I was out with some friends, about to go see a movie, when my phone buzzed. Aware that I was being a bit rude, I pulled it out to have a quick squiz--and possibly put it away--when I saw who it was from.

"Oh my god!" I said to my friends, "I got in!"

( Hello, three years of my life! )

There was still the interstate universities to wait upon; five o'clock on the Friday gave me the answer for South Australia: no go. Victoria was on the Monday, but not getting into any of the other universities with graduate entry had me convinced that ACU was where it was at, and I scoured gumtree, the local classifieds, for rooms available.

It struck me hard, those three days, how much more expensive it was to live on that side of the river--and what utter holes the same amount of money gets you on northside as compared to where I've been living these past number of months. I came away reeling at the sort of dives I was going to have to live in for three years, and still be having to make each dollar stretch to make ends meet.

Monday night I went to look at another room, in another divey apartment, but I felt good about it: the young guy I was interviewing for was pleasant, geeky, and we spent about an hour talking about anime and computers. It'd be a good fit. I came away with an assurance that the room was pretty much mine, although his friend had first dibs if he could get the money together by the next day.

Getting ready for bed, I remembered that the results for Victoria were released that afternoon. Suppose I better check, I thought, and logged in.

( Goodbye, three years! Hello, two! )

It's been a fairly quiet year. Things of note:

MY NEWS!

1. Finally graduating.


It's been nearly ten years since I left university without a completed degree, and upon contacting the university to see how I could put that to a close, it was found that I apparently had graduated, but slipped through the cracks. In July, I finally got my piece of paper, a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology.


2. Applying for graduate-entry nursing


The impetus to get my degree was deciding one day earlier this year that I wanted to go into nursing, and so towards the end of this year, I spent ages writing applications to universities all over Australia for graduate-entry nursing; I am still waiting on the January intake to find out if I've been accepted to any, for the rather sad results of my first degree means that it may not happen. Fingers crossed.


3. Buying a car.


While I don't really need one, there were twofold reasons to do so; one, so I wouldn't keep paying oodles of money for driving lessons, and two, so that I would feel stupid if I had a car sitting outside the house and not have a licence, and therefore not chicken out yet again out of finally getting a licence. I also opted to do so through a loan, so that I'd develop a line of credit, seeing as I'd never bought anything with a loan, nor had a credit card, before.


4. Getting my licence.


Third time lucky--I failed the test the first two times I tried, at the nearest centre in Brisbane, but for my third I used my own car and got a fellow co-worker to drive to the next city; google-fu told me that it had a higher pass rate and the wait time was only three weeks instead of two months. I scraped through a pass, and that whole day became a thing of drama--I only just made the appointment, by minutes, and then we got lost afterwards... I should write an entry about it, for posterity.


5. Moved!


It was time to move away from the area I'd been in, and during a house party with Harry when I'd partaken of lots of codeine, and then loaded up on alcohol--and passed out, several times--I discovered that one of the residents was moving out. This household had a wall of fantasy and science fiction novels as you walked in, and when I rejoined the land of living, I got the house manager's number and moved in shortly afterwards. This proved to be one of the more excellent decisions of 2011, and took about one hour of moving boxes with the assistance of a couple of coworkers and the Sailor.


6. Seeing lots of live music.


One of the reasons I moved to this area was that it was closer to work and closer to a friend I was spending a lot of time with--although he soon got a girlfriend and forgot that anybody else existed. That was fine; I made friends with his housemate, who proved to be most knowledgeable regarding local live music, and hardly has a week gone by without my going to a gig, or play, or something. A lot of my paycheck goes into this. (And alcohol, accordingly.)


7. Completion of a crisis telephone counselling course


There were only 25 slots, and most competitive, with rigorous interview questions, and then telephone interview, and lots of invitations along the way to continue on to the next phase--but I persevered, and went to every class, and started on a volunteer telephone crisis counselling line; possibly the hardest thing I have ever done.

OTHER PEOPLE NEWS!

1. Uma sobrinha nova!


My niece was born the weekend I was intending to go to a science fiction convention--it was tough, but she won out; I saw her only minutes after she was born, all little and wrapped in clean flannel. Sophia, new to the world. (She's growing so fast!)


2. Launching of Inara.


The Sailor finally put the boat into the water, and sailed up to the Whitsundays, where he's been having a grand time; it brought a big smile on my face to hear him on the phone, and hear the happy in his voice.

Unfortunately I wasn't there for the launch--not that I probably could have made it, because of work commitments, but I went down soon afterwards and was on board for the inaugural sail up the Richmond River.


