I'm employed again! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

I had the 2nd interview this morning, which I blitzed and just accepted the offer this afternoon.  I'm working as a code monkey to begin with, but looks to develop into a Team Lead type role so it looks like a good career move.  It's a small company, and the people all seem nice, plus the location is pretty sweet - outskirts of St Kilda, where there's some awesome cafes and bars just around the corner.  Did some one say All Day Breakfast?  Om nom nom.

I start next Wednesday, as I have my neuro appointment Tuesday arvo.  I said I could start Monday, but they're okay pushing it back.

Hooray for income!  I can now pay off my HECs debt!

I've seen this challenge pop up all around LJ lately.  I don't think it's an entirely recent thing though - I've just happened to stumble upon journals that are doing it.  It intriugues me because I like lists - they make me more productive (why I need a list to do just that will forever be one of life's mysteries... or maybe I just like telling myself what to do BUT ONLY ON PAPER.  See?  Mystery.). 

The gist (or jist?  Jist sounds dirty so gist it is) is that you come up with 101 goals and they can be anything, but not something like "go to the moon" because that would just be silly.  They must be attainable goals, life goals, long term goals, short term goals, musical, sporting, hobbies, you name it and that just makes something inside me go SQUEE.

The overall time is just under three years.  I've done some calculations and if I start it on my first wedding anniversary, I'll complete it on NYE 2012 if I want it to be date significant.  Alternatively, I could just start it whenever.

I think I'll do this.  It'll be a good way to motivate myself in ways that may not have happened WERE IT NOT ON A LIST.

If you are not familiar with this project, go clicky.

Not for me, but for Aaron.

He landed a job with WebJet last Wednesday, and got the confirmation call whilst we were out at the Microbreweries Showcase at Fed Square.  Being surrounded by beer gave us the perfect opportunity to celebrate, although we declined dumplings and went home early-ish like old people.  Still yet to check that dumpling place out - the queue was massive on Friday night.  Another time...

My employment options are quite substantial, I just need to take advantage of it.  The only thing holding me back is the lack of confidence from being out of the game for so long.   I was made redundant at the end of Feb - 7 months is a long time.  I've been sporadicaly applying for things that Aaron draws my attention to but I don't know.  I don't think I'm cut out for a software developer life but the alternative is just as difficult.  

We'll see how things go.

The weekend has been pretty neat.  Friday, we took gwyntt 's car out to the Gippsland area, and discovered that Yarragon is a place where one could spend a lot of money.  If only.  Caught up with a travel buddy that night, the idea being to have drinks at Madame Brussels, but we baulked at the idea of paying $50 for a jug of Pimms.  C'mon!  Korean BBQ for dinner, and a drink at Section 8 Container Bar, and the night was sweet.  I really missed Melbourne and it's funky bar culture.  Looking forward to reconnecting with it again.

Aaron starts his new job tomorrow, and then it's Melbourne Cup Day and a BBQ over here.  I'm to meet with a recruiter tomorrow, which resulted because I had applied for a job with them and it turned out to be the same job I had already interviewed for, just a different recruitment company.  Lame.  But... maybe something will come of this.  Having already worked at a recruitment firm, however, I'm not that confident in recruiters abilities.

It's been a pretty epic day.

There was an epic battle between myself and the dust bunnies that were slowly taking over this house.  Thankfully, they are now under control with the TV room, kitchen, eating area, laundry, and landing at the bottom of the stairs all vacuumed and in some cases, floors washed.  Mish 1 - Dust Bunnies 0.

Also, I now have all my clothes back.  I did yet another cull, and got rid of a good couple of garbage bags worth of clothes before putting it all away, but it's so awesome having a full wardrobe again and not having to live out of a backpack.

I concluded the day with an afternoon spent sweeping the back patio and potting some herbs in an attempt of an herb garden.  Little did I realise that we already have a FLAMING HUGE ROSEMARY BUSH right near the back door.  I potted the seedling anyway :D

We're in Melbourne now.  Have spent the past three days packing, and driving and unpacking and putting things together and cleaning and vacuuming and hooray, it's all done!  I can now sleep in my own comfy bed now instead of on the futon.  We've also moved the computer desk out of the room and upstairs to my parents room, so now it can officially be called 'ours'.  It's a good feeling.

