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Fortunately, the move was only a couple of kilometres so I figured that I'd be able to accomplish this using my little Nissan Navara ute. What I hadn't counted on however, was the worst four days of weather we've seen since February.

As a result, I spent from Saturday morning through to Tuesday night running around busting a gut carrying all manner of heavy items while remaining soaked to the skin. Tuesday was the worst though, because as the temperature fell, I discovered that hail really hurts when you don't have hair atop your head.

On Saturday afternoon, I was wheeling the chest-freezer around on the rain-sodden lawn using a loading trolley, when one wheel sunk into a soft-spot and the whole damned thing fell on top of me.

Fortunately no bones were broken but I had to call for help so that someone could lift the damned thing off me. It left a lovely person-shaped depression in the muddy ground too.

Moments after that, I slipped on some concrete steps and slammed my coccyx into the edge of one of them -- boy, that hurts! Fortunately the pain wasn't too bad for the rest of the day but got progressively worse and now I find myself having to perch a single cheek on my chair rather than my whole backside if I want to remain comfortable.

To make matters worse, I'd started to develop what I thought was a bit of a cold by Saturday evening so I was feeling decidedly grumpy and off-colour.

I should also mention that this new place is atop a quite steep rise in the ground but has no driveway so I had to park on the road and *everything* had to be carried some 20m up a steep slippery, muddy lawn or a set of awkwardly spaced (and equally slippery) concrete steps cluttered by trees and shrubs.

By late Tuesday night when the final box was moved and the old place was far cleaner and shinier than it was when me moved in just 9 months ago, I was utterly and completely wasted. Not only was I suffering the early signs of hypothermia but my nose was running like a tap and I was coughing like a 70-year-old who'd smoked 20 packets a day for all his life.

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Nothing would be nicer now than to have a nice warm shower and go to bed -- but unfortunately all my clean clothes, towels and stuff were in a plain brown box somewhere (amongst the dozens of other plain brown boxes stacked high in every room).

What's more, it soon became apparent that this place was nowhere near as nice as the one I'd just moved from

Unfortunately, it seems that the previous tenant of this house had dozens of cats and was none too worried about the fact that they pee'd all over the carpet.

Despite the fact that the carpets were cleaned prior to our arrival, I was to find that once I lit a fire and got the place warmed up, the stench of cat pee was almost unbearable. And then there were the fleas...

Mind you, by this time I was past caring about anything as it turns out that what I thought was a cold was actually a rather nasty bout of influenza that had me wishing I could find life's off-button.

So, here I am, sitting in a flea-pit feeling rather sorry for myself, surrounded by boxes of household items, stacked furniture and soggy tissues.

What irks me even more is that I'm mow paying an extra $40 a week for this hell-hole and I would actually be paying *less* each week by way of a mortgage if I was actually buying a house of similar size and quality. Unfortunately banks are not wildly enthusiastic about lending money to people in my position of course -- so in the meantime I simply pay through the nose and put up with what I can get.

But Mr Murphy is still working hard because I see today that the paper which, for the past six weeks has had nothing resembling a half-decent house for rent, today lists several "redecorated, renovated" properties close to (but not in town -- *perfect*) with garages, workshops and rents that are the same as I was paying before. One even includes free lawn mowing!

Right now I'm really glad I'm not prone to bouts of depression!

I don't have my wireless connection yet because I've been simply too busy and sick to get around to it -- but I expect that it'll be in and running by next week. I guess I'll get around to answering the 300+ emails that are now sitting in my intray by then too.

In the meantime, while I've been away, I see that plenty has been going on not the least of which is the disclosure that IT minister Paul Swain had actually come out in favour of unbundling the local loop but had been over-ruled by his colleagues.

Space Ship One also set a new benchmark in privately funded aerospace development with its little hop up to the edge of space -- excellent stuff.

Note that normal Aardvark Daily service will be resumed on Monday.

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