REverberations

(Continued from So Why Picton?)

Once we'd decided Picton may be worth a try, we set to viewing some houses. There's quite a variety in the town, from 1860s weatherboard places with lots of charm, central, even cheap, but not really what we are looking for in a family home.

There's empty blocks to build on, which is a very strong possibility, but we're yet to find the right block - most new land releases are too far from town, and the ones that are close enough to walk are unfortunately not served by footpaths - just busy roads designed for nothing but cars. Even cycling would be dangerous in the 60-80-100km/h zones.

One thing we did want to be able to (before we'd even decided to move out of Sydney) was to be able to walk to some decent shops. Penshurst is reasonable, but a good town centre is important, and it needs to be walking or cycling distance to reduce our car dependence, especially since we're so far away from the city.

The place we're in for now is called Jarvisfield Estate. Don't worry, the word estate has negative connotations for me too, but this is nothing like what I had expected. It's an established little suburb 20 minutes walk to the north of town, 8 minutes ride to the station, no through traffic, and all one acre blocks (there's a neighbouring estate - the Botanical Gardens Estate - which is all quarter acre blocks). There's a really nice walking path around the river that borders the area, forming a natural barrier to further development along with the hills we have a great view of from our front door:



The house itself is absolutely amazing. Built by the people who now live next door (they used to own both blocks but sold one off) who are in Real Estate, we're yet to find a short-cut taken. There's four bedrooms, four bathrooms (that's just stupid!), a huge kitchen, dining room, family room, and the "big" room which is the massive octagonal living room you really can't describe in words that I'm currently sitting in. Outside on the basically flat acre, there's beautifully landscaped gardens, a four-car remote garage, a huge pergola for outdoor living, a tennis court with lighting, full irrigation, water tanks (smaller than we'd like though), and a biocycle, which breaks down all the wastewater from the house into watering for the extensive gardens automatically.



In short, it's a house way more than or anyone really needs, but within our price range, both for renting which we are doing now, and possible purchase if the Picton Experiment turns out to be a winner. We intend to keep looking around probably after Christmas at other places here, but this is going to be hard to move away from now.

All pictures here.

Due to our organisation moving buildings early next year, my band Jersey Kerb faces an uncertain future.

We use the present location for rehearsals and storing equipment, but there will be very little chance of this happening at the new location.

This means that tomorrow night's gig is likely the last for quite some time, until we work out how we might possibly pull together something in the new year with the organisation centred around North Sydney instead of Surry Hills.

So tomorrow night, come along and see what the last four years have culminated in:

6pm, Tailors on Central, Mary Street Surry Hills.

Free Entry.

Due to extreme busyness you're going to have to cop the same boilerplate you've already seen elsewhere, sorry! Liz is not too impressed, but nonetheless:

During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I'm growing a Mo. That's right I'm bringing the Mo back because I'm passionate about tackling men's health issues and being proactive in the fight against men's depression and prostate cancer.

To donate to my Mo you can either:

• Click this link and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account, or
  
• Write a cheque payable to ‘Movember Foundation', referencing my Registration Number 1974386 and mailing it to:
  

  
  
                                              Movember Foundation 
  
                                              PO Box 292
  
                                              Prahran VIC 3181
  
  

  
  

Remember, all donations over $2 are tax deductible.

The money raised by Movember is used to raise awareness of men's health issues and donated to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue - the national depression initiative. The PCFA and beyondblue will use the funds to fund research and increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer and depression.

Did you know:

Depression affects 1 in 6 men....most don't seek help. Untreated depression is a leading risk factor for suicide.
Last year in Australia 18,700 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and more than 2,900 died of prostate cancer - equivalent to the number of women who will die from breast cancer annually.

Thanks for your support, Tim.

Yes, we are heading up to Dubbo for a long weekend tomorrow - 7am Friday until 10pm Sunday, first-class on the train.

Yes, we are still moving out of Sydney next Friday.

No, we haven't finished packing or cleaning.

Yes, we probably are insane.

I've already attempted to explain that we are moving and also why.

How did we decide that Picton might be a good place? A process of elimination, and then actually really liking the town when we first arrived to check it out.

First, the elimination. Having decided to move out from where we are now in suburbia, a problem rapidly arises. In Sydney, as you move out further and further west, north or south, the houses get bigger, but they just cram closer together, or more on to the same block. Witness the McMansion belt of most of the western suburbs.

Thousands, probably millions of people live there in varying degrees of happyness, but this is not what we want. The idea of having seven bedrooms on the same size block as we have now, with no public transport and total reliance on petrol prices in this day and age is simply contrary to what we are trying to achieve.

So, we decided fairly early on to look beyond Sydney. People I work with in the CBD already commute from places like Springwood, Emu Plains, Gosford, Wyong, Thirroul, Helensburg, and I've spoken to most of them. Their views are in chorus - the longer travel times are worth it for their families to have a better life, and to have more money to spend on what really counts.

