How to dispose of an old unwanted computer… drop it off the upstairs balcony into a bin. Not as elaborate as the VCR, but fun nonetheless. Watch the video. Make sure your sound is turned up - the thump as it lands is particularly satisfying.

So, here I am in the dying days of this eight year old (more or less) tenancy. The move is progressing. Over the past 36 hours, a lot of the small stuff has got moved. Enough to make me think that once things are settled in, I will do a major clean out of the junk I no longer need. No, a real clean out. What I’ve been doing over the last couple of months has barely scratched the surface.

Last night I was out with friends for drinks. Glugging down Belgian beer, chattering away with friendly people, toasting anything and everything, taking early leave with The Moving Excuse, then staggering home from the last tram and climbing into bed with a feeling that my legs were doing whatever the hell they wanted, and it was only by pure chance that they were taking me vaguely in the direction my brain had instructed.

Psychologically, a night off was just what I needed. Physically and organisationally, it was less than optimum, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

Amongst all the agony of moving boxes and boxes and boxes, two little pieces of silver lining. Firstly, and most importantly, the kids love the new place - better than the old place in fact (and it’s not hard to see why - it is undoubtedly an upgrade).

And secondly, I spoke to my last remaining neighbour. She said they had been away for 2 months on holiday, only got back a couple of weeks ago, and never got their notice to vacate! Presumably it’s lost in the system somewhere… so I told them to ring Consumer Affairs to check their position, but I’m hoping that the registered mail notice to vacate is sitting uncollected in a post office somewhere (or was returned to sender - and I know how disorganised they are) and that it means they have more time to move out. Ah, I can just see those developers in their convertible BMWs, being mightily pissed off when they discover they’re facing yet another delay.

Oh, speaking of BMWs, last week I sent out a bulk e-mail advising friends of my imminent move. There-in I scathingly mentioned the "developers who all drive BMWs". Two days later I remembered that at least one of the people I sent it to drives a BMW, and so does his wife. Oops. He didn’t point it out in his reply back, and he’s got a good sense of humour, so hopefully his reaction was merely one of amusement.

Meanwhile, in preparation for the actual moving day on Tuesday, all the essential services are connected at the new place, except one: Internet. The ADSL connection may take another 4-5 working days, so I’m going to need to get dial-up working I suppose. Sigh. Back to the bad old days.

• Flashback: the last big move, 14 March 1995

Things I discovered during the pack small stuff, put in car, drive, get out of car, unpack, repeat routine today:

• I have too many video tapes.
• I had too many video tapes last time I moved (kinda), three years ago. This has not been resolved.
• Actually I have too much of just about everything.
• And I don’t have enough boxes.
• Caulfield Dan Murphy’s aren’t as free and easy with their boxes as Brighton Dan Murphy’s.
• I don’t really need these twelve year old uni notes that I’ve never glanced at..
• I don’t think anybody would buy them on eBay
• I’m chucking them out, though some of the margin notes are moderately amusing in an undergraduate kind of way.
• I don’t really need these old text books about subjects I haven’t worked with, and am unlikely to ever work with.
• I don’t really need these software boxes.
• Nor do I need these ten year old camcorder magazines
• Cool, I found a yoyo!
• I have too many CDs, too. I can’t keep them all as coasters.
• My car must look really stupid driving along with all that stuff packed in the boot. If driving with the headlights on, I’d be in danger of blinding people.
• It’s not too hard to back the car into my new driveway.
• Even after moving many box loads of stuff, there’s still a shitload to go.
• Maybe it’s a good idea to move every few years so you don’t accumulate as much crap as I’ve managed to accumulate.
• I have too much stuff.
• Yeah… now I remember how much I hate moving.

Last Sunday I took the kids to theMelbourne Museum. A bunch of fun to be had, and at the new government subsidised price of $6 for an adult, free for everybody else, a bargain. And it hasn’t been a waste of taxpayers funds, either - not only ismuseum patronage way up, but long term this is the kind of initiative that could spark an interest in the youngsters of today, and contribute to a smarter society in the decades to come.

Anyway, we caught the train in to the museum. Boarding at Glenhuntly was a bloke - bearded, dark hair, with a hooded blue windcheater with a slogan on it, something along the lines of: "CONSCIOUSNESS HAS NO BARRIERS"* (capital letters faithfully reproduced). He sat down next to a young woman, and muttered something about the ticket machines.

