Trying To Crawl Out Of The "Meh"

Okay, so even though it's winter right now, our winters do not include - obviously - Christmas trees or snow. Winter snow elsewhere in Australia? Sure. Not in my city though. Which means the above pic isn't a very accurate graphical representation of my current situation. I just think it's cute.

Moving on...LOL.

I have been battling a fairly severe case of the "blog blahs" these past couple of weeks. All of August actually. I'm working on it, I really am, but the interesting thing I've learned recently is that life really does go on when one doesn't blog. Don't worry, I'm not about to shut up shop, LOL. But I am finding it far less stress-inducing to keep to a 'whenever the urge strikes' kind of schedule. I'm not in it for the ad revenue and I'm getting to the point where subscriber numbers and page hits bother me less and less. I blog because I find it fun. So this 'everyday' thing? Lovely in theory, a bit impractical in reality - at least for me. The ease of twittering the day's trivialities instead of blogging about them does make it the laziest choice!

So what's been going on these past couple of weeks?

Boof sat a national mathematics competition test last week and even though we won't know the results for a few more weeks, we think he did well. This was a totally optional thing but was right up Boof's alley so he jumped at the chance. Atta boy!

We booked and paid for our trip to Sydney in a few weeks. The trip is about three-quarters "Good Lord we need a BREAK!" and one-quarter "Happy 30th birthday Lizzie!" The weather will be warming up into spring but not too hot. Talented Hubby is busy planning all the photo opportunities and I'm busy freaking out about the plane ride (I don't do planes well, LOL). But it will be great and we're really looking forward to the break, something we don't do nearly often enough. What we are NOT enjoying? The fact that it will cost about as much for 6 days as it did for BOTH of us to fly, stay AND eat breakfast daily when we travelled to Bali in 2000. Okay, so the then-recent civil disturbances in neighbouring East Timor kind of bumped the price down, but still. It's very hard to see a 'per night' hotel tariff for Sydney and not automatically convert that to a comparable "cheap Bali t-shirts" figure, sigh. When we went to Bali we took what we thought was a modest amount of spending money and still came home with over half of it - and we bought a LOT of stuff. But Sydney is a place that neither TH or I have been since we were wee things and I know the lure of Taronga Zoo is too strong to resist for my photography-mad husband. I mean, we don't even have ELEPHANTS at our city zoo...and they have a baby one!

Also, I am sick. No specific reason. Though weirdly, my legs hurt. I think it's because my friend C and I got stuck in the torrential rain yesterday which was then capped off by severe wind, freezing our wet denim legs into icicles. My legs feel like they've been run over and haven't felt truly warm since, despite being in dry clothes the second I got home. So yeah, legs that don't work properly and no doubt, a cold coming. Auuugh. I took some classic photos with my mobile phone, including one particularly amusing one with C using her 1yo son's parka as a rain hat, but she made me promise not to blog it. Actually, she threatened me with an unflattering Facebook retaliation so I had to concede defeat, LOL.

The poor dog - the wind had been blowing the rain inside his kennel all day so by the time I got home he was saturated and shivering and I felt horrible. That dog has never had so many cuddles and treats in one stretch as he did yesterday afternoon.

I promise I won't be such a stranger this week. No, really. As for now, I'm off to take some paracetamol and download a podcast or seven to make cleaning my kitchen far more palatable.

Mwah.