Summer Down Under

The long hot days of summer have begun in the Southern Hemisphere, where this week the average temperature in Adelaide is set to hover around 37 degrees Celcius (that's almost 100F).

Yesterday, I went for my first swim of the season, and although summer doesn't official begin until December, I get the feeling we are going to be in for a torrid summer.

Of course, no right thinking person would spend their days out in the heat of the midday sun. Not if they had a choice anyway. Mind you, this rules out most teenagers who think that frying their skin in the middle of the afternoon is the 'cool' thing to do.

Come to think of it - I was one of those teenagers once. I can still vividly remember taking a day off work one hot summer day to spend it at the beach. Stupidly, I didn't apply sunscreen to my back and legs (I can't remember if sunscreen was around in the late 1960s), and by the end of the day, it is no exaggeration to say that I left the beach as red as a lobster.

In deed, the next day my legs and parts of my back had broken out in blisters as a result of the damage I had inflicted on my body. It was a lesson I learned the hard way, and to this day I will not visit the beach or enter the water unless I wear a hat (to cover my balding head), and a t-shirt to protect my upper body from the burning sun. I also make it a rule to visit the beach late in the afternoon or early in the evening when the heat of the day has begun to ease. The added benefit of this policy is that I'm always on the beach to watch a golden sun dipping below the horizon in a blaze of yellow, orange and red.

Of such small pleasures are my days made whole!

House Sitting

In the past I have featured a series of entries about house swapping on this blog. When you house swap, you exchange your home, unit, holiday home or apartment with another house swapper for an agreed period of time. That is, you move into someone else's home - say for three weeks - while they move into your home for the same period of time. You could even swap something unique like a houseboat or motor-home.

Today though, I thought I'd turn my attention to house sitting. House sitting involves you looking after someone's home while they are away for business, on vacation, or working far from home.

With house sitting, the homeowner engages the house sitter to move into their home for an agreed period ranging from a few days to in some cases 12-18 months - or more. In exchange for living in the owners home rent free, the sitter agrees to water plants, care for pets, and do any other tasks the owner asks of them for the duration of the agreement.

Personally, I am really excited by the possibilities that house sitting presents. In fact, early in 2010 I will be house sitting in Melbourne, Victoria, for a period of six weeks.

Since I have never spent more than a couple of days at a time in Melbourne, I can't wait to immerse myself in the life of Australia's second major city. The last time I visited Melbourne would have been back in the early 1990s. Much has changed in the Victoria capital since then, and I am looking forward to discovering just how much the city has grown and evolved for myself.

There are even international house sitting opportunities available to the right candidates. Yes, folks, you could be house sitting a Manhattan condo, a house on the French Riviera, or an apartment in Paris if you have the right credentials. As long as you can show that you are honest, reliable, trustworthy, and have no criminal record, prospective home owners may select you to look after their most precious possessions.

So how do you go about becoming a house sitter (or finding someone to look after your home)? You go online, of course.

All of these sites charge money for prospective house sitters to register their interest. This helps eliminate time wasters and people who have no real intention of following through with house sitting opportunites.

Here are just a few sites to get you started (all fees are in US dollars):
Aussie House Sitters ($60): http://www.aussiehousesitters.com.au/
House Carers ($45): http://www.housecarers.com/
Luxury House Sitting ($25): http://www.luxuryhousesitting.com/
House Sitters America ($30): http://housesittersamerica.com/
House Sit World ($40): http://www.housesitworld.com/

That will do to get you started. There are literally hundreds of opportunities to house sit available right now. If you are planning to travel next year, now might be the right time to register with one (or more) of the above sites, and familiarise yourself with the process. You may also like to try house sitting close to home first, so that you can accumulate some good references from home owners, which can in turn be used to help you get house sitting placements in other countries.

Cutting The Ties That Bind

I know next to nothing about Buddhism. Nothing at all about the spiritual beliefs of Native Americans, of Hinduism, Judaism, or the beliefs of a host of other religions - but as I try to divest myself of the baggage I have accumulated over a lifetime of collecting, I can appreciate more and more the concept of 'travelling light'.

I'm thinking - and writing - about this today, having just completed a very successful sale of most of my vinyl record collection. At 61, I have been buying and collecting records since my early teens. To be honest, I probably haven't bought more than a dozen vinyl albums over the past ten years, so the bulk of my 700 plus record collection was acquired over a period of 30 years.

I don't know if scientists mapping the human genome have discovered the gene responsible for the human habit of collecting, but I'm sure it's there somewhere, because I can personally attest to its power.

Since I sold my home in May 2007, I have had a storage shed full of stuff that at the time, I simply found impossible to part with. Two years later, and a couple of thousand dollars poorer, I have finally begun the process of letting this stuff go.

Apart from some household goods, the bulk of this stuff consists of books, vinyl records, CDs, and DVDs. Those four categories alone would collectively add up to several thousand items. Add to this, magazine collections, personal documents, photo albums, and who knows what else, and it's not hard to see why a large storage shed was needed to house them.

And so the process of passing these things on to others has begun. Slowly at first - but as my plans for future travel draw closer - now faster, and faster, I am reselling books I will never get around to reading, and vinyl albums I will rarely sit down and listen to. At least the CDs and DVDs take up much less space, and are lighter to move around, but even these will eventually go to other homes.

I don't know where all this is leading, except that I want to cut these ties that bind, and try and reach a mental and physical state where I can move more freely from one location to another; one country to another, without feeling the pull - the constant drag - of stuff.

The upside of all this selling is that so far I have raised $2,500 which will go towards my forthcoming travel costs, and that makes the whole process just that little bit easier.
　
IMAGE: Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative Quilt - The Ties that Bind, © AmyB
Read more about this quilt here...