Days with Italian Groundhogs

Hi!

Well. Another week to cross off the calendar. Was a good week, started a bit slow but certainly picked up and now, here we are at another week! Sometimes it feels like 'Groundhog Day', but that's ok - am happy to be employed in a decent gig!

So yeah. Work is good. I actually managed to finish all of my little projects to the point where I handed the last one to my boss, went back to my desk and sat there for a minute while I realized I'd finished everything! Well, good girl that I am, I went back to my boss and told her I'd actually run out of real work! She laughed and together we came up with the slightest hint of something for me to do. How funny. But how embarrassing if she asked me what was I working on and I said "uh, well, nothing", and she's not stupid, she knows what my little projects are and where they're at. It was pretty funny. I kinda thought she was going to just send me home until more real work came along, but no. She's pretty cool. So I still have someplace to be tomorrow morning at 8am! Hooray!

And the weekend. The usual. Met Natasha in town, had breakfast at our favorite place, then proceeded to run up one side and down the other of Queen Street Mall looking for a dress for her and some toothpaste for me. Then came home, nap time, and went out to dinner at my favorite Italian place right around the corner from me. Mmmmmm! Man it's goooood!

And today, well, here I am. Probably stayed out way past my bedtime last night and now I have no energy. But, I've done my chores and now I'm watching "Broken Flowers", Jim Jarmusch movie with Bill Murray. Jim Jarmusch is one of my all-time favorite directors. Yeah.

And that's that. Boring, I know. And I know I haven't done anything really exciting either. Too busy going out to dinner. That's bad, I know. I'll work on a plan! Promise!

So there you are. Another week in Dullsville, Australia. Well, xmas is coming, that'll be a fantastic week off. Will do stuff then!


BYE!
J!

Weekly: One Good Thing About Little Apartment #16: My favorite Italian restaurant is right around the corner from me, so I don't have to cross town or make reservations!

Day Out... At The Pub!

Hi!

Well. Apologies for the late update. The sole reason is that Sunday was a day spent at the pub - need I say more. Am sorry. It was fun though after a long week and a busy weekend!

So work. Yep. It's good. Got my paperwork all turned in that officially extends my little contract until the end of March next year - woooohhoooooo!!!!! A job for another 3 1/2 months! At this rate I'm aiming for May, if I can do it, then I'll have been there a whole year! Goooood look on the rez - Editor. Yeeaaahhhh!

And the weekend. It was pretty nice, but busy tho. Ran errands for a good part of the day. Then in the evening, Jan picked up me and Natasha and we went up to the Kangaroo Point lookout and had wine and nibbles watching the not-very-great sunset over the city. Man. In the time we were there (perhaps an hour or more) there were four wedding parties having their photos done. It was all I could do to not shout out "It'll end in tears!" Yeah. The optimism. Bless 'em. And then we headed from there over to West End for a Vietnamese dinner - it was loooooovely! I can't remember officially ever having Vietnamese food. Lots better than Chinese in that it's a lot lighter and a lot less greasy and maybe even a little bit tastier. Mmmmm! It was so good. We got the buffet and somehow I ended up with all the leftovers! But a very good evening was had by all. It's always nice to catch up with Jan and we usually always seem to eat at interesting places. It was most excellent.

And then Sunday. Well, you know how that ended. And wasn't it a shock when the alarm went off this morning! I hit the snooze button that many times that I was very nearly late for my bus to work! But ahhhhhh, a Sunday at the Paddo is a good day. Met Natasha, Veronica, and Natasha's brother Quinn and his roommates, it was just a good day.

And sadly, that's pretty much it. I have to buckle down and really start saving for the 7 days we'll be off over Xmas. That'll be 7 days without pay. No more days spent down at the pub! Ahhhhhh, the downside to being a lowly little temp - you no work - you no get paid! But I am REALLY looking forward to the break. So far I don't have anything planned, just some very vague plans to meet up with Caroline and her husband who will be here visiting from Bristol (England). And I was meant to be going down to Sydney with them for New Years eve, but haven't heard anything since August. That's ok. Am not a big NYE person. I mean, huh, really, after New York City? Yeah. It all just pales in comparison, dahlings! Really, if I stayed in town, that's not so bad (everyone leaves town for the Xmas holidays, it's only us little tourists who stay behind), I'll just go on a few little adventure walks, starting in my hilly 'hood! Work off some of this office flab!

So there it is. A fairly quiet week ending with a bang. Whew! So hope you're all well up there! C'mon down and we'll waste a day at the pub!