From Sydney, if you want to move out but still commute in you have four basic options - our first task was to whittle these down:

• North to the Gosford area. There's definitely some nice cheap places up there, I really like the Hawkesbury and surrounds and would love to live there. However, you are totally reliant on the F3 and the train line, both notoriously unreliable, and - the big one for us - even getting to the start of either of these is a major undertaking for all our friends and family, mostly congregated around the St. George area. Best would be 45 minutes to the F3, and then probably 45 more to wherever we ended up. The final nail was the fact that the land blocks aren't very big, so we'd still feel somewhat crammed in.
  
• West, to the Blue Mountains. We were up there not very long ago and really liked the place. The trains are pretty good, but the drive is no better than North, especially from St. George. We are familiar with most of the towns up there to the point where we could rule many of them out for not being quite "nice" enough. The only remaining ones really were Leura (too far away) and Springwood. Staying there was enough to confirm that it hit all the right points, but still we can't quite get over the distance back to our family and friends.
  
• South, to the Illawarra. I was down in Kiama for work a while back and really liked the place. It's a great little town, just the right size, friendly people, on the beach, but it is simply too far to commute each day. The drive is only an hour from Sutherland now which is fantastic, but then you still have to get to the city. Alternatively, the train is over two hours, which is excessive. Not quite as far south, Wollongong is next - huge and ugly and mostly suburbia, so past that you really only have places like Thirroul. This is nice, and we've visited it and the rest of the coast road towns a fair bit. However, the prices are really no cheaper than Sydney now, the blocks are just as small and there's really no nice-sized town to talk of - just a few shops and a big pub or two.
  
• South-West, to the Highlands. So we arrive at this option, after analysing and pretty much eliminating the other options. Ideally we'd probably like a place like Bowral, which is similar to Kiama with a fast drive until you hit the city, but again the train is just too long. So, we started looking north of Bowral. To keep the train journey times sensible, and the drive to St. George a reasonable length, we didn't want to go too far.
  

I did most of this research using Google Earth/Maps and the Cityrail timetables, and eventually located Picton as a possible option. I didn't at the time recall ever visiting the place(*), but it was 45 minutes drive down the M5 from the Beverly Hills junction, an hour to the CBD by train (admittedly there aren't many of them, and most are longer than this with a change required at Campbelltown) and yet a quaint little country town just the perfect size. Less than four thousand people, 30 minutes drive to huge shops at Campbelltown and Windsor if you feel you need them, 30 minutes drive to the beach (same it takes us from Penshurst in mid-summer!), and importantly, acreages abound.

Next we researched real-estate prices and were pleasantly surprised to say the least, for something so conveniently located. We found a few actual properties we liked, booked some inspections, and I convinced Liz to give it a chance so we loaded up the car for our first drive down.

As soon as we drove into the main street, after what felt like a very short drive, we were immediately taken with the place. There's enough of each type of shop for there to be competition and sensible prices, but not so many that it feels like one big Westfield. Behind these shops if you look up there are unspoilt green hills in all directions, and two minutes walk gets you to a paddock with horses. There's a botanical gardens, with cycleways servicing many of the houses, and several pubs including the great old Henry IV, home of Scharers Little Brewery. There's several also schools to choose from, which will be important in a few years, a public pool, doctors, etc. All the things you need and none of the stuff you don't.

In short, we felt like it was a serious possibility from day one. Subsequent visits have brought more interactions with the locals, and honestly, in the total maybe 48 hours we've spent there I can honestly say we've made more local friends than we have in four years in suburbia.

Our parents are a little sad that we are considering this option no doubt, but understand and are supportive. They too were blown away with the house we've chosen, which is covered in the next installment of this riveting saga.

(*) We later recalled that during the 1997 bushfire season, we'd both been stationed down here with SES as the Wollondilly SES has it's headquarters in the town. From here we'd driven to and evacuated surrounding areas, and interestingly I had my first unaccompanied drive of a manual vehicle - a suffering SES ute - one morning from the HQ out on the road we now appear to be moving onto. The skidmarks are no longer visible, but I do vaguely recall the area where "our" house now lies being empty, which according to records I've seen, it most likely was.

"Aren't you guys happy there?"

Well yes, we are. But we're looking at the bigger picture and trying new things.

From my perspective, for as long as I can remember, when asked whether I think of myself as a city person I've answered "not really". My parents can confirm, but moving away from the city has always been something I've wanted to do. I hate crowds, and Sydney is now a huge city with useless fundamental design now incapable of moving people where they want to go when they want to go, either by car or other means.