The job interview didn't go that well, but to be honest, I wasn't all that surprised.  It did sound a bit too good to be true, and they were after someone with way more Flex capabilities than I have.  I was a little upset afterwards - mainly at myself for not being as prepared as I should have been, but I'm over it now.  I know I wasn't right for it, and I accept this.  Looking at Seek there are a couple of other jobs out there that are Flex-focused.  I'll be in job hunting mode over the weekend.  Big Al has also offered a head hunter type person to help me out.  He helped him out alot when he was living in Canada - we shall see how this goes.

Aaron has had his moments adjusting.  It was a little upsetting seeing him so sad.  He also managed to hit a tree with the truck we hired and from what I hear, it put a substantial dent in it.  Not exactly great as Overhead Damage is not covered by the insurance.  Grrr!  It wasn't like the tree was obvious either, it barely comes out over the road, but it nabbed the truck anyway.  Needless to say that didn't help his mood.  He seems to have perked up now that our room is mostly set up.

Anyhoo, it's time to drink beer and eat lots of Chinese food.

I am in so much awe of the dust storm in Sydney right now. Boo-urns for missing all the fun!


And because LJ is being a fucking moron, here is a link to a YouTube of what's going down in Broken Hill:  http://www.youtube.com/v/BrlD22HwPvI&hl

It's freaking me out, man!

In two weeks, we`ll be out of here.  Flying home via Auckland... it will be a very long 36 hours.

I`m looking forward to going home, but at the same time, I`m not.  We`ve been travelling 4.5 months now and you kinda get used to that.  I`m dreading having to go home to find work - I`ve always hated the job finding process.  I suck at interviews, and well... I haven`t worked since the end of Feb, so it`ll be difficult to adjust again.

It`s been a fun trip though.  I love Canada, but I do think it`s quenched any desire to move here for any amount of time.  I think visiting every couple of years or so will be just as good.  It just sucks that it`s so ridiculously far away.

In other news, we`ve already started pondering our next trip.  Christmas 2010 in Germany seems to be the best option and maybe I can rope my parents into coming too.

So we've been in Vancouver for three weeks now (wow, has it really been that long?).  That 'not feeling well' turned into an upper respiratory cough infection thing that lasted pretty much the first 10 days.  Took myself to the doctor to get some hyped up cough meds, and it seemed to sort itself out.  Naturally, just as I was getting over that, I was struck down with ANOTHER migraine - another 3 day doozy.  Not as debilitating as what I've experienced before, but still had the blurry vision, and intense headache.

( health stuff )


We have extended our journey to Oct 4th - taking our total travelling time to just over 5 months.  I highly recommend an epic journey for a Honeymoon - I mean, if you can't travel together, why are you married?

We will be venturing East towards the Rockies at the end of next week.  I'm hoping I will not be attacked by migraine madness while we're doing that.  We'll be camping, something I haven't done in a long, long time. We picked up a tent, chairs, sleeping bag combo for CAD150 at Canadian Tire - awesome!  I'm actually really looking forward to it.  I really liked camping during school camps and Scouts/Rovers etc.  We just have to make sure we don't eaten by a bear, or something.

We're going jet boating tomorrow.  Lee, a girl we met two weeks ago at a friend of Marica's partay, invited us last minute.  I'm really surprised she thought of us, but it's a pleasant sort of surprised.  I'm really looking forward to it.  We'll be heading Squamish way, except on water instead of on the Sea to Sky Highway.  It's a really beautiful part of the world.

PS.  Canadian cable TV freaking rocks!

So we arrived in Vancouver 2 days ago, and holy crap, who told the weather to be a goddamn bitch?  If I wanted humidity so high that sweat rolls down my back, I'll go to Thailand kthx!  Serious heatwave right now.  Low 30s for about a week forecasted - which actually doesn't sound so bad, it's just the humidity that kills you.  Okay, so I can handle the heat during the day (c'mon, I'm Australian - we live for 30+ weather), but the lack of breeze or any cooling off is a killer to sleep in at night.