BYE!
J!
Weekly: One Good Thing About Little Apartment #15:
It's really central to the City - cheap cab rides home!

Work, Socks and the Pacific Rim

Hi!

Well. That week has passed. Hooray. Weekend, went fast as usual, but, weather aside, it was nice.

So yeah. Work. Eh. This week was ok. Fine, but ok. A bit of politics and drama that I'm doing my very best to stay out of. Have narrowed down The Troubles to two people (who are seemingly never happy unless starting or perpetuating rumors and gossip). So now that I know who, I can keep out of their way. Whew! Don't want to get caught up in any petty crap! And get this - I still haven't heard yet if I've been extended past Xmas or not. Although I did get a teeny tidbit out of The Finance Lady - because am a lowly little temp from an agency, they can only extend me 3 months in one go. So that answers that. But I still don't know if they're going to extend me for the next 3 months! I know I keep worrying about it. Sorry. It's just that this time of the year in the Southern Hemisphere is a really rotten time to be job-hunting as the entire country goes on "holidays" for 6 - 8 weeks. So nothing gets done until February, really. Bummer. So, will see what happens hopefully in the next week or so as my boss is one of the lucky millions who's leaving at the beginning of December to go away until the end of January. Fantastic. How much would I love a 7 week paid vacation?!!!!

One bright spark mid-week - on Thursday I went to go hear Michael Palin talk about his new travel book "New Europe" and then afterwards he signed our books (I bought "Full Circle" where he circumnavigates the Pacific Rim - it's really neat, took him (and his tv crew) almost a year to do). So I guess I kinda met him, even if for maybe 10 - 15 seconds! He was really cool!!!! In case you don't know him, he started out in the '70's with Monthy Python and then into films ("A Fish Called Wanda" - he was Ken, the guy with the stutter trying to save the animals), and now he's been commissioned by the BBC over the last 10 or so years to travel all over the globe and make both tv series' and books out of it all. He's been all over and to some really interesting places. It was cool. Very difficult to get photos during his talk, as there was no flash (fair enough) and he kept wiggling around and I have no tripod yet (like I would bring it anyways). So I got what I could!

And Friday, well, we had a pub lunch. Mmmmmm. I had kangaroo steak! And it was goooooooood!!!!!!! I highly recommend it if you ever get the chance and, well, you're not a vegetarian. Medium-rare, no seasoning or sauce or any excitement like that. Just as nature intended. Man it was good. Very light, not at all filling or greasy. It was perfect. So a couple of glasses of wine and good conversation later, my god, I got back to work 3 hours later! Oh my god am in such trouble! I was assured all would be ok, that my boss doesn't really care - she's of the "I don't care what you do as long as the work gets done" school of management. And I don't at all stay out like that, ever. So hopefully all will be ok. The Finance Lady makes me kinda nervous, but I don't report to he, so there! Ahhh, but it was a most excellent afternoon indeed!

And then Saturday, a gal I work with, Jade, invited me to go to a big pub called The Story Bridge Hotel with her and some of her friends and family. Well, I got there and holy cow, it was her hen's night (bachelorette) party! But nonono, it wasn't like that at all, it was just a bunch of gals getting together for a drink. So it wasn't embarrassing or loud and obnoxious. But geez, if I'd known it was her pre-wedding drinks, well, that's for good friends not work monkeys?! Anyways, it was a good night. Neat pub. Massive. Huge sprawling place. The awful trend here seems to be to take a "dark, dingy and previously a biker hangout" pub and strip it of all it's wood, replace it all with modern metal and tricky lighting and call it refurbished. It's a crying shame in my book because refurbish seems to mean strip it of all it's character. But, that's what they seem to like.

And today. Well, the usual chores, a nap, some tv and fighting to install my new 500gig external hard drive. It's been formatting itself for about an hour now. I couldn't get it to work at first so am trying this formatting trick to see if it'll happily back up everything on my little laptop. What a pain. I thought you could just plug it in, click a coupla buttons and that would be that. Oooooh no. There's work involved! So yeah. That's been today's main task. At least I have clean floors and socks!

So there it is. I hope everyone's well up there! Send an email, let me know you're out there alive and well!

BYE!
J!
Weekly: One Good Thing About Little Apartment #14:
It's located in an extremely hilly 'hood - good for walking off the office blues!

Blue Bottles in Hotels with Views

Hi!

