The Arrival

We set out from London in June 2003, with two goals: Find somewhere in tropical Australia to settle down, and get there the long way.
This weekend, we moved into our place in the bush in northern New South Wales.
There is no sense of anticlimax - I'm as excited about the future as I ever have been, but there is a sense of reality setting in: The DIY jobs, headaches, and bills that come with home ownership; the ongoing paperwork and bureaucratic wrangling that come with immigration; and the isolation and daunting prospect of making new friends that come with moving to a village where you don't know anyone. 2oz.blogspot.com will be my online diary as we set ourselves up in what is shaping up to be an (almost certainly pratfall-rich) cross between The Good Life and a troppo'd hebridean cyber-cottage.
For the next few weeks I am working as a contractor in Brisbane - commuting weekly, renting a room midweek, and coming home for four or five days on the Friday morning train to Kyogle. C's contract as a web-designer for a charity has just finished, so she's based down in Nimbin all week - though various bits and bobs of freelance work will draw her back up to Brisbane for the odd day here and there, I'll wager.
All we have done this weekend is a spot of unenthusiastic DIY (which did include the crucial step of bodging a fly-screen over the large bathroom window - now all our rooms can have open windows without any rain-forest insects finding their way in!) some shopping in the village, and some inefficient unpacking of boxes and crates.
After I publish this, I'm going to unpack the remaining large boxes of books that have arrived from the UK, rig up some crude bookshelves from planks and breeze-blocks, and dip into my books again for the first time in 5 years. Oh yeah, I'll update this blog every Sunday evening, Sydney time.