Holiday roundup

I haven’t been blogging much lately and I’m not sure why. Not many things have been able to keep my interest, and I’m thankful for the fact that The Age keeps being thrown onto my front path each weekend for keeping me current with the world. But this week is different – I’m going to use my lunchbreaks to write or shop or jog.

I got back to work last week and those three days were just awful. I had a ton of mail banked up, projects had been allocated to me in absentia, and the early mornings just killed me after three weeks off work, staying up till 3am and reverting to the night-person I know I am deep down. For nearly two of those three weeks, we were in Katoomba, Sydney and Bangalow, mostly lounging and shopping. We’re not the most active folks on hols, so it was 30 Rock and Sopranos DVDs, lots of Sudoku, book buying and the eternal quest for a bought coffee (or two) each day. It’s no wonder that after 10 days I had seen the local sites and was happy to return home to the dogs. Unless we plan an active “goal-orientated” trip like our Bay Of Fires walk in 2004, we end up wondering why we couldn’t just be doing this stuff back at home. 

On the second week of our trip, the NSW mid-coast was heavily flooded and the Pacific Highway was blocked at one point, leaving us potentially stranded. I think Bellingen (two hours south) had more than 500mm rain over two days. Lucky we didn’t stay there on this trip. After two solid days of rain in our rented house in Bangalow, and with the forecast of a few more, we bailed 3 days early and drove 18 hours home. I was glad.

We had a few minor projects left for the year, so we haphazardly tried finding some replacement bedroom furniture as ours looks (and is) cheap, but it’s hard to find period wardrobes that don’t look too banged-around or creaky. Giving up on that, we bought a few dozen tubes of plants and put them in the garden so there’s something cheerful going on in spring.

In other news, Fergus has got his regular yeast infection in the ear thing, so we’re putting drops in twice a day, Chloe has become even more neurotically obsessed with the neighbour’s dog, and spends large chunks of time listening at the fence, hidden behind the compost bin. My brother and his wife had a baby daughter Pippa in the early hours of this morning, and we stared raiding Ulduar in WoW this week – boy it’s hard!

I’ll post some holiday pics later.