Europe was OMGAMAZING but I'm glad to get off the Euro - god, it's killer for an Aussie traveller.  Though if there was any one city I would recommend visiting, it would be Berlin.  That place has so much history vomiting all over the place, it's intense.  Walking downt the street and seeing bullet holes in buildings from the war is just... wow.  The city itself has so much personality - doesn't matter what you're into, you'd be able to find it there.

Aaron and I also pulled an all-nighter last Saturday night.  Watched the sun come up along on of the canals, which was beautiful and got back to the hotel around 6:30am.  Didn't exactly plan the sleep recovery very well (curse you trashy MTV reality shows!), and plodded through the 10 hours of travel and 3 train connections back to London on Monday.  We stayed with some family friends that night out near Heathrow, which was actually a really pretty part of London.  They live right near the Thames, which is just inundated with swans right now.  The next day we were on a plane to Vancouver - talk about rushed haha

Since getting here though, I haven't been feeling very well... (like duh hehe  Exhaustion ftw!) although we've already planned to stay an extra month.  Hooray!

I am in Bavaria, sipping champagne with an Italian aperitif added.  Interesting.

We're winding down to the last leg of our trip.  I have a bunch of people in Canada I need to email to let them know of our impending doom visit.  It's been fun, but I really don't think I can do more than 3 months of travel at a time.  I get homesick.  I've already made a list of all the things I want to do when I get home, even though I doubt how many will actually get completed.  In no particular order:

- move back to Melbourne (this one is pretty much a given)
- learn German
- learn the guitar
- learn the tin whistle (for those random Irish jigs!)
- start back at basketball
- buy an apartment
- get a job I actually like (lol)
- exercise more (I miss my muscles)

That's all I can think of at the moment.

Also, I love Germany. 

Yes, I'm still alive.  With Facebook and everything now though, I guess that point is moot on here.

Currently in Hungary - Lake Balaton region actually.  Wine country.  Riding bikes.  We did 40km today from Veszprem to Tihany, and tomorrow will be around 50km - the 'tour' goes for 7 days, so I expect to get pretty fit.  Although with these included breakfasts and 3 course dinners, I may not lose any weight as I was hoping.  Goddamn all that pork and beer in Eastern Europe.

In any case, the trip has gone really well.  Our Intrepid travellings went great.  5 Aussies and 1 American in our group (including us).  Too many things to talk about right now.  I really suck at keeping up to date.  Uploading photos takes forever, let alone coming up with a cohesive blog entry.

Anyhoo, time to go walk along the lake before turning in for the night.

If anyone's interested, Flickr photos are http://www.flickr.com/photos/mishandaaron

I'm alive!

My absence has been mainly due to the Great Firewall of China, and being on a train in the middle of Siberia for a few days.  Mongolia's net also sucks balls.  Anyhoo.

I'm currently in St Petersburg.  Aaron and I have just gotten back from a canal tour, and oh man is that wind icy.  Curse you Gulf of Finland.  You win this time.

St Petersburg is amazingly beautiful.  I love it and I've really only been out in it for a total of 4 hours today.   We took an overnight train from Moscow last night, and we just happened to get the one berth that had a squeaky, vibrating wall.  Nothing could make it stop, thus lack of sleep that night.  There was a mid-afternoon snooze once we got here, and a very chilled day in general.

Tomorrow we'll tackle the Hermitage Museum, and maybe hire some bikes and go riding around town.  We're also planning on doing a banya experience - a traditional Russian sauna, but in addition to a really hot room you also smack yourself with birch branches to get the blood really flowing, then run out and jump into an icy plunge pool.  Oh yeah, and you're butt nekkid.  Sounds like fun to me!

I have also managed to convince dear husband that we should go see a show - therefore we're booked to go see The Nutcracker at the Mariinsky threatre.  I remember watching it as a kid on TV so I'm really looking forward to this.  Not sure about Aaron though haha

Anyways, just a quick update.  I have a massive amount of writing to catch up on.  The Trans-Siberian alone was epic.

