They call it the Silly Season. I call it the Smegging Annoying Season. Christmas is a paradox: It is commonly known to be a time of goodwill and peace, when everybody just wants to be happy. But have you been in a shopping centre full of Christmas Shoppers? Christmas is a time when inoffensive individuals become hagglers from hell. Soccer mums and trophy wives alike elbow their way to the front of queues, raise imperious voices, and demand that jigsaw for Our Young Peter so he can feel loved for another 5 minutes until he opens somebody else's gift. Christmas brings out every person's impatience, exhaustion, rudeness, and selfishness. It is the great equaliser.

Boxing Day, if possible, is worse. We live near a major shopping centre, and yesterday the carpark there was full and cars were blocking streets for about three blocks in all directions. It was madness.

But now it's all over save New Year, and that's just an arbitary date on which to get drunk. Real life returns.

I hate Christmas.

I’m back at work, and starting the training for my new job as Export Assistant... I don’t have much time to blog, or read anybody else’s blog, which sucks! But hopefully once I’m all settled in and a little less under the watchful eye of The Boss I’ll be able to get back into it!!!

It seems like half the country is up in flames right now. Bushfires are the norm in Australia at this time of year, but this year's fires are among the worst. The bushfire season started extremely early, I recall hearing about fires back in October. Our on-going drought only exacerbates the scenario. You know it's bad when experts aren't mentioning controlling or putting out fires; they're going direct to the evacuation plans.

We woke up this morning to find the whole city covered in smoke, we can even smell it inside the house. (Unless Aidan burnt his toast.) Here is the latest news, and that's really only Victorian.

In other news... I have no other news. I have to find something to do, since I'm not due back at work until the 15th. I can't sit around the house being bored.

Oh, we finally got our car!!! Aidan's parents bought us a car roughly a year ago, and we got it a couple of days ago. Now we have to figure out what to do with it... we've been without a car for so long we got used to it and I really think we'd rather not have one at all! Oh well...

The Wedding & Honeymoon Story

I'll start at the start, shall I? And continue on until I reach the end - that sounds rather Alice-In-Wonderland-ish.

Saturday was a typical Melbourne day, overcast but not too cold. I awoke in a hotel room shared with my parents and my bridesmaid. My flowergirl and her mother rocked up late-morning to get organised, do make-up, and so forth. I stressed and paced and worried. For all that, the wedding went off without a hitch. It was small, casual, intimate. Everybody who said they'd be there was there, and everybody was extremely happy for us. The day passed in rather a blur for me, I don't really remember much of it!

The next bit was the "reception" - about twelve of us ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner, including both sets of parents. Surprisingly, they enjoyed it and didn't get headaches. Or so they said. We all had rather a lot of fun, and I danced with my dad to some old Everly Brothers song that I'd never heard of before, and cared nothing for the mud on the bottom of my dress! (Gotta love a garden wedding.)


Sunday morning dawned upon ill fortune. Sunday was the day of our departure to South Africa, monitoring baboons. But disaster struck! FOOD POISONING!!! I spent all of Sunday in the bathroom, ejecting food from both ends. I struggled bravely on, and got on the plane... we made it as far as Singapore, our first scheduled stop-over, and then I passed out on the plane. That put an end to any hope of reaching South Africa.

I learnt that if you ask a taxi driver to take you to a cheap hotel, you end up in the red light district in a hotel that rents rooms by the hour.

So the up-shot is, we spent a week in Singapore for our honeymoon by accident. I recovered after about three days, at which point Aidan fell ill with what appeared to be the same thing. But by day three or four we were both ok and able to explore! Amazing luck - my brother's girlfriend lives and works in Singapore, so we had our "local guide" and got to see things that most tourists don't find out about.

We had a great time once we were all healthy. The Singapore Zoo, Changi Chapel memorial, Fort Siloso, Fort Canning, Sentosa, Raffles Hotel and general wanderings... I can't be arsed going into the history of Singapore right now, but if you don't know about it, it is certainly worth a read. Interesting stuff, although a lot of what we saw was very emotionally draining. However, on the whole, we had a fantastic time and I guess things kind of worked out for the best!