Monday, August 11

Life

Age Is Catching Up With Me

But hasn't caught me yet.  Not quite.

Went house-hunting in the Southern Highlands today.  Because maps can be misleading, and real-estate agents just plain lie, I decided to find out where the nice-looking properties were located and actually walk to them from the nearest station.*  And also walk around the shopping centres to find out what was there and what was where, that sort of thing.

The difference is, I'm only going to live in one of these places, so I'd only be making one trip each way to the station or shops on any given day.  So I probably wouldn't be walking something like 20km in a normal day...  Which is what I just did.

So, things I learned today:

1. If it's nice, and affordable, and it's in Bowral, it's further out of town than you'd expect.  For reasons partly topographical and partly inexplicable, Bowral radiates out south-eastward from the railway station.  And pretty much only south-eastward, which means that for a given distance from the station, there's only a quarter the houses available that you'd find in a more sensibly planned location.

It's partly the topography that makes Bowral such a nice place to live, so part of that I can accept.  But why the town stops at a knife edge on the railway line, and there's nothing but empty fields west of that, remains to be explained.  It looks like a property boom just waiting to happen.

2. The nice part of Mittagong is to the east of the railway line.  All the shops are on the west.  (Except for, as far as I can tell, a pottery shop.  An immense pottery shop.)  The useful shops that sell stuff like, oh, food, are way-to-hell-and-gone over the west side of town.  So a very nice house that's half a mile from the station is appealing until you factor in the extra mile every time you need to buy some groceries.

3. Moss Vale gets cold in winter.  It's fine if you're dry and in the sun and out of the wind, but if you do something silly like wash your hands, brrrr.

4. There's really great bakery on the route from most of the places I was looking at in Moss Vale and the station.  Except that their apple turnovers are far too large and filled, apparently, with lead.

5. I can happily walk a couple of kilometres lugging a notebook bag.  It's no problem at all, as long as the terrain is not outright vertical and there's some sort of footpath.

6.  I can happily walk a couple of kilometres lugging a notebook bag twice in a day.  Three, four, five times even.  Around trip number 8 or 9, it becomes apparent that this is no longer the case.  And if trip number 8, say, leaves me two kilometres from the station so that trip number 9 is unavoidable despite the growing unpleasantness in my right knee, then I find that after dragging myself back into town and waiting at the lights to cross over to the station, said knee will start showing clear intentions to cease functioning.

7. Elevators at railway stations are a blessing.

8. After resting up during the long trip home, I find that while sore, I am not actually crippled (though stairs still hold little appeal).  So as I said in the beginning, it hasn't caught me yet.

* I also took a pointless two-mile detour around Mittagong for reasons that are too complicated to fit in this footnote.  That didn't help.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:30 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Perhaps a smaller notebook ?

EEE pc perhaps ?

Posted by: Andrew at Tuesday, August 12 2008 11:42 AM (/uGTr)

2 Definitely, either that or one of the hundred other netbooks that have sprung up.

I still have my little Sony Vaio, and it even mostly works.  But it's kind of slow by today's standards, and the rightmost quarter of the screen is stuffed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 12 2008 12:10 PM (PiXy!)

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