First cold night

In a few months time I might be regretting ever saying this, but Saturday night I was a bit excited that it had finally cooled down enough to wear both boots and a jacket out to dinner.

I'm officially in love with this Boden dress, after having some initial doubts when I first received it. I love its breeziness. And the light material worked well with the leather jacket and boots.



The only thing I had to think twice about was tights/boots combination. It's hard to tell from the picture as it's so dark, but I'm wearing dark blue tights, which I think looked good continuing on from the blue pattern in the dress. However when I tried adding grey boots into the mix, the blue and grey together just didn't look right to my eye. I don't know if my instincts were right, or if I'd have gotten used to it over the course of the evening. Maybe I'll have to try it again some other time.



Doesn't my hair look all over the place? I think 6 months is officially too long to be without a haircut, so I'll have to remedy that soon.

And here's a bonus outfit from a few weeks ago featuring another light and breezy clothing item: a tunic top from H&M in Beijing. It kind of hurts my eyes looking at the pattern in this picture. Hope it doesn't have the same effect on others when I'm actually wearing it!

Slowly Slowly

That's how I feel this month has gone. And yet, at the same time it's December 17 and what exactly have I been doing or achieving? Not much. For the last few weeks I've felt like I've simply been treading water. Where will we live? What are we doing for Christmas? How about New Years? Are we still going away?

Who knows!!! Certainly not me.

But now at least one those questions has been answered.

Just to backtrack, we applied for the townhouse I mentioned previously last Monday. Three days later I got a call from the agent saying he couldn't find A's application form. I assured him we handed in both forms after sitting there and filling them out at the same time. He said he'd look around his desk. 20 minutes later he called me back and said he couldn't find it.

I asked if he could email a replacement form that we could fill in and fax back to him. He took down my email address. Over an hour later, getting close to COB, I still hadn't received his email. So I called him up, only to be told he had found A's form attached to someone else's application. Thanks for letting me know buddy!!

Time marches on. By Friday we still hadn't heard anything and I was starting to get edgy. I called him up and he said the owner still hadn't decided which applicant to accept. Fair enough. He offered to call me back before the end of the day and let me know what the status was.

Of course I didn't hear from him until Saturday afternoon. This time news was not good. There was nothing wrong with our application, but they had accepted someone else.

I was upset! Neither A or I have ever been rejected from a rental application before. I guess the market is not what it was 4 years ago though! Still life goes on.

It really put us in a pickle though, because we were so happy with this place we had stopped looking at other options. This put us back by at least a week. Not optimal with Christmas and NYE looming ever closer.

Monday I was in a bit of a funk going through the available listings on domain. Tuesday I headed down to the gong again to view a house in the same area. $60 more per week, lovely outside, not so great inside, and a much longer walk to the station for A.

After viewing this house I went to visit my brother who lives nearby. I was sitting on his sofa, brandishing my geeky "real estate spreadsheet" and bitchy about the mess we were in when I got a call from A. We had got the place!! The people they selected had fallen through and were were 2nd on the list. YAYAYAYAYAY!!!

It's not set in stone yet; we have to go down tomorrow to leave a deposit and sign the paperwork. But still, we are in a much better position than we were 3 days ago.


So I still don't know how or when we are moving, what we are doing for Christmas or NYE, or whether we will get to go away. Oh and I've only bought one Christmas present thus far. Wanna swap lives for the next few weeks?

No more words

One minute I was rushing around gulping the last mouthfuls of coffee, washing breakfast dishes, packing my bag and brushing my teeth in my haste to leave the house and be slightly less late than I’d otherwise be sans rushing.

Then I noticed my mobile. Call from parents house. My Mum often calls at inopportune times, and in my early morning stress-out, I have no time to answer. I’ll call her back later today.

Next time I glance at the phone I notice 3 calls from my Mum’s work number.

Weird. Why am I getting called from both places? As by then I’m literally about to walk out the door, I wait until I’m downstairs to listen to the first message (no mobile reception in the lift or lobby).

As soon as I hear my dad’s voice I know there’s something wrong; messages from him on my mobile are rarer than days when I’m on time in the mornings. I call him back with trepidation, my mind racing. He called me, so he’s ok. My Mum’s at work, so she must be ok. I got emails last night from both of my brothers, so unless something dramatic happened overnight, they’re ok.

In hindsight I should have been worried about my Babushka, that she’d fallen again or something. But the words stumbled out of my Dad’s mouth so quickly I didn’t have time to go through any other options.

My cousin. He’s dead. He drowned at the beach yesterday. He was away on holidays up on the north coast.