I looked carefully at the slogan on his top. Oh great, slogan with obcure hippybabble - warning! Warning! Possible nutbag alert! So I looked busy, talking to the kids about stuff out the window.

Sure enough he tried to start up a conversation with the reluctant woman, telling her about how he trademarked the slogan (I’m sure there must be swarms of people wanting to hijack a slogan like that for their own purposes), quizzing her about where she was from (India, in Australia studying IT), and telling her all about the ills of western society, and congratulating her on her imminent departure from Australia.

She made her escape at South Yarra. Suddenly without someone to bug, he glanced in my direction, noted my mean "don’t fuck with me, I’m busy enjoying my Sunday, which I intend to remain nutbag-free" expression, and then stood up and looked around the carriage for other victims.

We got off the train at Parliament and headed for the northern exit to go to the museum. Mr Nutbag also got off, and I’m guessing he went the opposite way to the southern exit. He then got onto a tram in Collins Streetand proceeded to bug Jen and Erin.

*Correction: On consultation with Erin, and spotting the guy the following week, it actually says: "Consciousness has no culture"

For the second day in a row this morning one of the builders was needlessly blocking the driveway with his ute. It’s one of those bright red ones that is way too new and shiny for a builder’s ute, and I bet he never drives it onto proper building sites where there might be mud and other such things.

The driveway in this place is a wide one. Convention is that people park on the side next to the fence, leaving the side next to the building free for people to drive along to and from the car ports at the back. It’s not rocket science, right? So when I saw this ute parked on the wrong side again, I got rather flustered. None of the builders were visible, so I beeped the horn a couple of times.

Some seconds passed and I was getting impatient. I beeped again, longer this time. I stopped the engine and got out of the car, looking around. The owner of the ute appeared. "Maybe you could park it on the other side next time" I remarked. "I’ll park it there any time I like", he replied.

What? Fucking WHAT? He kept walking down to move it, and I shouted after him "Hey I’m still paying rent here you know. You guys shouldn’t even be here for another two weeks!" It’s true - the notice to vacate specified a deadline of 26th July. Now, I don’t mind that renovations have started earlier on the other flats, and fair enough that occasionally they’ll be unloading a truck or something in the driveway. But this fucking arsehole sure as hell has no right to deliberately block the remaining residents’ cars.

So when I got to work I rang up the agent to hassle them again. Sympathetic noises were certainly forthcoming, but whether they can or will do anything about it is another matter. Grumble.

Still, it leaves me wondering if they’re trying in their way to apply pressure for people to leave early.

I had a word to a very helpful bloke atConsumer Affairs (okay, so he’s a friend of mine, but I’ve always found them to be very helpful) who has suggested various avenues of action should this happen again. We shall see…

My very own mountain of boxes, ready for packing

On Saturday I signed the lease at the new house, then I went box hunting. In this day and age of recycling, it should come as no surprise that most shops these days are exceedingly efficient at crushing boxes and piling them up for collection almost the second after they’ve finished using them. So when I went visiting the local shops, they weren’t able to help me very much.

But thank God for Dan Murphy’s, purveyor of fine liquor and keeper of one of the most impressive spare box collections this side of the Yarra. They were happy for me to take a bunch, as long as I took them from the left hand side of the pile. Fair enough, I thought, I was in no mood to be fussy about which side of the pile I took from. So now I have a bunch of boxes to start packing my stuff into.

And the movers are booked for next Tuesday, giving me all of next weekend to get stuff packed, and even some of it moved in advance. As when I bought my Malvern Star bike, lacking any particular preference, I went for the nostalgic choice: Gronow’s Removalists, whose Inkerman Street depot I remember from when I was growing up, down the street from where I went to kindergarten. After all, if they’ve been in business that long, they must be doing something right, right?

Meanwhile the renovator guys have been around most weekdays doing work in anticipation of all us pesky tenants being gone soon. Among other things the two vacant ground floor flats have had their balcony railings removed - and dumped in the front garden. Today, however, I caught them about to start cutting mine down.

First floor balcony… railing removed when I have small kids living here half the week? I don’t bloody think so, and I told them so. I’m paying rent until next week, and they can damn well wait until I’ve moved out before they start doing stuff like that. I rang the agent later on to give the new owners a serve too. The lady agreed and said she’d pass it on. I should hope so too. Gits.

