The plan was to do our best to treat Sydney as though it were Japan and continue to travel, playing tourist in our own land, and continue to blog about life as an ex-pat wife, hopefully hitting on the odd issue that could be helpful to someone. It seemed a good plan; we lived here for 18months before we moved to Japan and it was, indeed, like moving to a foreign country (I genuinely found Japan easier), so clearly there were difficulties worth addressing. Now that we're here, however, the cost of living prevents us from being able to travel as we did in Japan, so travel and photography will be limited to the, not unattractive, metropolitan area. What is more, in the few months we've been here, I've found solutions to the main problems we had living here last time and, while I will eventually write those posts, there really aren't that many ways to say "Have lots of money" and "Don't live in The Shire".  

Nevertheless, life is not lacking excitement, even if it is the kind of excitement which only that percentage of the population which identifies as 'writers' (and possibly musicians and other creatives) would define as such. Perhaps it's the lack of beautiful architecture luring me from my desk, and/or the removal of the constant, low-grade stress of living in a land in which you do not speak the language, but my narrative disorder has returned with a force I have not experienced for many years, perhaps even since high school. Characters are tramping through my head all night, scenes are playing like movies in my mind's eye, often from the moment I wake. When sitting down to write each weekday, my only creative angst derives from trying to unravel the big ball of scenes which seems to have replaced my brain. It's bliss!

All that is not to say that it's easy. No matter how quickly or slowly scenes come to mind, rarely do they come in order, and, despite the phrasing sometimes used to describe the process, nothing actually writes itself. What is different at the moment is that the scenes come so fast that it's all I can do to get them down, and there is simply no time for self-doubt. For years, I've understood intellectually the theory that you have to take off your editor's hat while writing your first draft. I've repeated the advice as mantras: "You can't edit what you haven't written"; "If it's worth doing well, it's worth doing badly till you learn", trying to convince myself not to second-guess as I go, but I've never before managed to achieve it. I'd like to think that I've reached some kind of personal and professional turning point, that this new state is the result of my continual practice and study of the craft, and that it will be, if not permanent, at least something I can call upon at will, but I daren't tempt the Gods by assuming such a thing.

And so, the answer to my original question becomes clear: the blog will return to its original subject - my Adventures in Wordcraft (I wonder if I still have any readers from when the blog was called that?) Whether this blissful state is permanent or not, I'll be doing everything I can to nurture it and, while I probably won't share my actual writing with you here, I will do my best to share anything that helps me to keep this state going. Off the top of my head, I can imagine posts might include: reviews of books on writing; alerts to a writer/agent/publisher whose blog or tweets I find inspiring; recommendations of tech that make reading or research easier; reviews of fountain pens and inks I use to slow down and create less frantically; or even a recipe for some comfort food to soothe a ragged, creative soul. 

To those of you who came to this blog because it was about Japan, I want to say thank you for reading these past eighteen months, I hope I was able to help your own Japanese experiences in some small way. I have a few posts on Japan left in me, but only a few. Many of you are also writers and I hope you'll stick around to see where this goes, but I won't be surprised or upset if I see my subscriptions and views dropping substantially - it's quite a ride, the whole ex-pat jBlogger thing, even from the sidelines where I've been hanging out!

Of course, the most important way to nurture the muse is to answer its call to write, so chances are there will be awfully long gaps between posts, but I imagine only family, friends and writers will be watching for Narrative Disorder to go bold on their feed readers, so I'm sure I'll be forgiven. 

From my desk to yours, happy writing!!

The house is big, four bedrooms probably seems over the top for a couple, but we wanted a spare room for guests and we found that in Sydney there was either tiny, pokey places or huge places - so we went huge. The smallest bedroom is the size of the room we squished both of our workspaces into in Japan, so the space will be wonderful. The space is also our payoff for having not only no water view but no real view at all; though there were many lovely places on Cronulla beach we could afford, none would accept our wee cat.

Design-wise, the house is a real 'find' for a rental property; it's modern but not a glass and tile box that is one of a block of identical apartments, rather a friendly modern with huge open plan spaces downstairs with vaulted ceilings and warm, dark wood floors, and three large bedrooms (with carpet - yay) upstairs.

The actual moving in will be a multi-delivery juggling act from hell! Our air shipment has arrived in Sydney so we'll have that delivered soon. We will have to move in, or rather out of the serviced apartment, before the sea shipment arrives with our bed, so that has meant ordering our guest bed so we have somewhere to sleep for a few weeks. The rather ingenious ottoman-bed (as against sofa-bed) will be cutting it fine but should arrive in time. The third delivery to deal with is that of the things we've had in storage while in Japan which, apart from the books, I can barely remember!

