Commonwealth Games
It's been a while, hasn't it? We've been settling in nicely though, thankyou. Ikea has seen a lot of our money recently. After finding a unit (that's flat to those in the UK) we set about making it habitable. Apparantly, that involved (to date) five trips to Ikea. To be fair, one of them was to return and swap a faulty chair, and the last one was to buy a sofa that was out of stock on the previous trip, so really it's only three trips! However, our unit is now furnished with a bed, a workstation, two stools so we can sit at the breakfast bar and eat, a TV so paj can watch the GP and I can watch the Games, and a sofa so we can sit in comfort. Freecycle has come good with various bits of cooking equipment, a chair for the balcony, and an old barbeque. Hoorah! You may now come and visit, if you're prepared to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor and eat japanese style.
My job is going absolutely fantastically. I'm loving every minute of it, spending more time in the office than I'd have thought, and waking up looking forward to getting back to it. It's a weight off my shoulders that someone believes that I can do things I thought I could do but had lost confidence in myself over. I've been there two weeks, and I've just been moved off managing a small job to be assistant project manager (which sounds to me like I get to do all the work with none of the glory ;-)) on a job worth half a million dollars in fees. Hoorah! It's just a shame I had to go round the world to get it.
Actually, no it's not. Melbourne's lovely, and buzzing at the moment. The games are really really big here - people are taking days off work to watch (at the last count) rugby, cycling, netball, badminton and swimming. You can't turn around at work without discussions on what went on yesterday. Even the internet rules are being bent to get blow by blow commentary. I went down to watch the marathons this morning. It was strange - I only went because it went past the end of our road, yet with every person that went past, and every cheer that went up, I felt disproportionately proud of my part in it. Right to the very last man that went through.
So there you go. We've got a lovely flat, and in a couple of months we'll have our finances back together to be able to enjoy the benefits of our location. All we've got to do in the interim is sort out credit cards so we can buy things off the internet (Eftpos isn't like Switch or Visa Delta - it only works in ATMs and shops, so we can't buy flights, or GP tickets, or anything off the web at all at the moment), and stop swearing at our bank and just get used to it!