Monday we fly to Vienna.  Mmmm, strudel.

I'm so over packing.  I can't believe a small 2 bedroom terrace-style apartment can hold so much stuff!  I've actually had to cull some of my clothes, and even got rid of my desk and a chest of drawers.  Our lives can now fit into a 3m x 3m room.

I just have to keep telling myself I'll be in Singapore on Saturday night, and all will be right then, but there's still just so much left to do.  Mainly cleaning.  We have the final inspection on Friday morning in which everything has to be done by then.  So that leaves us with just one day to box the remaining CRAP, then clean our little butts off, have the carpet steam-cleaned, and everything in pristine order for Friday.  I really hope our luck comes through with this one.  It has yet to fail us, and now would be a REALLY crappy time.

At least my backpack feels like it's under 20kgs.  I have yet to weigh it......


I also hope I don't get swine flu and like... die... on our trip or something.  That would REALLY suck.

It's been an interesting past few days.  I came to work on Thursday thinking it was like any other day.  The first sign of trouble was that they split the team for our regular monthly meeting.  The second sign was that we went to completely different meeting rooms, and my boss had a rather glum look on his face.

The long and the short of it is that I'm now unemployed.  The 4 of us that were taken upstairs were made redundant.  A sign of the economic times.  It's funny, I never felt my position was in jeopardy but there you go.  The explanation was that CM just didn't have the money to pay for all our positions here in CMy, so they had to make cuts.  It's also come to light that the management type roles have been cut back to 4 day work weeks, effectively a pay cut of 20%.

The great irony is that the day after my redundancy, they made a big hoopla about the Profiler not working, and that deals in the UK rest on getting it fixed.  Well, I was the Profiler guru for the company, and they got rid of me.  So now they have to train up (or maybe I'll have to, who knows?  There's talk of getting me back in to help out.) another developer before they can actually tackle the problem.

I'm some what glad it's happened now.  This is a very clear sign that CMy is not doing as well as they keep telling us (but then skeptical me never thought it was doing as well as the fluff they spoke of).  It just means I now have the next two months off.  The wedding is one month away, and then we'll be off on our honeymoon a month after that, so getting a new permanent role somewhere isn't really going to work.  I may be able to contract or something, but with only 2 months available, that might not happen.

My payout covers us quite well.  Aaron still has his position, so while we're back to one income, we're by no means stressed financially.  We've been fortunate enough to pay all of our acommodation/travel needs for the trip before this happened, so all that was remaining was saving up some spending money, which I've got quite a bit of.  Without all my spending on public transport and lunch every day for work, we'll still be able to save.

All in all a favourable outcome.  I have a 6 month holiday, and that's never a bad thing :)

( Click here only if you want saaaaaaaaaaaaaap... )

And for another meme (ganked from tibbycat ):

Put your mp3 player/music player program (windows media player, itunes, winamp, etc etc) on shuffle and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

"How Come"

I tried so hard my dear to show that you're my every dream
One night when I was sleeping
I backed my car into a cop car, the other day
Oh, my love
Did I ever call for your fame?

Sittin' in the mornin' sun
Using your mind
There's a hole in the roof
Once I had a love and it was a gas

Adelaide, on a plane, far from the united states
Sitting for lunch in a square in this town
Waking before you I've got a fever and a childish wish for snow
It could be ten, but then again, I can't remember half an hour since a quarter to four.

You got to get up every morning with a smile on your face
Sit back, matter of fact
I've paid my dues time after time

So you were born in an electrical storm
And when you give me your clothes
Little darlin', do you want me to sing you a song?
Give me your hand.


haha, that was very random.

I have heartburn right now.  WTF?  I never get heartburn. 

Just another crappy thing to go with my crappy health of late.

I've had a migraine since yesterday morning that only really cleared up until last this afternoon.  It was horrible.  I thought it was a tension headache to begin with, but it just kept getting worse, even after Aaron massaged me.  Needless to say, Sunday was a sucky day.

So was today, really. 

Though went for a walk around Centennial Park after the migraine cleared.  A nice 4.5km.