3. Mother news :(

On a sadder note, my mother was forcibly hospitalised in the Northern Territory, put into the psychiatric ward and injected with drugs, as she would not take them. This time it was through my brother's actions, not my own; she was spiralling down into an especially bad place, sending people all sorts of sad, threatening, letters, throughly losing touch with reality. She sent me some, and they went into the bin unopened--she called my phone, and it went unanswered, voice messages deleted unheard.

Instead, I implemented a call-dad-weekly thing, and I look forward to talking to my father. I have spoken to my mother so few times I could count it on the one hand. It's sad, and I sometimes feel bad about not wanting to have anything to do with her anymore; but I lived it last time, and I cannot do it again.

Which kind of makes it amusing that I'm doing crisis counselling. Bizarre, but it's easier.

May the new year be filled with surprises!

The in-store radio has been broken for ages at work, and so because of that, we've been pumping out our own music over the sound system--or, at least, the store manager does; nobody else is game to do so while the store is open. She is especially partial to Nickelback and Michael Jackson. It only takes a couple of songs before something comes on to cement the ipod as hers.

When the store's closed is a whole other story.

I brought my own speakers and ipod in at first and whacked it on random, only loud enough for those in the produce department to hear what was playing. That is, just Lachlan and myself.

At first there was some embarrassment on my behalf, but when I didn't get raised eyebrows from him at what was playing, I relaxed. He even bopped along with some of the offerings, and we grinned at each other over the tomato bay at some especially old pop songs--and sometimes sang along with them.

"Oh, I like this song," he said one morning, heading over to the speakers and cranking it up.

( yay, music! )

* bonus points if you get post title

A few people ahead of us began jogging across the road, and I thought they had the right of it, but they stopped far too early, only steps into their jog. I started sprinting, and behind me I heard the other two do the same. I was wearing slippery leather-soled soles, and even with the fear I would slip over, still bounced off each step further, kept going, past the other people who'd stopped in their run.

The other two kept up, and I soon heard other people start running with us, and not stop this time, calling to their friends to keep up.

"Come on!" I heard, in various fading distances, encouraging calls all along behind us, with the pounding of footfalls along the road.

"You're running a lot further than I thought you would," my brother said from behind me as we neared the steps to the entrance.

"Of course," I said, "I ride 15km of hills every day," only to come to a stop at the bottom, because of their slippery tiles. My brother and his friend ran on past me up the steps, and the others motivated by us ran on past me in a flood.

We stopped inside the doors, looking around at the various doors. "Which door did she say it was? Who did she leave the tickets with? She said a woman ..."

There were no women. The others whipped out their phones and tried to contact their respective other halves, and I sidled up to one of the gate attendants. "Do you have any doors staffed by women?" I asked him, chest heaving.

"They all are," he replied, and I darted off to any woman to ask if she had the tickets for our family last name.

"Gate five!" one of them called out, and we started running again, and as we rounded the corner we could see a woman standing guard, looking our way, calling out our name.

"That's us!" we chorused, and collected our tickets mere moments before lockdown.

( the show must go on... )

( before the show; after the show. )

It's been a long time from the first line of pencil upon MDF to create the mould for the first hull--or even before that, when the shed first had to be built. For months the Sailor and I sourced second-hand tin for the roof, making i-beams, and setting supposedly cured posts into concrete, and buying blue metal aggregate for the floor of the--eventually finished--shed.

For the first month or so in Ballina, those years ago, I bummed around--and as money got low I went out and found work, with the same company I now work with. The Sailor got to marking out the plans and hitting the phones to find a source of cedar to start laying out the first hull of the catamaran he wanted to build.

( A progression in through time. )

A couple of weeks ago I took a bus down to Ballina to have a look at her. It won't be long now before the Sailor hies off for the more welcoming shores of tropical Queensland up north, where he can use the boat for charter purposes and finally go sailing after being landlocked for so long. He's got the idea to take backpackers with him sailing, and hopefully source them as income as he takes them from one tourist town to another--namely, Airlie Beach, the holy grail after Byron Bay and Bondi Beach when it comes to unsuspecting tourists. If only they knew that the supposed beach at Airlie is mud and rocks and little else; but then again, I guess the party culture I so enjoyed while there more than makes up for it.

"Shall we go down the river?" he asked as the day wore on, and clouds came in from the south-east, the direction of prevailing winds.

( She is ever so delightful. )

My brother was a little late, but that was all right--we headed on down during the remains of my lunch break anyway, my nephew bouncing on my shoulders.