We began phase 4 today, by deciding on two of the rugs we will need for various spaces. We ordered the big rug and took home a small one for the area we are designating the reading nook, for which we also bought a beautiful deco version of a wingback chair in Valentino-red leather (matching ottoman on order.) We took them over and placed them today - it still needs the bookshelves and books but I can't wait to spend time there!

A brief addendum: obviously we are not really set up for net, yet, so this post has been written with the relatively new WordPress for Blackerry app which gives every appearance of being remarkable, so here's hoping it all works!

At the end of the first week things were looking pretty bleak - our dreams of a coastal apartment were put to bed quickly because of our cat - noone down here would consider her. So we were down to houses, none of which we could afford on the coast. Inland in the Shire, the houses we saw at our price range were so badly run down that I was in despair by the end of the week. It really seemed that the assumption was that if you were a renter and had a cat then the assumption was that you deserved only to live like a crack addict with peeling walls and curling vinyl floors... and all this an hour away from the city! Sure, the beach is nearby but, frankly, if you're not right on the beach with a view of it every day, being within 10mins drive from it is little different than being 30mins from it, as far as I can see. 

This week has been somewhat better. I packed our Saturday with showings and appointments and we inspected 8 properties and drove past several more. Of the 8, we found one we really liked and have applied for, the location isn't hugely convenient, but the house is beautiful and the area is green and pretty. We have another appointment this afternoon for a townhouse which is in a fantastic location for Mike's work and shopping without a car and looks as though it is a great place, too (though we've run into our share of prof. photos which were straight-out lying!) 

And by the way, the navi in the Prius has been indispensable. We were able to make bookings 10mins apart despite being in a foreign city. just punch in the address and off we went. I highly recommend hiring a car with a good navi if you're house hunting in a new city! 

I am hopeful we will have an address soon, cross your fingers for us! In the meantime, this is the view from the serviced apartment - at least we get it for a little while. 

We are pretty much in the same position as we were when I wrote this post from Sydney in Jun 2008 - the packers are coming on Tuesday morning at 9 (four hours after Brigid will be picked up for her trip to Aussie Quarantine) and we are in preparation limbo. Our days are a blur of decision making: Air, Sea or Plane?; Pack ourselves or leave for the packers?; If pack ourselves do we do it now or will we need it before Tuesday?; Do we even TRY to write "Air" and "Sea" in kanji on the stickers we are hoping will indicate to the packers that the various items are to go by air or sea - what if the kanji for "Air" is one stroke off the kanji for "The Depths of Hell"?

In Sydney, on packing day, we had four guys packing up our stuff, with no language barrier, and it was rather like trying to coordinate a locust plague. One guy might see you nearby and so ask you if you want your Grandmother's china treated as fragile while another might see you talking to the first and so, even though he's not TOTALLY sure, just make his own judgement based on your stickers with arrows and big black texta that the stuff IN this chest of drawers is to go by air but the chest of drawers itself is to go by sea - when you share a language, that's going to be right most of the time. Also, in Australia, if something seems just, well, stupid, an Aussie will - as politely as possible - ask you if you really meant that you wanted to ship your entire library by Air. This time, there will be five or six men who won't speak English, and one supervisor who will, but, in my experience with the Japanese so far, none of them will be so rude as to second-guess me even if they do wonder why Oku-sama has clearly written in kanji that she wants the piano sent to the Depths of Hell. Who is he to argue?

Today our goals are to organize which clothes will come with us and which will go by sea and organize the office - the latter seems an Herculean task atm but I am discovering that switching to tunnel vision and tackling a 30cm square area at a time eventually gets you there!

We will have internet till we leave and will leave the computers up till Monday (going by Air, no question) and hopefully at some stage between now and then I will have the time and energy to blog about our lovely, snowy New Year at Atsuta Shrine - but no promises, it may not happen till we are back in Australia and up and running with (what, in Australia, passes for) internet access.

Happy New Year to all!

I say "packing" but we are, of course, not actually packing but rather preparing for the packers of OSS (Overseas Shipping Services I believe) to arrive at 7:30 tomorrow morning. As lovely as it sounds to have someone else pack for you I would actually venture that it is far more stressful because of the sheer level of organization required. When you pack for yourself you can organize as you pack: "Hmm, forgot we had that, guess I'll put this in this box here" "Ah we'll need that before the Sea shipment comes guess I'll put that in this box here." Instead,one must provide a detailed inventory to the company some weeks in advance for both insurance purposes and as a guide for the packers THEN, as the day approaches, you have to find ways to ensure that it is communicated to the guys on the day. Having experienced this process to a smaller degree when we were transferred to Sydney, I can attest that packers (as in the guys who come and pack your stuff, not a certain wealthy Australian family with a penchant for gambling from both sides of the table) give a good impression of locusts. They arrive, they buzz about determinedly for what is probably a few hours but feels like a few minutes and when they are gone everything, and I mean everything is gone. I was recently told about a diplomat whose shipment arrived after two months on the sea and eagerly opened it up to find her partially full rubbish bin in a box. Seriously. Think about it. Two months in the sun on a container ship...

