I guess I was avoiding this place. There was so much uncertainty and my life needed me more than I allowed myself to need to write about it all. There is still so much uncertainty, but there is clarity amidst that.

We moved for an opportunity for Tom, but thus far relocating has worked out really only for me. Tom's job hasn't been what he expected. Tom's job is no longer Tom's job. I don't know how else to say that. It's really upsetting to see him doubt himself when there are clearly so many things about that whole situation that are nothing to do with his abilities or his value as a person. He'll find something new, something better matched to his incredible mind and his passion for Environmental Science. But to say that this has been tough is an understatement. I could not have predicted how much it would challenge us. And I definitely would never have predicted how relieving it could be for Tom to lose that position. After so much stress and pain and worry, it was like a heavy weight had been lifted.

I, on the other hand, applied for an awesome position in Youth Services and am proud to say that I've been working there for three weeks and I absolutely love it. I'm working with some amazing people and on some exciting projects. I'm planning a couple of events and it's both exciting and terrifying to be solely responsible for their success; I've only worked as part of a team on things like this (and only in my spare time).

It's challenging having such different experiences of this move. We both love Darwin, but Tom has been uninspired and overwhelmed while I've been quite the opposite. He's been working out of the city and I'm right in the heart of that tiny hub of activity. I've made a few friend through working at a coffee shop when we first arrived, he's only been able to meet people through the workplace that hasn't been a great place to him. It's like we're living in two entirely different places.
 

That said, we're managing to explore this beautiful city more and more now that life has calmed down and it's been so nice to find a Darwin that belongs to both of us. Yesterday we visited the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and then enjoyed the sunshine at the Ski Club for a beer. It was the perfect date to reconnect. I love our love and I love Tom's resilience.

I'll write soon. How are you all?

One Week in Darwin

I’ve fallen in love with this tiny, humid, world-of-it’s-own city. Darwin is a mixture of Australia and South-East Asia and something else all of it’s own. During those nine days between Tom getting the job and us hitting the road, I was given a lot of crappy advice based on a lot of crappy Darwin stereotypes. From what I’ve experienced thus far, people ‘down south’ give Darwin and it’s locals an entirely unfair rap.

Darwin is the welcoming, open-minded and multi-cultural city that Australia likes to pretend is it’s national culture. I didn’t know what to expect, but I don’t think I was expecting this. I was concerned that I wouldn’t handle the heat, that this city would be too small and confining, that the culture here would be as bogan as I was being told by friends and strangers alike. I’ve certainly learned that you have to experience something for yourself and take what you are told with a grain of salt, because nothing I was told to expect was the city that I found here. Instead I found delightful people, friendly strangers and an incredible mix of cultures.

Going to the Rapid Creek Markets on Sunday was like walking right into Thailand or Malaysia (which are admittedly the only countries in Asia I’ve actually had the pleasure to visit thus far). The markets were overflowing with trestle tables full of delicious, locally-grown produce, home-made curry pastes in a mishmash of margarine boxes and Vegemite jars, eskies boasting mangoes frozen from back when trees all over Darwin were heavy with the weight of delicious fruit. I will take photos when we return this weekend.

Darwin is unlike any other Australian city and not merely because the weather is so unlike that which is typical of this country. Darwin is laid back; I’m certain that if the Rapid Creek Markets were to set up in Adelaide they’d be so overrun by pointless regulation that they’d lose the warmth and charm that emanated so clearly to Tom and I last weekend.

All of that said, Darwin is expensive. Our original rental budget, double what we were spending in Adelaide, now seems ludicrously naive and we’re having to increase our budget and readjust our ideas of what is reasonable.

Tom has now been at work for a week and he loves his new job and company. I had an interview and hope you’re all keeping your fingers crossed for me, but I’ll look for a cafe job for the interim (whether I get this job or something else) because I have far too much time on my hands and no studio to work in. I can’t spend all of my time waiting for real estate agents to get back to me - I need to be doing something.

Hopefully next time we speak it will be from our new home and I can get back to regular posting! x

A new city to explore

Long time no speak - and so many adventures to share with you! They may have to wait, though, because we're still homeless and I'm using hotspot from my phone to access the internet and I really need to be using it to hunt down some sort of home situation. Rent up here in Darwin is so outrageously expensive that we've had to readjust our expectations and ideas of what is 'reasonable'. We're lucky that Tom's uncle and aunty moved up here a little over a year ago and are graciously opening their home to us while we settle since the move was so quick we really couldn't organise anything from Adelaide.