Now, I wanted to buy a car, but nobody around me apparently knows anything about them other than you put fuel in and they go forward. This wasn't all too helpful, and all the googling in the world didn't give me much more to work with, other than to narrow what I wanted to:

• hatchback
• late model
• low kms
• white, or pale coloured (because of the fierce Queensland sun)
• A.B.S. brakes

I was talking to my bro over the phone on Friday evening, as I idly scrolled through various car sales websites, ebay, and gumtree, bookmarking the ones that looked promising so I could try my hand and dragging a friend around on the Sunday, looking at them. Not that I'd know what I was looking at, other than vaguely car-shaped objects.

"Oh, hey, this one looks good!" I said while on the phone to my bro. "It's at a car yard just outside my work! I might have a look on my lunch break tomorrow." It looked ok: a white Hyundai Getz, 2006, 50,000kms, 1.6L 3-door. Less doors, less things to break?

( suddenly I have debt. )

"So how was your weekend?" said my boss, standing in the office doorway, stopping briefly on his way out of the store.

I pushed away from the computer. "Guys," I grumbled. "I saw a friend over the weekend, and he was all handsy. It was annoying. I never even saw him that way--didn't know he even thought that."

He laughed. "Everyone's after you at the moment, hey. So?"

"God, no. Not my type. What you do you mean, everyone?"

"You know, Tina."

"What do you mean?" I said, wary.

"Last Sunday she was all 'oh, she's so funny! She's so nice!' all day long."

I was torn between embarrassment and amusement, and the latter won. I laughed. "No."

"Yes," he said heavily, put-upon. "She's married, right?"

"It just goes to show what a great judge of character she is!" I said, ignoring the suggestion. "I'm hilarious. It's good to be acknowledged." I sat straight and smoothed out my apron. "You should do the same."

( coworker networking delights.  )

"I'll move the car," I said to my dad. "You go pay."

He handed me the keys and as he headed into the service station, I slid over into the drivers' seat. I stared at the key fob, checking to see how the key part popped out, but even trying to dig it out with the nail didn't work. I peered around under the steering wheel, but over where the key normally went was a little plastic cap.

I stared at the "key", befuddled. How on earth did you start the car? There was a little light on the dashboard saying "press foot on brake to start car", but when I tried that, it didn't work. I tried it turning the "key housing" under the wheel, I tried it with pulling the automatic gear into "drive".

I saw my dad pay and head into the food area of the truck stop, and I gave up. Shut the door, walked off in search of him. A tour of the facilities, and he was nowhere to be found. Not near Maccas, getting a morning feed, not paying the fuel bill--but no, found waiting back at the car, perplexed.

He laughed at me a lot.

Dawn crept up over us slowly as we made our way up towards Bundaberg, where I hadn't been in four years or more. It's funny how things change in little ways. Looking down at the river, it boggled the mind that the water came up to just under the bridge--so very hard to imagine all that area underwater, where my yacht had been moored against a jetty, now long gone, had been in the middle of a morass of water and debris.

( You can never go home. You find new ways. )

"Touch my stomach," said my sister-in-law, Naty, as it moved with the movement of her baby. I could feel the baby moving under her skin, little hard limbs sliding against the distended skin of her belly. It put into mind the Aliens movie, or some other equally eerie scene.

Naty hadn't put much weight on during the course of her pregnancy, so there she was, still fairly svelte, but with a massive protruberance. She was having the baby via caesarian in the morning, and so my brother measured her belly. 179cm, and that was at a month early!

My brother's family has a preponderance of photographs, and he nicked my dad's camera--and we came across some photos of Naty in the shower from that night; we might have liked warning that he was using any available camera lying around for naked photos, and quickly scrolled past onto the photos of my dad's boat, which we were originally trying to see.

My dad took the expectant parents off to the hospital first thing in the morning, for they were scheduled early; we were to wait until my brother sent us a message that it was all right to come.

At a far more respectable hour we trundled along to see the baby, in the maze of the hospital warren, trying to find out where they were. The grandparentals sat down while I chased down a nurse, and upon finding one she said, "oh, I saw a guy who looked like you wandering around," which had me blinking a lot--my brother and I don't look that much alike.

( Minha sobrinha muito pequena. )

There was a knock on the door, and my father answered. I peered around the corner, curious, and saw an old man, stooped over and doddering.

"You're--the neighbour?"

The man was barely speaking, nodding in a way that was either affirmation or old age, and made as if to step by.

"What's your name?"

I didn't hear.

"John, is it? You want to come in?"

My dad looked at me, and I at my dad; he quirked an eyebrow at the old guy, and I did my best to shrug and not look confused. The old guy didn't wait for my dad's answer, moving as if to grab at him for support. He came close to me; he was bald, wearing a tweed cap and a pair of sunglasses the likes of which people severely sensitive to the light do. I pressed against the wall to give him space, then scooted to the table.

He moved towards a vacant chair, not saying anything, and sat down.

( We soon discovered who was this weird old guy. )