WEEK THIRTY-EIGHT

Despite my stupidly late (or early?!) night, I woke up at about the same time as usual – talk about a creature of habit. As I had one more day on my own I decided to waste the morning by lying in bed and watching a couple of episode of the Apprentice, drinking too much tea, and eating a majority of a packet of biscuits! A healthy start to the day! At least I had broken the routine of pancakes! I really was just ready for a lazy day, and that was exactly what I did. Once I got up and had a shower I started watching the rest of season four of the Big Bang Theory – 24 episodes in 3 days is a pretty impressive record! I felt a bit mean after a while, and although I knew I had to walk the dogs I really wasn’t in the mood – so I took them down to the creek, so they could do lots of running, and I could do minimal walking! Everyone happy! When I got down there though I was slightly gutted I had arsed about so much, as I had just missed a giant container ship going down the river. I’m not normally one for boats, but these ones are just so massive, I love watching them go past. When I got half way round the track I sat down for a little break – lethargy had set in well and truly! During this time the dogs decided to bolt after a rabbit – straight into the fenced off ‘private keep out’ area. Always good. They came back remarkably quickly though – possibly having already caught the rabbit and eaten it! Neither of them had any signs of a cheeky treat, so they got away with it if they did. Just as I turned back onto the pavement, the dogs were pretty much right next to me, and then they were gone. And this time they were properly gone. I spent the next 20 minutes screaming their names in a more and more desperate manner, terrified I had lost them both on my final day of being responsible for the, Eventually I saw two little tails bobbing through the grass, and after a bit more screaming, they came back. And went straight onto their leads. Little buggers. As with the first part of my day, I did very little for the second half of it either, and just took up residence in front of the TV. I also had my final night in a bed for a while – the next bed I’m in will be in a hostel, which barely counts, and after that it’ll be in Edinburgh! Madness.

The next day I thought I woke up quite early, but not early enough, and Toni was already curled up asleep on the sofa. Bless. As she was sound asleep, I also went back to bed for another couple of hours, and then when I woke up again, it seemed like a much more reasonable time to be up at! So, my first job was to make tea for the jetlagged lady – and then we spent the next couple of hours just having a chat and finding out all about her trip. It actually made me feel quite homesick – thank god I have something fun to look forward to! Finally we decided to venture to Yarraville to pick up supplies, and take the dogs out for a bit. As usual, I didn’t wear a real jumper, but this was the first time I actually bloody regretted it – all of a sudden it had gotten very chilly! Both of us just lazed about for the rest of the day – Toni’s tiredness was infectious! Eventually, I made dinner, and as it was easy, made more pumpkin and feta quiche – my excuse being that Toni hadn’t tried it yet, and I had well and truly perfected the recipe now! Ha ha! Funnily enough Toni went to bed pretty early that night – don’t blame her – and I spent the evening having a chat with mum, drinking far too much tea, and watching my new favourite TV programme – The Amazing Race. Sadly, before Toni went to bed I forgot to grab my wheat-bag, and I really had become far too accustomed to it – I went to sleep with cold fingers and toes! I am slightly scared about how I am going to react when I get home!

When I woke up on Wednesday I had no idea what time it was – but as everyone had already gone to work I knew it wasn’t early. Turns out it was 11am. Ooops. So, with no one to judge, I slipped back into the pancakes routine – at least I did the dishes too, so it wasn’t all completely self-indulgent! I then sat down to watch an Australian documentary, which had been all over the news, and all over Facebook, about how terrible live export of cows is. As horrible as some of it was, it was all kind of expected – people seemed to have thought it was the worst thing in the whole world, when, to be honest, it’s some cows being treated badly before they are killed to be made into burgers – we all know my stand on this issue, so I wont preach, but, what the hell did you think happened? The weather had well and truly turned, and I was cold to the core – the only remedy was to have a burning hot shower. And my god it worked, slightly too well, I had to have a little lie down afterwards because I thought I was going to faint! At least I was warm! When I took the dogs into Yarraville to get some provisions, I had a big case of déjà vu – as always they were off their leads, and someone, this time in a car, told me to put them on a leash. There was once difference between the grumpy man from the other day, and this time – the person asking me to do it had a council sticker on the side of their car. The last thing I wanted was them to be taken to the pound, so much to their disgust, they were tied together, and to me. In the afternoon I just busied myself with my computer, and finally, all of my movies and TV shows have converted into iTunes. Our flatmate was home quite early from work, so we just wasted time together – both with stuff we really should be doing, but instead, I stole 140Gb of music from him! It was his entire music collection, and some of it is terrible, but at least it gave me another way to [rocrastinate, and I spent the evening sorting all that out – and ended up taking about 2Gb! Haha! Overkill much? However this meant I had to delete other stuff, so it all fits on my phone. It was tricky to cull more, but I don’t think I really need any more than 10 days of music! In the evening Toni took to the kitchen, and created a yummy tofu dinner – it was so nice to have someone else ideas – if left to myself I can almost guarantee I would have had quiche again! I get stuck in a rut far too easily with food! Even when I offered to help she declined – it was a nice change just being called for dinner when it was ready – after a month of dealing with it myself! Before Toni went to bed that night, I remembered to get my wheat-bag, and when I fell asleep I was super toasty!

