As the term break draws to a close, I have just completed a back up of all my images shot in the last two months, 758 mg. I was expecting to shoot more, but sadly a couple of events got in the way. Nik's father is a builder back in her home town of Mildura, he has just built a display home. His sales rep wanted to furnish the house and as Nik's Dad had recently paid a visit to Ikea in Richmond he thought it would be great to house the furniture using their furniture. So we get a phone call.
“ Can you please buy some furniture and bring it up to us by Monday?”
“ Of course” says Nik.
“ We'll fax a list later in the week”
The List arrives — it's three pages LONG!
So we dutifully head off to Ikea on Friday morning, a wise move, Saturdays are a nightmare in that store. It took all of the day to buy everything on the list. Seven trolleys full in total. Don't even get me started on the whole issue of finding someone high enough up the food chain to help us organise the temporary storage of the trolleys as we went in search of a means of transporting the goods to Mildura. We had already spent the morning looking into options and decided we would try and book a Furniture van and tow it behind my Magna, station wagon. We were picking this up on Saturday, around 1:00pm. [Perfect timing to escape the annual event that pre-occupies Melbourne's collective psyche, a time when I try and get a cheap flight out of Melbourne, often easy if there is at least one interstate team playing.]
We spent the best part of Saturday morning getting organised, and then headed off to pick up the Van. A saga develops!
We had tried to book one type of van the company claimed that none were available, so we settled for second best. We arrive at the depot, three of the damn things are sitting there! Back on the phone. It seems that they weren't prepared to give us one as the destination of this one way rental already had too many up there. Back out to the trailers and we spent 45 minutes trying to get the trailer we had booked unlocked. No luck even after several phone calls. Then another long phone call to the company. Finally after a much discussion we got the trailer we had originally wanted. No thanks to the company, we hired it from. The rest of the day involved wheeling trolleys out of Ikea, and loading the van. When we'd finished, things didn't look right and my poor old car wasn't coping too well with the 900kg trailer, plus load.
I decided we needed to re-load the van and re-distribute the weight more evenly.
It took an hour.
Not counting the 20 minutes or so it took me to reverse into our drive!
That night was dinner at Pete and Sue's. I was wrecked and barely made it to 10:00pm.
Sunday was the big day, and surprisingly once on the open road the car trundled along ok. After four hours we stopped at our usual stop in a place called Charlton. Great Hamburgers and steak sandwiches there, at the Mobil on the south end of town! Then on and upward to Mildura, when, somewhere south of Ouyen, it started raining, it didn't stop till we got to Mildura, thank god we had the covered van!
Finally in Mildura we set about unloading, and this time I got some help from Nik's Dad in how to reverse and we unloaded the trailer in no time, off to the depot to finally rid ourselves of that 900kg beast and home for a quiet evening meal and an early night.
The drive home was so different to the drive up, in fact I drove all the way home. We did stop for a short break at one of the many picnic spots that dot the highways of Victoria. Which in itself brought back a whole heap of memories about Sunday drives and picnics. Still I will do it differently next time, perhaps with a small 3 tonne truck.
At least I now know how to reverse a trailer!
So back to my original thought. Whilst backing up my lastest round of images, I scrolled though them all for another look using iView a neat little freeware app for managing photo-libraries and of course after 6 weeks or so I managed to see some images that looked like they were worth a revisit. So this process of dealing with my images served a twoflod purpose. It allowed me the oppurtunity to revisit the images and decide their visual merit, it allowed me to remember what i'd done over the last 6 weeks and where I'd been.
God I love photography.