Well. Here we are again. This time, the week just crept past painfully slow. And the good thing was everyone else noticed it, so it wasn't just me wondering 'why is it still 2pm on Tuesday?'. But it was finally put out of it's misery Friday afternoon. Hooray! But here we are again at Sunday afternoon. Hot and humid today, well, all weekend it's been this gross. Today there're great big scary clouds looking intimidating but not doing anything more than blocking a good breeze, kinda like bouncers in front of the Windy Sky Nightclub. Ahhhh, Sunday in Queensland - and it's not summer yet! Eeek!

So the week. Yep. Slow, as reported above. But finally ended on a fairly positive note - I broke down and asked my boss if she thought they'd have any use for me beyond Xmas. She was pretty surprised to realize/remember that that was a small fact they'd forgotten to address. Said she run it past the bigger boss (Paul, he's cool. I told him I can weld and he thought that was the best thing he'd heard all week. So something tells me he wouldn't mind my hanging around the place. Yeah) and she has to run it under the nose of Financial Lady in Charge, just to make sure they have the funds to keep me in the lifestyle I've become so fondly accustomed to. It should all be fine, but how long I can stay will depend on funding. Geez, I should have a telethon. Maybe I'll call Jerry Lewis...... Otherwise, work is good. Fairly "busy", and that's fine with me. As long as those manuals need updating, I'm the gal!

And the weekend. Saturday dawned promising, as we - Maree, Zoey and I had been planning for weeks to go down to Byron Bay and surrounds (about 3 hours south of Brisbane, just over the New South Wales border). It was a lovely day overall. Byron Bay is very pretty and much smaller than I expected. Little hamlet/beachsidey kinda town. Sort of reminded me of Pacific Beach only, well, not. We parked next to this big hotel (a.k.a pub/bar) that Maree told me used to be Paul Hogan's pride and joy. It was pretty nice, even if it's not in his possession anymore. Big, right near the beach, airy, fairly crowded for a Saturday morning. Nice. Nice toilets too. And then we were off to see the sights, of which there really aren't many, but we had a pretty good wander around the main drag. In and out of little shops then, up to the Cape Byron Lighthouse (built in 1901) and the most Easternly Point of mainland Australia. That has to have been the highlight of the day. Very pretty spot, easy to get to, easy to wander around and it had a nifty little section of the old Keeper's cottages converted into info rooms and a little shop. The museum itself is in the actual lighthouse but it was closed. And it was wiiiiindy! We managed to hang around long enough to get a good look around and to come back into town thoroughly windblown. But I like to think I got a few nice shots of the place. I'd love to go again, spend the weekend, and check out the view at different times of the day. Hmmmmm.

Anyways, Byron Bay was lovely. Looks like a pretty cool spot, even if everyone averages 20 years old. Will have to spend a proper weekend down there sometime, maybe after the muggy furnace of summer. And then we went off in search of Nimbin - a quirky hippie community from waaaay back. It's apparently as close to San Francisco's Haight Ashbury as Australia's gonna get. But alas, we couldn't find the road to get there, as directional signs were non-existent. Maybe it's one of those places that if you have to ask how to get there, then you have no business being there, maaaan. So instead we headed to a little place called Lennox Head, where we had lunch and a wander along the beach, where, to my mortification we stumbled across numerous dead and deflated Bluebottles (a.k.a. Portuguese Man-of-War) - little bundles of pretty blue, gelatinous lethality. One sting and all you have time for is running to the beach and collapsing. If it's not too bad, mouth-to-mouth and some vinegar on the welt oughta be enough to get you to the hospital. And they're little. You'd never see it coming. And just one or two long stingers is all they need. Scary little things. Good thing we didn't go swimming! And that was about all we had time for. We had to get back to town to drop Zoey back with her family. Shame, but that was that. Maree whispered she and her husband would take me back down there again where we'll spend the weekend and check the area out properly. Cool.

And here's Sunday. I've had the energy to do the laundry and not much else. Tooooo hot and muggy. Monster Boy upstairs installed a window a/c unit (at the bright hour of 6am a few Sunday mornings back) and I'm wondering if I should do the same, maybe at a more humane hour tho. Hmmmm. Otherwise, yeah. I guess the weekend kinda collapsed like a souffle because we thought we'd be spending the entire weekend checking out the northeast corner of New South Wales, but was suddenly cut waaay short. So it was a bit of a.... Ehhhh. But, nevermind. There will be other weekends to go exploring. And now that I'm learning the freeways slowly but surely, it won't be too tough to rent a car and vamoose for a short spell. Will do!

So I hope you're all well up there! I'd say c'mon down for a visit, but don't. It's too hot and humid right now with seas full of Bluebottles!

BYE!
J!
Weekly: One Good Thing About Little Apartment #13:
It's extremely close to the grocery store - making shopping quick and easy!