We had a wonderful Christmas at home with our three sons Pieter, Riaan and Philip and Pieter's wife Monique. They had come up from Cape Town for the Christmas-NewYear week and we enjoyed their company, albeit only for a short while. Apart from the family, we had many happy engagements with friends, over a meal, golf or simply for a chat or, as the French say, for "un verre".
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| Swart Clan at Kleinmond |
We flew to Cape Town for a gathering of cousins on my mother's side of the family, the Anderson clan, that my brother Carl had arranged in Kleinmond. Wondererful reminisences ensued of days gone by, our shared and unworried youth and of catching up, mostly over the last forty years. We also spent the rest of the thorougly delightful weekend with my brother and sisters and various offspring having much fun including a meal of mussels we freshly harvested and (illicit?) cape lobster ...thereby hangs a tale!
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| Anderson Clan cousins |
We could not really start getting the house ready for letting until after the Festive Season but we did contact the storage company and the rental agent that we had settled upon in October. Unfortunately both had since experienced such high volumes that neither could now accept our furniture nor our business. A survey of other storage companies in the area showed that they also were fully booked or considerably more expensive than our first choice. We had hoped and planned to have the household packed and the house cleared by the 13th. We were offered and committed to 5x3x2,8m storage space, apparently adequate for furniture from a three-bedroomed home, the last one available for long term rental, but only from the 18th of January.
Those of you who have done this before will understand my mounting concern, as we finally had packers in to cart off our beloved furniture, collected over nearly forty years of marriage, that this was not going to fit into the available space. What do we do if it doesn't? Unlike when we did overseas duty and had all our houshold effects stored with little ado by us and arranged by my employer, this consignment had to fit into the said volume, a small space that shrunk further in my mind's eye during the course of the two day packing process! Eventually, on the 18th the packers moved in to pack our effects and on the 19th late in the afternoon transported them to the storage company where I offered a bonus to the team if they were able to fit all into the storage space. Although a number of them were confident to start off, one by one they waned as the afternoon of unpacking progressed and they came to conclude what I had feared. Fortunately, the company eventually proposed a temporary solution by offering us an additional unit until the end of the month whereafter they had a quarter unit available, enough for the overflow. Thank you Ronell for playing fairy godmother and diverting a mounting coronary just before our departure.
We called a variety of rental agents to rent our house. They all seemed very interested, but just could not, in the end, deliver us a lessee. I had resigned myself to the fact that the house might have to stay empty for a while when a chance encounter resolved our dilemma. While we were busy packing I had become concerned about a contingency plan if things did not fit. I called a fellow I had spoken to before who had steel containers to rent and enquired whether he could have one on standby if needed at the last moment. He kindly agreed and also came round to see how we were progressing with the packing. After establishing from us that the house was not already rented he called an agent friend of his and she clinched a good rental deal with us the next morning, a day before we were due to depart for Europe. Hallelujah!
One jarring realisation I had somewhere in December was more a psychological shock than a real dilemma, namely that after our house was rented and we had moved to Linqui we would actually no longer have a fixed address..... we would be gypsies, non-entities, stateless, without address! While this was a very powerful reminder that we would no longer be part of our current establishment, with its concomitant fears of disassociation, our return to Pretoria after two months away also held in it a very practical reminder of this dilemma..... we had been dropped by our medical aid because we had not responded to various letters that been sent to us after my retirement. The fault was of course simply mine for not transferring all monthly deductions from my payslip to my own bank account. Fortunately this unintended consequence was rectified quickly, but it served as a practical reminder of what we had to put in place. Fortunately Josie came to the rescue and agreed to receive any snailmail we might receive after I had changed most of the various modes of communication to email. After all, we are in the electronic age nogal, aren't we!
Rudi: Saying goodbye to family, esp your children and friends is not an easy thing to do. Saying goodbye to your doggies after you had them around your feet all day for 10 years, is not an easy thing to do. Karen was kind enough to take on the responsibility of looking after our dogs and we can never thank her enough. Ed and Jacqui gave us a welcoming home and a comfortable bedroom for a few days before we left and even delivered us, with lots of luggage at O.R. Tambo airport. That deserves a heartfelt thank you. I felt very guilty not being able to spend more time with my girl friends just before we left but time ran out and priorities shifted rapidly! Love you guys and thank you for being my friends.
It was a huge moment sitting on that plane and knowing that there is nothing you can about things that you haven't done, but here we are on our way to gay Paris to sort out the visas and that is another stress factor and hopefully, if all goes the way we want it to go, we will be joining Linqui in a few days!
Short checklist before departure:
- renovate house for letting : paint, tile, gutters, common gate
- new carpets/tile or wooden laminate floors
- check out security system
- Arrange letting of house
- Sort out job for gardener
- terminate utilities: water and lights
- new postal address
- Sell car
- book flights
- Change postal addresses for various services, e.g. banking, tax, medical aid, insurance, investments, phone etc.
- cancel various services e.g. TV, phones, water and lights, refuse removal, internet, land lines and mobile phones,
- medical checkups
- Visas
- attend to friends/relationships
- sort out finances
- sort out pension arrangements
- life insurance & annuities
- travel insurance
- sort sporting and social club memberships
- obtain medical/travel insurance
- sort income tax arrangements
- review will
- pack and store household & furniture
- leave relevant information with a friend
- sort out homes for animals
- arrange Internet access to bank accounts
- arrange roaming for mobile phone
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