Looking Ahead - Kinda

Linda's working hard upstairs in our continuing quest to de-clutter the house. I feel vaguely guilty about being downstairs not doing anything productive - just watching football and surfing the web. And if the Steelers game continues to be as one-sided as it is, I will probably give in to my guilt and find some work to do.

Jon just sent an e-mail asking where we were moving if we sold the house. He's not the first to bring up the subject. As a result of telling everyone that we're putting the house up for sale, we keep getting asked what we plan to do. It's slightly embarrassing to admit it, but we hadn't really thought that far ahead.

Sure, we have had long-term plans to sell and relocate to Tasmania. But the key phrase there is "long-term". If this house now sells at auction in late November, we will be completing the deal and vacating some time late in January. And that's when "short-term" bumps against "long-term", because we cannot move to Tassie until August at the earliest because our tenant there has a lease through July.

I guess LK describes our situation best. She's telling people we will be homeless.

Our current thinking is that we will probably rent a holiday home on the coast about an hour away from Sydney. The holiday peak season will be ending about the time we need our temporary digs. That should keep the costs down. It will let us have enough space so it doesn't feel like we're living in a hotel room and still keep us within an easy train ride to Sydney. Also, if we're in a holiday home, it just might prove quite tempting for family and friends to join us for a break.

Or we may not do that.

Another option is to just hit the road. We proved in our recent US holiday that we are extremely adept at mooching off of people and there's no chance of getting homesick if you don't have a home. We've already got a 24-day cruise booked for April, and we might just wander the world for months until we once again have a home - nomad as a lifestyle choice.

Or we may move early to Tassie and rent an apartment for six months while we find an architect get to work on plans to renovate the house we have there. That being the most practical plan, it's probably the least likely to be what we do.

Or we may do something else. Because every time we think about what we will do if we sell the house next month, we seem to come up with one more option.

Robert Burns wrote, "The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft aglay."

That's one good thing about not knowing what we're going to do. If you haven't laid any schemes, they cannot gang aglay, whatever that means.