Comment and I will ..

a) Tell you why I friended you.
b) Associate you with something -- a fandom, song, color, photo, etc.
c) Tell you something I like about you.
d) Tell you a memory I have of you.
e) Ask you something I've wanted to know about you
f) Tell you my favorite userpic from your list
g) In return, you need to post this on your own LJ.

I need an SD card reader for my laptop*.  I got some neat photos while we were up at The Block (it shall be henceforth known as this as Aaron's sister's boyfriend's olive farm is a bit of a handful to type all the time) on the weekend that I want to upload, but alas, no reader.

The weekend was good fun.  Nice weather for the full days we were there.   A lot of lazying around the river at the back of the property - BBQ on the shore, and tubing down the mini-rapids that had formed with a beer in hand - noice.  Thunderstorm rolls through on Sunday night, and we get a great show of sheet lightning lighting up the sky.  Very creepy, but very awesome.  Drive home was through a downpour, and we even drove past an accident where the guy had managed to roll his 4WD.  Nobody was hurt, thank goodness.

Drop by Brokenwood on the way back.  Find out that they have a new stove (HOORAY!), but had to get rid of all the bedding while the council did its inspection.  They'll be putting it back, but they just don't know when.  Shame, I wanted to go up again before Christmas.  We'll see.

Don't want to be back at work this week.  Need to get my butt into gear with exercise, though even when I was going 3x a week, plus eating really well, my weight still didn't budge.  Sigh.  Stupid body.  It's hard to get motivated when you're not seeing results (and yes, I gave it a decent amount of time before I started bitching :P )

Que sera.



*  But then, I should just get a new laptop. Aaron suggested getting a baby one - much like yours, gwyntt - as it would be easy to travel with.  Hmm.

So, I rearranged the downstairs of my apartment for no real reason last night.  Well, there was a reason.  The previous layout was bugging me to heck. The living/dining area is tiny and it just felt so closed in and cramped and there was no space to do my WiiFit!  So when Aaron got home, and with the promise of beer, we got to work. 

Basically, we've just flipped the layout.  The lounges/tv stuff is in the back corner next to the kitchen now, and the dining set is at the front near the door.  I like it alot.  I'd post photos if I remembered to take some.   We can even use a coffee table again, which means that's one less thing to get rid of.  Aaron still needs to get rid of his old TV and stand, which is annoying because it's a big mofo and it's taking up space.

There's still cleaning to do, mind you.  The dining table is a mess since where it was before, it was in the darkest corner and easy to ignore.  Now it's out in the open, and I'll see it every time I walk in the door, I might feel more inclined to keep it clean.  Hmmm.  I don't make any promises though.

Oh, we can also entertain properly without guests having to lose 10 kgs before walking in the door since there was little space to pull out the chairs before.  Anyways.

It's awesome.

In other news, I've been having a horrible time sleeping again.  The last week and a half has been crap.  To the point where I took yesterday off, I was so tired.  I can fall asleep easily enough, but something will always wake me up, and I'll lie like a doofus, or toss and turn until the wee hours, and then finally fall asleep again just as dawn breaks.  Pissing me off.  

Taking drugs isn't an option because I STILL wake up with them.  The only problem is that I feel like a zombie in the morning.  It's so, so difficult to be coherant and operational after taking two tabs of temazepam (mmm alliteration).  I'm trying to avoid them for that reason.

Grrr.

We'll be going away for the long weekend and we'll be able to restock the wine collection too, as we'll be near Mudgee/in the Upper Hunter.  Whee!  Credit card, you have been warned.  We'll be driving to Aaron's sister's boyfriend's olive farm, which is in the middle of nowhere (seriously, not even phone signal), and that's the way I like it.  It's meant to be quite warm this weekend though, so that might not be so fun - snakes might be coming out to play.  Plus, not the weather for bonfires, boo.

Can hopefully make a break for it early Friday arvo to beat the hellfire and brimstone that is Sydney weekend traffic.  Hopefully.  Depends on Aaron's workload.

Oh and hooray for October.  In 6 months, I'll be a married woman.  Eep!