Tom starts his new job on Monday and is full of nervous energy and I'm acclimatising to the humidity in this tropical climate whilst applying for work and preparing for my first (hopefully last, since this is the perfect job) interview on Wednesday. Life is pretty crazy, but I'm loving exploring a new city. Darwin is so unlike any other Australian city, mostly due to the tropical climate I suspect, and I feel kind of like I'm on a permanent holiday in Thailand with the monsoon rains and the crazy Sunday morning markets. I love it here. I was worried before we left, but this is definitely where we need to be at this point in our lives and I'm so excited to find a place and start feeling like locals.

I'll share our road trip another time, but here's a taste to tide you over:

1 back bumper bar missing somewhere along the Stuart Highway
2 shredded tyres
3 swimming holes
8 sunrises
3,766 kilometres travelled (2,340 miles)
4 climates (Mediterranean, Arid, Sub-Tropical, Tropical)

Mind, matter & Melbourne

I didn't want to leave the last post lingering there like that. It has no reflection on how I feel most of the time. Right now I'm floating on clouds. When I wrote that, I was waiting for medication to kick in after five days of missing them and dealing with the associated withdrawals. I had been crying at the drop of a hat, spent a day in bed, yelled at Tom for being perfectly lovely on more than one occasion and entirely lost perspective. I knew that I needed my medication, but I continued to skip it because a couple of days without and I'd entirely forgotten the last time I felt joyful. I'm my own worst enemy in withdrawal. I actually didn't hit publish on that post until I was back to feeling myself, but something made me feel like I should actually put it out there rather than delete yet another ill-advised draft. My anxiety has become such a strong influence in my life that it feels just plain silly to hide it in shame. It is what it is. Most days I feel in control, but every now and then it rears it's ugly head and leaves me feeling impotent. I don't need to pretend otherwise; I'm proud of how far I've come. It was only a couple of years ago that I could barely leave the house because the fear was just so overwhelming.

As always in the last million months, my reasoning behind the lateness of this follow-up is that we're still sharing my computer since that incident wherein I stupidly threw a bottle of vodka into Tom's bag not realising that his computer was inside just waiting to be smashed. In this past week, Tom has been writing the application and then preparing for the interview that he had this morning. I don't want to jinx anything, but it somehow feels like this is the job. We'll find out really soon, so fingers crossed.

I spent two blissful days wandering and writing and at my own pace. In the mornings, I walked the dog in the Botanic Gardens. We sat at the cafe and watched the gondolas and Mr Biggles attracted the attention of many adoring strangers. I wrote, for the first time in far too long, simply for the sake of putting words to paper. I wandered up Swan Street and ate a delicious fish taco at Fonda. I spent a long while immersing myself in the beautiful art at the NGV. I sat a table in Degraves sipping delicious coffee, listening to a great busker and reading The Happiness Project. I caught up with an old boyfriend and met his lovely new lady. Returning to Adelaide, I felt so refreshed and inspired, so lucky for the flexibility in my life that allows brief escapes like this.

foiled plans & kombucha

If everything had gone according to plan, today's post would recount what I am sure would have been a glorious long-weekend escape to the beach with friends. But life does not always go to plan. Sometimes that stomach flu that has apparently been "going around" hits you square between the eyes and wakes you in the dead of night screaming "I AM HERE! FUCK YOU AND ALL OF YOUR AWESOME PLANS, YOU WON A TRIP TO VOMIT TOWN!"

Tom had it three days earlier, and I was so certain that I'd made a lucky escape (admittedly a fantasy when living in the small quarters of a one-bedroom flat) that was excitedly picking out books to read on the beach and buying Tanqueray and Rekorderlig to drink over interesting (and later, ridiculous) conversation during those balmy nights out on the deck.

