Homeless

Well, you have to hand it to us. This week we proved that you don't need a house to entertain a house guest.

Our friend David dropped into Hobart Sunday to visit us in our new home. And we promptly pointed out to him that a house is not a home. And in fact, you don't even need a house to have a home. (OK, you do need something obviously. We more or less convinced David that everything we need from day-to-day is in the back of our car, and David - being such an understanding sole - proceeded to call us homeless people who were living in their car.

Which is really unfair because we only keep our stuff in the car. We actually sleep in beds, either with friends who are bound to grow very tired of us soon, or cheap motels. And the topic of cheap motels is one I am not willing to discuss right now since I am sitting and sweating in a room in Devonport because I did not read all the online stuff, one line of which read "This configuration of room does not include air conditioning."

It's all kind of ironic that so many of our friends kept asking us why we would move to a place that was so cold and here we are sweating away in early autumn. In fact Hobart turned out Paradise-quality weather for David's visit - cloudless skies, mid-20s (mid-70sF), sunny, gentle breezes - and we did our best to try to convince him that this was pretty much par for the course, even though we have absolutely no idea if that is true. We've become very defensive about Hobart and its climate. Fortunately, so far Hobart has given us plenty to defend.

Having a guest visit us in Hobart is ironic since, in the past several years while we lived in Sydney, we had almost no overseas visitors who came to stay with us. Now that we are Hobartians (or is it Hobies? I am pretty sure it's not Hobarters) it is interesting that we have had our first US visitor come here.

It would have been nice to have a house, a guestroom and a comfy bed for our first Tasmanian guest, but we were way too optimistic when we asked David to swing down on his trip to Sydney and visit us here.

As many of you know, events just did not mesh for us this time around. We had been renting the house to Stanley and Ann, a lovely couple in their 90s, for the past several years, and we initially had not planned to move in until the end of their lease in July. However, in December Stanley passed away, and Ann requires 24-hour care so the executors of the estate were moving vigorously to get her into a facility.

Silly us, we figured that by now this would have happened. As it turns out, the waiting lists for the local facilities move ever so slowly and, as Ann rebounded from the grief of losing her husband, her condition seemed less severe and the doctors reduced the level of urgency to get her admitted to a facility.

So, it's now back to Plan A whereby we will not be moving into the house until the end of the lease in July. By then we are sure she will have moved, and in fact our agent tells us that having her lease ending will move her toward the top of the waiting list once again.

But for now we are wandering the world, living on the kindness of family and friends when possible, and on the power of Visa and Amex when not possible. Tonight we are back in Devonport getting ready to take the ferry tomorrow. Then it's a tour of Victoria and a nice drive up the coast back to Sydney by Easter. From there - the world beckons.