Try driving at 3am, as we had to do a little while ago when there was no other option for Phoebe - that's how roads were meant to work. Then try the same thing at 8am. That's how Sydney, and any other big city now feels to me - millions of people stuck waiting to get somewhere else they want to be. Trains are a little better - just as cramped but at least they move and there's less rage.

But, the really silly part is that they don't actually want to be at that target destination. Who wants to work in a cramped office? Humans evolved to roam free and work the land and all that, and now in the last century we've come to spend two-thirds of our life in an office (or factory, or shop, or whatever) and somehow perceive this as normal.

That's the world we live in and I can't change that (I might be aiming to, but that's longer-term). However I can try to make the other third of my life as enjoyable as possible. Here where we are now in suburbia, I had hoped to be able to to say that was happening. Instead, we barely know our neighbours - those on one side have never even said hello. There is no community spirit anymore, no place to gather akin to European plazas, even if you go into the CBD!

Everybody has somewhere else to be, is perpetually busy, and no time for each other. That's the real shame of it, and we're hoping to find a new place that can help.

So that leaves us with two basic options - either move further inner-city where life is more vibrant, travel times short, and lots of like-minded people exist, or move further out, to a "simpler" life.

Moving inwards, the drawbacks as I see it are:

• price - a run-down two bedroom semi with two metres of backyard is not worth a million bucks, no matter where it is
  
• space - for the dog and the bub to run around - is significantly less than we already have
  
• noise - traffic and of course our city has that fantastic triumph of planning, an airport smack-bang in the middle of it
  
• child-friendlyness - well, plenty of children grow up inner city, but deep down that still doesn't feel quite right to me
  
• pollution - air, noise, visual, ...
  

Alternatively, moving outwards, we get far more house and land for our money, somewhere to live more off the land with our own food and energy sources, a strong community, peace, tranquility, and a good place to bring up Phoebe amongst animals, rolling hills and fresh air.

Drawbacks will of course be being further from our friends and family, longer commuting times to work, and the risk of mono-culturalism. We've mitigated these risks in our actual choice of location which I'll elaborate on more later.

I also want to spend significantly less of our lifetime income paying off a pile of bricks that we live in. Australian capital city property is amazingly over-priced compared with pretty much anywhere in the world, and I'm no longer interested in playing that game to the point that it impacts the pile of money we have to actually enjoy life with.

It's still rather scary even after much delibration and with an easy way out, but I do honestly feel we are making the correct move for this time of our lives.

As always, time will of course tell. Maybe the drawbacks will be large enough to get us back on the bandwagon - they appear to be for millions of others! Or have they just not truly considered their options?

So we're moving to Picton!

Starting in a few weeks we'll have vacated our little Penshurst house which has been a great first home, and moved all our belongings to a strange new rural place. We're calling this an experiment because we like to have ways back out of unfamiliar places, so we're renting a house down there and going to put our Penshurst house up for rent too. This way if we change our minds after a little while (probably six months to match the lease durations), we can move back and say "experiment completed, conclusion negative".

However at this point we're all super-excited and think that this is the place for us for a good while yet. More posts on the reasoning and the actual house we've chosen coming soon. As well as a house-warming of course!

For now it's crazy packing time, plus organising everything for two houses at the same time, oh and of course Liz is going back to work shortly and Phoebe still challenges us with her on-again, off-again sleeping and eating habits.

We must be crazy, but sometimes in life you have to be a bit daring and hope it pays off.

I'm ten days into Octsober, and doing just fine. This is a seemingly low-profile campaign where the Drug and Alcohol Council tries to get you to not drink for a month. I guess I should donate what I would have spent to someone at the end of it, but I can't find much about it online.

The long weekend was a bit of a challenge, but the large supply of bubbly mineral water and decent ginger beer proved refreshing enough.

I am missing the wine though, and the wine club that we're members of is sending out the next tasting collection soon, so hopefully it doesn't arrive this month so that I have to stare at it!

My reasoning behind this isn't much more than "just because" - maybe to give my body a break, definitely to remind myself that I'm not addicted, and to feel more compassion for a breastfeeding mother who only recently has started to sneak a glass in here and there.

Bring on Movember!

The house is now routinely in chaos when I return home from work, as Phoebe is crawling everywhere rapidly, and can climb to stand on most objects.

For a while there I was joking that at least she hadn't tried to use my leg hairs for this purpose. And then she did. I joke about this no longer.

She seems to have decided that food isn't the root of all evil and will eat many things at her own pace, far more often. We're still hesitant to call it a meal, because it's far from the recommended amount, but it is a significant improvement on even a couple of weeks ago.

Sadly, the sleep issues continue. There are clear improvements at times, but almost every night there's still a period of many hours where she just doesn't want to sleep. We're booked into Tresillian again next month so if she doesn't keep improving on her own then we'll all get a bit of a helping hand.