So, we are grouping everything in stacks or on shelves with big yellow, blue or pink stickers with Air, Sea or Store on them and hoping we've got it all right! Our consultants in the office have asked us to be around to direct everything which is a good sign since the lat guys asked us not to be present - so we should be okay. When it all comes down to it though, by midday Friday everything will be packed and "uplifted" and there will be nothing we can do anymore - which is exactly why I always preferred exams over assignments lol.

Sydney has been ... well it's been. We really, really, should not have lived in The Shire. We chose it because it was 3 minutes from Superman's work and, frankly, we just didn't know.  We had some glimpses when we told people where he was working and they said "You're white, you could live down there." We wondered at the seeming racism but ignored it. No one suggested we NOT live here though. No-one told us that we would never hear a language other than English spoken nor see a complexion darker than ours that wasn't due to an insane amount of time spent on a tanning bed. No-one told us that in the very few, just-barely-above-supermarket-quality greengrocers here garlic would be found "down there with the other exotic things" or that "brown" is still a descriptive used to describe bread - though "whitebread" is a perfect descriptive for the whole area so that's probably ok. Having our cars vandalized when they couldn't break into them three times hasn't really helped our impressions either...

We were told that, because of the traffic (made worse, especially for new people by the higgledy piggledy civic "planning"), you'd have to "live" where you live  and that was, essentially, true - going into the city from here is a nightmare by car or public transport. Nevertheless I found solace slowly driving the 25 minutes to Hurstville to do my grocery shopping. The Westfield mall there is quite small and has become like a small town market. Every time I went around 11 in the morning I would see a group of ten or so 65+ yr old husbands of various European origin who seem to have made a club house of some sofas near the exit to the car park and chat for seemingly hours while they waited for their wives to finish shopping. I could shop for terribly exotic things like mirin or Chinese cooking wine or - shock horror - homemade kibbe and hummous.  Best of all, I could stand in the medicare line and eavesdrop on little old french ladies lamenting their daughters' not yet being married or listen in blissful ignorance to the gentle rhythms of Mandarin or the bright clang of Cantonese. When we return we will live in Hurstville I think

Anyway enough procrastinating, my feet are almost not sore!! Must get back to it. No doubt my next post will be from our new home in Nagoya!!

At least that's what it feels like here in Sydney.  Buses are particularly bad here. In their attempt to be seen to encourage public transport the State government "encourages efficiency and punctuality" by fining transport companies if a certain percentage of their buses or trains are late according to their own timetables - sounds good right? In theory maybe, in practice not so much. Because transport companies are also rewarded for having a good number of services running per day, and I assume also because idling buses cost lots in petrol, buses are timetabled according to how much time it takes the bus to get from terminus to terminus WITHOUT PICKING UP PASSENGERS.  The up shot is, in order to get a bus to stop, one has to risk life and limb jumping about on the road to flag them down or else they will pretend not to see you and whiz right past you and heaven forbid you don't know what ticket you need or have exact change. The harassment older people get when getting on a bus (if it's stopped at all) because they are slow is simply ridiculous. "Come on, come on, I don't have time for this!" one bus driver complained on a bus I was on (that's how I got the above information about timetables, I had laughed lightly and said "You don't have time to pick up passengers? What else is a bus for?")

So what would happen if you were standing at a bus stop with a bike (which frankly would be needed to just get to the ridiculously positioned bus stops in The Shire)?? According to Michael MacKinley who's blog came onto my radar while hunting for Japan posts (stand by for post on Nagoya airport), this is what happens in Calgary:

And just think, it snows a good deal of the time in Calgary so either people are biking through the snow or these contraptions are not used at least 40% of the year - such waste!!

It would take a re-education of galactic proportions to implement something like this in Australia but oh my there's a lesson in what happens when people who are truly committed to doing something put their minds to it!

One day I'll catch him with a Qantas Melbourne flight streaking up behind him (I'm just guessing Melbourne but hey it's going in that general direction and what else is down there?) Not sure my phone camera will make it clear enough though, it makes everything seem so much further away - the ocean never looks as clear in these shots as it is with the naked eye. Can't wait to get a real digital camera for shots of Japan!

I wonder what the gods were doing up there that they drew this curtain between us?

Barely five minutes after this was taken visibility was barely a foot as this massive cloud hurled itself to the earth with it's full weight. The skies were bright blue again within ten minutes and, as with most Sydney storms, the temperature did not change more than a degree either way from before this formation made its appearance.

I wonder what Nagoya storms are like...