Alas, it was not to be. (I wish I could honestly say I use the word alas in my day-to-day vocabulary, but most of the time I just waste the opportunity by using a swear word in it's place.) We spent Australia Day on the couch watching The Matrix Trilogy, which I somehow managed not to see in the fifteen years since it's release, which is unfortunate because of all the Thomas Anderson references I could have made throughout the last two years. Other than those misses opportunities to tease my boyfriend, though, I don't feel like I missed out on a great deal. The first was good, but the other two? Whole sequences of CGI people with jelly-limbs hitting each other? Twenty minutes on a single chase scene that wasn't remotely necessary to the development of the plot? Machines and computer programmes with an inexplicable will to live? The first was enough; ignorance was bliss and I wish I could un-know the whole Architect/Oracle/One storyline and the stupid love story between Neo and Trinity. /accidental rant

 

In other exciting news, I finished my first batch of kombucha and I'm dorkishly proud of myself. I'm please that I have a boyfriend with a background in biology, because I needed him to assure me that none of the new growth around my SCOBY was bad, regardless of how ugly it appears. Even though I knew what kind of things to expect in a normal batch of kombucha, I was still anxious that I had somehow broken it and infected my SCOBY with horrors unknown. It reminds me a little of when I first started nannying the twin one-year-olds when I was eighteen. When they tripped and fell I would run and scoop them up, afraid I was doing a terrible job. It only took a week or so for me to become more relaxed and just let them pick themselves up and go along their merry way. Things are usually not as dire or serious as they might initially seem. I'm hoping that kombucha will become second nature to me and I won't be anxiously checking the progress of each batch multiple times a day.

I'll be honest, this first batch hedged a little close to the over-brewed, slightly vinegar stage. In an Adelaide summer like this I think it could use a day or two fewer to be of the beautiful tart standard of Mojo, especially with the mini heat wave we have to look forward to this week. I hope you're all well and that any of you Aussies had a more exciting/less sick Australia Day than I, but right now I really ought to get ready for work - I've made a terrible habit of being exactly two minutes late to work every day, but I think today shall be the day I break that streak and catch the earlier train.

life, lately

pictured
1. The sky one night of the heatwave. Oh, yes, the heatwave. For those of you lucky enough to have been anywhere else last week, we had the most diabolical (record-breaking) heatwave. On Thursday the temperature reached 47C and we were officially the hottest city on the planet. We had to close the shop for the week and I spent most of my time hiding form the heat and watching Homeland.
2. Celebrity head, because Sherlock and Watson were adorable when they played it in The Sign of Three. We spent Tuesday of the heatwave swimming, drinking gin and playing silly games with friends.
3. I finally bought a Kombucha SCOBY and my first batch should be ready in about five days!
4. Cashew Cheese from The Whole Pantry app.
5. The Life-Changing Loaf of Bread from My New Roots.

not pictured
1. Impromptu dinner date at Jack Ruby. The scallop cheviche is ah-maz-ing!
2. our first night(s) apart since moving in together. Tom went to Kangaroo Island with work (just for fun- entirely funded by tips!)
3. the cool change came in the form of a huge storm; Tom's parents dog was alone and terrified and somehow managed to make her way to our house. It's about a half hour walk, but we can't remember a time that she has actually been here before then. Clever girl.
4. a lovely gin-soaked evening with Josh.
5. setting up my studio in the detached bunglalow in the backyard. Excited to start using my new (to me) workbench.

I didn't mean to take so long to post again, but the heat was so all-consuming and those day so uneventful (I didn't think you wanted to hear my thoughts on Homeland or how our low temperatures were a normal week's highs) that time just ... passed. How have you all been?

Pub nights in Adelaide. (1 degree of separation)

Usually I really love Adelaide, you know? I like how it's relatively small and quiet for a capital city. And though we have plans to live in other, bigger, and busier places in time, we're pretty happy right where we are right now.

 But then you have those nights where you go to the pub and find that everyone knows everyone and you run into not one, but two of your exes (one of which we will not discuss because I like to pretend that it never happened) and start to wonder if perhaps it's time to move on from this tiny town to avoid these kinds of awkward interactions.

One of Tom's closest friends from all the way back in high school is now in the same Fringe show as the guy I was seeing for a couple of months three years ago. A guy I haven't spent more that thirty seconds with since that time he drunkenly apologised for being a dick while we were dating and then proceeded to try and coax me to go home with him. It couldn't have been all that long before Tom & I got together.

When asked how we knew each other, the Ex vaguely told someone "... we'll go with Uni. Yeah, Uni ..." as if we had some kind of secret. We met at the pub and we hung out for a couple of months and then we kind of fell apart and that was that. And neither of us were studying at the time. I have no idea what was going on there, but the remainder of the night was tinged by that initial awkward and unnecessary lie.