There are always more pictures being uploaded, and there is plenty more stuff I want to blog about but I just keep forgetting it! Perhaps I need to get the mobile blogging client working so all that time I'm on a packed train when these things come to my head I can be writing them instead.

Liz's twelve months of maternity leave is rapidly drawing to an end, which has prompted us to think about how we are going to handle it.

There are a number of factors that make this quite a challenging task:

1. Phoebe still doesn't eat solids in any measurable way. Now that she's crawling (and standing) all over the place, she's burning through energy like mad and breastfeeding more often again.
   
2. Phoebe still doesn't sleep properly. A good night means up twice, a bad night could be a few hour long block, followed by up several more times. This is currently compounded by factor one and the temporary problem that all three of us have colds.
   
3. Liz doesn't really want to go back to work, although she misses some aspects of it, such as her friends.
   

SMH today have an article that neatly sums up one of my concerns:

The bureau's report found that from 1996 to 2006, police-recorded incidents of assault at hospitals across the state have increased from 214 to 322.
In more than two-thirds of the assaults, the victim was a stranger and was most often either a hospital staff member or police officer.

I've never found this even remotely acceptable, but for Liz it's been just part of the job - mentally ill people who don't know what they are doing get away with physically abusing staff. It's largely tolerated because there's not much that can be done.

It's a very tough problem and one that's come back to my mind now that we have a small child still wholly dependent on Liz to think about. She has on occasion suffered this herself, and it's always worried me greatly.

But for now she'll most likely go back one day a week, hopefully a good day where positive things happen, but that's not something we can count on unfortunately.

Dear Guy in the Railcorp Uniform I just sat next to on the way into town,

Perhaps next time you don't have to leg-spread so wide your mother would be ashamed, and then look with me in scorn as I attempt to squeeze myself into the gap. Or at least have the decency to move your legs so that I can fit in some non-yoga-position manner.

If you decide to continue with your understanding of the amount of personal space required by each traveller on CityRail, perhaps you could approach your employer to re-instate first class? It's not like you're even paying for your ticket so you'll get the free upgrade I'm sure.

Personally, I'd settle for just more trains so that maybe one of the two that shot through Penshurst without stopping before this one arrived would have taken on some passengers, giving each one of them more room.

Oh yes, this was a train at 7 am, and this was the last available seat in the carriage. Otherwise your body odours would have put me off way too much.

We could have had another baby in that time! Not that Liz would approve of that plan :)

So little Miss Phoebe is going pretty well really. We still have ongoing sleep issues, which seem to sort themselves out for a few days where she surprises us, but then that's followed by nights where she's refusing to sleep for three or four hours straight.

A good night is currently Liz up feeding twice where Phoebe goes straight back to sleep, and a bad night is up ten times or more, and/or where some of those times Phoebe just wants to be awake. The evenings are typically very challenging, although there's signs of improvement there as well.

But that said, when she's awake, Phoebe is happy and enjoying life most of the time. There's screamy days and happy days, but it looks like the latter are finally outweighing the former. Phoebe loves to look at what we are doing, play with anything, grab things, smile at everyone, and try and get to the dog.

Crawling is still almost there, but constant reliable forward motion still escapes her. She can do it, but it just takes a little while for her to remember how. She loves to walk (assisted of course) so that may come sooner than we expect if she can work out how.

Funnest games include peek-a-boo, flying around, tickling, and funny moving faces. Her laugh is truly wonderful if you can work out how to coax it out of her!

So it's taken a while, and not quite there yet, but we're truly enjoying being parents now. I miss them both so much when I'm away for long days at work, especially on the worst days when I leave before Phoebe wakes and return after she's slept. Luckily for me, she's usually awake again soon, but that's not good for other reasons.

We envy those parents with babies that just sleep twelve hours a day from birth - Liz sleeps maybe five hours some days and Phoebe perhaps seven, but I wouldn't trade either of them, especially since Liz kindly lets me get more sleep than her so that I can face the long working days. This is helped though by the fact that at times Phoebe screams for her mum and won't have a bar of me!

Found a significantly better webhosting deal at Hawk Host so decided to jump ship from my crusty old one which has been patchy over the years.

Sorry for the rough ride, there's more to fix yet too.

So make sure you aren't missing out on the updates which are happening pictorially via my Flickr Photostream.

The first additional lens has turned up for our new camera - a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D.

One of the things I've always love and missed since I last had a (film) SLR is shallow depth-of-field, like in this picture of Alina or this one of Dad and Phoebe. You just can't get that with point-and-shoot, and you get less of it with the 18-55 kit lens that came with our camera which only goes down as low as f/3.5.

On our D40 the 50mm lens manual-focus only - it's great fun getting back to that sort of raw photography. It's also great for low light - I've never been a fan of flash and this makes it unnecessary in many situations.

A 55-200mm telephoto should be arriving on Monday, giving pretty much a full versatile set of lenses for most occasions.