Suddenly I think back to yesterday afternoon. Sitting home procrastinating and reading the smh.

I read a story about my own cousin’s death without realising it.

My Dad tells me what little more he knows, but it isn’t much. We talk a bit, both crying, then say goodbye and I love you. I then call my Mum and do much the same. By this stage I’m halfway to the GPs office that I’m currently sitting in with.

Really, in situations like these, what can you say? Nothing you say or do is going to bring anyone back, provide solace or make anyone feel good. Sometimes there are no reasons, and questioning why and going through alternative scenarios only leads to torture and mind fuck. What if he had gone to a different beach, at a different time? What happened in those last minutes and what could and couldn’t have been prevented?

Sometimes, a lot of the time, there simply are no answers. No clue. Nothing fixable. That’s hard to deal with.

I know I was numb for most of the day. A few patients I saw I wanted to scream at – those complaining about a sore knee or other ailments. I wanted to scream “You’re alive! Don’t take it for granted because it can be taken away in minutes, when you least expect it! Don’t sit there and ask me for sympathy about Centrelink cutting your pension off and asking you to attempt to look for work. Looking for work is not going to kill you!” And so on.

But I didn’t scream. I made it home. And then I looked at his facebook profile. And then I google’d the story again.

And then I broke down.

Catching up

It's been a busy time since I checked in here last. I don't have the energy to write a long, detailed post describing it all, but here are the highlights of the last week or so of my life, in roughly chronological order.

1. Eating dumplings, drinking much wine and singing lots of Guns 'n Roses at Karaoke.
   
   
2. Waking up still drunk the next morning and having to pack my bags for a morning flight to Cairns.
3. Making it to Cairns in one piece and enjoying a cruisy day wandering the streets, sussing out what had changed in the 5 years since I'd been there.
   
4. Spending 3 days on a boat staring at a view like this non-stop. Note the lack of blue sky.
   
5. Doing 10 dives in 3 days, including 2 night dives. Never done a night dive before and was expecting it to be very scary - it wasn't! Best dive was the last morning - there were 9 sharks right underneath our boat as we descended. Then we saw 7 turtles in the one dive!
   
6. Making it back on dry land and discovering that blue sky still exists.
   
7. Getting home and unpacking. Such fun - not!!!
8. Finding out I passed 3rd year and am now officially in 4th year - woohoo!
9. Realising this now officially means I have 9 weeks before I head to Vietnam for 3 months. Buying a Lonely Planet (still not opened it though)
   
10. Picking out a new pair of glasses. They'll be ready to collect soon.
11. Visiting my Babushka and getting to eat prawn dumplings at the same time. Yum.
    
12. Starting my first 4th year rotation - Obstetrics and Gynaecology. It's going to be an interesting 8 weeks, and I am loving being able to walk to hospital in the mornings.

So I think that pretty much brings us up to date. I need a rest from all this excitement!!

Yesterday

Yesterday I went down to the Gong to celebrate my Dad's birthday. My brothers and I joined my parents and their bushwalking group on a short walk along the escarpment cliff tops at Mt Ousley.

We sat and ate a picnic lunch on the side of the cliffs at Broker's Nose, overlooking the northern suburbs of Wollongong. You'll have to trust me when I say it was spectacular, because despite being organised enough to take my camera, I was not organised enough to ensure it contained a memory card. Boohoo!

After lunch we went back to my parents house and ate chocolate muffins and freshly baked apple crumble. Again, you'll have to believe me when I say my Mum makes the best crumble ever. That's not something you can capture in blog format.

In the fading daylight I wandered around my parents backyard. We looked at a nest that a bowerbird has recently been constructing near their front door. The bowerbird was hiding behind the fence dividing the nest from the next-door neighbours house, so I only caught tantalising glimpses of its midnight blue feathers. I love the way they collect and hoard blue trinkets - this one had milk lids and clothes pegs aplenty.

Continuing through the garden, I scored aplenty as well. First, a bunch of beautiful purple azaleas.



My parents are gardening freaks and literally have well over 20 types of azaleas growing (not to mention all their camellias). I had my choice from dark purple to pale pink to weird stripey kinds.

I also scored a bunch of brilliant blue lavender from their front yard.



I don't think it's as fragrant as the regular lavender (although my Mum disagrees), so I actually nabbed a bit of the regular stuff too. I'm attempting to propagate it in one of the pots on my verandah. Fingers crossed.

I would have loved to take some scented fresias home as well, but was a week too late as most of them had withered in the grass.

My Dad's veggie patch was also kind to me. He picked a big juicy bunch of rhubarb for me.



Hopefully I'll be making some crumble of my own later this week!