The combination of $2 beers specials and the strange I-have-seen-you-naked-but-I-don't-actually-know-you-very-well-anymore conversations left me feeling distinctly disgusting at work the next morning. I'm reasonably sure I was still drunk when I got to work, but thankfully no one seemed all that interested in coffee and I managed to spend my shift mainly eating bacon (essential) and rehydrating. It was possibly not the best start to a year of taking care of myself. I remember now why I always aim to get the last train home on weeknights, and it's not because of the cab fare.

our perfect little road trip

Our little trip to Melbourne and back was a very last minute decision, but so timely. We had planned a longer road trip for this time, but Tom's new retail job put a spanner in those works and it looked like that plan was off entirely. It was so exciting when we realised that we could fit in an abbreviated version of that break. 

This trip proved to be a break that we needed more than we even knew. The distance we travelled distanced us also from the burdens and stresses of the day-to-day and brought us some perspective that we could bring back home. We were able to live fully and completely in the moment and it was a glorious reminder of the importance of time spent together, of time out, of time to just be. 

We sang to bad nineties songs and classic hip hop and bickered over lyrics (I still maintain that the words to TLC's Unpretty sound more like "but at the end of the day I have no self esteem 'cos I'm so stupid"). We stopped to look at silly things on the side of the road and I took a thousand unnecessary photos of Tom's hands as he drove. 

 

We managed to stop in a lot of different little towns along the way. On Christmas day we had a little picnic lunch in Tailem Bend and then continued through to Naracoorte where we spent the night in Tom's sister's house. We drank beers outside and watched the sun set and dreamed together about the house we will one day have and the black subway tiles I am desperate to install in the imaginary kitchen. 

We managed to stop in a lot of different little towns along the way. On Christmas day we had a little picnic lunch in Tailem Bend and then continued through to Naracoorte where we spent the night in Tom's sister's house. We drank beers outside and watched the sun set and dreamed together about the house we will one day have and the black subway tiles I am desperate to install in the imaginary kitchen. 

 

The sun was setting as we left for the last leg to Melbourne. It was something of a miracle that we made it to South Yarra, what with my poor navigational instructions, Tom's entire lack of an internal sense of direction and the fact that the gps and both of our phones were flat as we made it into the city.

We walked through Gosch's Paddock (which is not a paddock, so you shouldn't mislead me to believe there might be sheep grazing outside Olympic Stadium, Melbourne!) to Swan Street and had a beer at the Corner Hotel. 

I rose early the next morning, made myself a coffee and brought it along for a long meandering stroll through the Botanic Gardens. A lot of people were running around the Tan, but I was quite happy to take my time, sip my coffee, and stop to read about interesting plants I came across. Under those beautiful tall trees I felt so small and at the same time so connected with the world around me. I took a lot longer than I had anticipated; it was blissfully quiet and peaceful and I took some time to reflect on the year I'd had and the one to come as I explored. 

Upon my return, Tom and I walked to Swan again to have a coffee (dad has a great machine but we like to sit and watch people sometimes) and pick up a couple of ingredients for breakfast. Tom made the most delectable scrambled eggs with baby spinach, bacon, and slow-cooked tomato. I felt torn momentarily between a desire to fit as much as possible into our only full day in the city and a wish to maintain the relaxed feel of the previous two days of the trip. We opted to take our time and just bask in the lack of responsibility and the change of scenery. It was the best thing we could have done.

We walked to Chapel Street, cursed the after-Christmas sales for filling the street with teenage girls with a thousand colourful shopping bags hanging off their arms and settled into a nice pub for lunch and wine. We met a couple of nice guys who told us brilliant stories about partying in London and Berlin in the eighties and how the clubbing scene changed in the aftermath of the Wall coming down. After a few beers we were lazy and just took the tram to meet Tom's old school friend, Cushing, at Richmond Station. They saw De La Soul that night in St Kilda and I wandered back into the Gardens to see Gravity at the Moonlight Cinema. 

On our way home I insisted on spending some time in nature, so we went through Creswick again and found a forest to explore. An inexplicable wave of something rather like sadness overcame me in this beautiful place, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. What was that feeling? It was terrible and it was blissful all at once and I felt as though I might be rooted to that spot, lost in that moment, for all the remaining days of my life. And then, in a flash, it was gone and I was with my love and we were ready, so ready, for whatever the coming year might throw at us. This trip had cleansed us and readied us and we are so excited and determined and the rest of our trip home is punctuated with discussions and plans for the future, for this year and the many years to come.