well normally, and when they suddenly find themselves in a position of having to have a real estate agent over, need to do some serious remedial scrubbing and polishing. Anyway, after pulling several very late nighters, the house looks better than it has in a very long time, certainly since Niamh was born. Whenever I have a clean house, I always wonder why we don't keep it clean the entire time. Then Niamh wakes up and I remember.
A quick example of her mischief. This morning, after Niamh woke up I went down to her room with her and started doing a bit more last minute tidying. She was happily playing, until all of a sudden she toddled out of the room, down the hallway towards the lounge room. I assumed she was going to go and say hi to Dan, but after a while I couldn't hear anything so I decided to go and investigate..... As it turns out Dan was in the shower, and the lounge room was empty. I found her in the kitchen, past the gate, standing on the top step of our kitchen stool, helping herself to the fruit basket. She'd eaten the bottom off one pear, and about 2/3 of another! She was loving herself sick.
(obviously that gate is not latched!)
Today we had a real estate agent come over and evaluate the place. She gave us an idea what sort of fees they'll charge us to manage the property while we're gone, and what sort of money we can get etc. It's weird to be on this side of a rental agreement, I'm not really sure whether we're getting a good deal or not, but I suppose you never do with real estate agents! I suspect they're the only ones getting the good deal! Anyway, we had to give her a date after which the house would be available for rent. At this stage our 1st of August deadline is looking a bit shaky, due to the inability of the wheels of bureaucracy to move discernibly. But we've decided to say that the house is available after the 15th of August. If we're not out of Australia by then, we'll have to depend on the kindness of strangers... or our mums.
After the real estate agent left us, the removalist consultant arrived. Just trying to get an estimate of the size of the house, how much crap is in all of our rooms and what is coming with us vs what's going into storage. The company will pay for 100kg each of air freight, so we have 300kg to work with. He's going to drop some boxes around next week so we can get started packing stuff into them! That is one thing that finally makes it seem somewhat real.
Finally, our exciting PNG related day finished off with Therese, our lovely Tok Pisin teacher coming over to our house to give us our first official lesson in Tok Pisin. Because Therese is from PNG, not only is she teaching us about the language, but also about a lot of the cultural stuff that we need to know. Tok Pisin is mostly made up of modified English words, with a few other random languages thrown in (various New Guinean languages, Malay, Spanish, German, Portugese...) but it's the grammatical structure that is a bit confusing for new players. I'm sure we'll get there eventually, after all it's only our first lesson! The company is paying for us to have 2 x 2 hour lessons per week from now until we leave, which is fantastic! The big advantage is that we get to do it all at home with a nice cup of tea and some mint slices. Therese has very kindly offered for us to all come over to her house and meet some other people from PNG so that we can practise our Tok Pisin, so we look forward to doing that soon...
That's all for the moment! As always, we hope to have some exciting updates soon! Thanks for reading...
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