Top CDs/songs to play really loudly when you realise you no longer have neighbours to annoy, and even if you did annoy someone you can’t be evicted because you’re moving next week anyway:

• Hoodoo Gurus: 1000 Miles Away
• Paul Kelly: Deeper Water
• the Edge Of Darkness soundtrack
• Most of Who’s Next, obviously
• and Led Zeppelin 4
• U2: Achtung Baby
• 
  Professor Ratbaggy
• Spiderbait: Run
• Sky: Toccata

Top DVDs to watch really loudly:

• Fellowship of the Ring
• Ocean Colour Scene: Filmed from the front row
• Matrix
• Gladiator
• Maybe a Star Trek or two
• Baraka might be quite good… damn, I really need to get surround sound

Though not too loudly of course, since I have come to realise that my "hi-fi" is really "lo-to-medium-fi". O alas, the distortion!

What else?

I thought my credit card balance was looking far too healthy, so I took my car in for a service today. I realised when I got into the car how filthy it looked… how embarrassing, taking it to the service place in such a state. Ah well.

So I dropped it off and went into work. I’d barely had time to get in the door when the car place rang. Couldn’t be good news, could it? Hell no - just as expected, the money pit strikes again. Problems with the drive shaft, the muffler, gasket, etc, etc… yes Mr Bowen, you’re looking at about $800 worth of repairs. And the beautiful thing is if I don’t do it, it’ll probably cost me a lot more in future.

I love my car. While I don’t drive it a great deal, I love the freedom it gives me. But I do get the feeling it is fast moving into lemon status. It’s ten years old this year, and one of these days I’m going to crack and say: No, I will not repair it this time. I will keep running it come hell or high water, and when it finally breaks, I’ll sell its remains to Pick A Part (or possibly try and devise a "How to destroy your car" exercise) and either buy a new car, or stick to public transport and my bicycle.

There is good news though: I have somewhere new to live. Yesterday I applied for a house to rent - 3 bedroom, weatherboard, not excessively luxurious, but fairly cheap rent (so I can save for somewhere to buy), good location, big back yard. All good. And since I’m probably close to being the ideal tenant, it was approved pretty promptly.

My soon-to-be-former-landlady says she told them "if all my clients were like him, I wouldn’t be quitting" when they did the reference check, which would have helped. And since the place I’m moving out of is being internally pulled apart and renovated, her instructions to me were "don’t do anything" in the way of cleaning when I move out. This could be the easiest bond money I ever recover.

Now I have to pull my finger out and organise all the services to be connected, get some boxes to pack my plethora of books and videos into, and arrange the movers.

Buying shampoo seems to get more and more difficult, at least for us blokes. I went into the supermarket the other day to buy (among other things) a new bottle of the shampoo I’ve been using. One of those
Herbal Essences ones, which I like despite the wanky advertising. Apparently it’s got mountain spring water in it, which I bet makes a lot of difference when I’m in the shower every morning flooding my hair withMelbourne catchment area water.

So I was looking at the bottles - and thank goodness that haven’t changed them like some of the manufacturers do, into some high-tech 22nd century black plastic funky bottle-oid shape. But which one do I need? I assume my hair is "normal". It seems pretty normal to me. A little too long at the moment perhaps, but that’s probably within the allowed definition of "normal".

In the "normal" range, there were two options, and I couldn’t remember which one of these I’d bought last time. Was it the "balancing moisture" variety or the "clarifying/residual removal" one? Does my hair’s moisture need balancing? I don’t know. Sounds okay - couldn’t hurt I suppose.

Why don’t they make one which just cleans your hair? Okay, there was another one for all types of hair, the anti-dandruff variety. That’s probably closer to just cleaning hair, but do I have dandruff? Hell no! At least I certainly hope not. I haven’t spotted any fluffy bits of it left on my clothes. Yeurgh.

I eventually decided that balancing moisture sounded pretty harmless, and bought that. Evidently it’s what I decided last time too, as the bottle was identical to the almost empty one at home.

So my hair’s moisture will continue to be balanced. Lucky me.

10pm. After work tonight I stopped past Myer’s post-stocktake sale sale. My favourite shirts on sale! Bought a white one, and one that looked bluish. Got them home and realised the bluish one is actually identical to the one I had on at the time. Argh, grumble grumble, blame the poor lighting, and the fact that I’m a bit colour-blind, grumble grumble. On the other hand, I really like this colour, even though I suspect it’s what
Beth meant when she once referred to "the blue shirt every man owns". Now tossing up whether or not to return it.