The next day I woke up earlier than usual at 10am – it’s getting better! I lay in bed for a while just dozing, and was properly woken up by someone thumping on the front door – bloody terrifying – it was just the bloody posty wanting me to sign something. He was pretty bloody keen! As I was properly awake I had some pancakes, and then got stuck into writing – I am desperate to be up to date by the time I go on my trip, which means a few days of just sitting in front of the computer and doing very little else. This worked for a while, until our flat mate came home, and said he was going into Yarraville, so I went along with him. My excuse was that he was driving, so it would be quicker than if I decided to go in later and had to walk. Who knows what I could do with those extra ten minutes?! As he had to go and do stuff at the accountant, I had time to go into the op-shop for a nosey about, and fell in love with an amazing full length military jacket, sadly it was $90 – by far the most expensive thing in the shop! Typical I had to fall in love with it. I have enough jackets at home, and I don’t wear them anyway, so I convinced myself that I really didn’t need it. Gutting though! When I got home I went back to the grindstone, did more writing, had some tea, did more writing, and then eventually gave up, and slumped in front of the TV. A productive day as far as I’m concerned!

On Friday Toni was heading into Footscray, and I decided to go along with her – I felt like that I needed some time out of the house – I felt like I had been cooped up for days! Ha ha! We went for a grand adventure to get some food for the feast Toni was going to make in the afternoon – she had the mission to make a gluten free, dairy free meal – just a little bit of a challenge! I also got some stuff to make our flat mates birthday cake – my wonderful plans had gone out the window, and in the end I was just opting for a chocolate cake. Everyone loves chocolate cake! We decided to get the train home, which sped up the journey – we seemed to have pottered about for quite a while in Footscray! When we got back, Toni went on a crazy cleaning mission, and by the end of it the house was looking amazing! Then she set to work making the feast, two of her friends were coming over for dinner, and by mid-afternoon there was an impressive stack of rice paper rolls, and she was still hard at work. Whilst this was all going on, I really didn’t do much – more glorious writing, and sorting out all the crap on my computer as it was starting to get quite clunky and annoying. By the time her friends came over she had made an awesome soup as well to go with the other things, and had gluten free bread at the ready! I gatecrashed the evening, and enjoyed some yummy food, yummy wine, and a big old chat – it was great! And, that was the way the rest of the night went. How lovely! After the obligatory episode of the ‘Amazing Race’ I fell asleep.

I had really just started counting the days until I go on my adventure, and this was not proving to be a good way of doing it – time was just going so slowly! At least it was too early to be counting the hours! In the morning I had a chat with Hannah to find out her news, which was just what I felt like! I also multi-tasked and made my pancakes at the same time! Cannot resist – I think I might be addicted! I once again spent a majority of the day writing, and writing and writing, and drinking multiple cups of tea – the only thing keeping me going was the thought that Edinburgh Fringe tickets were going to be released, so I was also frantically just pressing ‘reload’ on their website, until I eventually gave up, and just went through all of the venues websites – there is just so many good shows – as always! So, after making a massive list of what I want to see (and deciding I will need more money to do it all) I got on the phone to Mum to start organising her too! At this point, once again I thought I could make some money out of doing this for other people – so many people just don’t know how to plan their trip. Maybe next year…ha ha! Trawling through so many shows too a ridiculous amount of time, and by the time I finally finished it was almost dark. Oooops. So, I lit a fire (and it worked) and wasted the rest of the night in front of the TV – and continued to press ‘reload’ on the Fringe website! At least I got some writing done, so it wasn’t a completely wasted day.

After all of my hard work sorting out what tickets I wanted, I was ready to get on the phone and book a few of the free Radio 4 shows – they were so good last year, I was pretty keen, so when the phone lines opened I called the box office. Engaged. So, I phoned again. Engaged. And again, Engaged. This was the story for the next few hours, so I got on with doing other stuff, and also gave Mum a call to try and get her to phone – so with two of us working on it, I thought we may have had better luck – this was not true. Bugger! In the end I got through, and was number 15 in the queue, so I waited. When I eventually got an answer I knew the person on the other end, so we had a little chat about how we were, before getting to business! This was when disaster struck, I found out most of them were sold out already, and then the internet died, thus killing my Skype connection! Noooooo! As it had taken me so long to get through the first time I gave up on trying again, I couldn’t bring myself to go through it all again. To be honest I’m not quite sure what I got up to for the rest of the day, apart from trawling through the various websites relating to the Fringe, and trying to find out if I had missed anything before. I did make our flat mates birthday cake though, and annoying he walked into the kitchen when I was halfway through mixing it all up – dammit! I just claimed I was randomly making a cake – and I think he was tired enough to buy my dodgy story! At midnight I had to do an emergency run to the servo to pick up some tobacco – something I’m sure I could have done during the daytime, but apparently I didn’t! Ooops. For some reason, I was pretty nervous about the walk, and on my way home, a massive fight erupted on Hyde St, which didn’t help my state of mind at all…so I hid! In my defense there were about 20 drunken morons just whacking the crap out of each other in the middle of the road – there was no way I was going to get in the way! So, with my missions accomplished, I had a smoke, and then went to sleep. Sitting in front of the computer for so long is exhausting?!? Just as I was getting ready for bed, I checked my email one final time, and one of my bosses from Edinburgh had emailed me to ask what shows I wanted tickets for – it was so unexpected, and appreciated – there re perks to knowing a majority of the staff there, my disastrous tale had made it around the office! Ha ha  - brilliant!

So, still with eight weeks left until the Fringe actually kicked off, I am already getting in the mood for it – I just need to get some tickets now. It is so weird thinking about being back in Edinburgh – of course it’ll be great seeing everyone, but still, I’ve been here for so long now, I don’t want to leave! At least I have a couple of holidays sorted out for when I get back to the land of the cold – that’ll make the change easier to digest. Bring on my final 2 months!