Birthdays, Mustachey Kittens and Bourbon Street at 7am

It's my birthday today. I turned 23, and while I realize that Next Year Me and every Me that has a birthday after that will hate 23 year old me for saying, I feel just a touch like this is the beginning of the end.

I think that actually 22 was probably the beginning of the end, but this time last year I'd only been back in the country for less than two days and I was too jetlagged and New York-Hung Over to care much.

This year I just got up at 5:45am, left the boyfriend asleep because he was working a night shift tonight and needed to sleep in, and went to work :S

 Mustachey kitten from Apartment Therapy. If ever get another teeny kitteny thing to be friends with Wayne, it will definitely be a mustachey kitten. Maybe called Nigel. Nigel and Wayne.

But the girlies (and charming accented gentlemen) decorated my computer screen and my desk with balloons and ribbon and a Happy Birthday banner for when I arrived. And they made a little fuss with carrot cake and sparklers. Which is insanely lovely, because they've barely known me a month. They're darlings. All of them.

This teeny birdy is from one of my favoritest blogs. Mackin Ink is written by a very charming American woman with three twinkly daughters, who bounces around the world with them and her hubby, and writes very beautiful words. Read her, she's lovely

My lovely boy had a cake waiting for me last night, and has issued me an IOU for a little iPad and attatchy keyboard or Microsoft Surfacey clicky thing before I go back to school, so I can take lecture notes all stylish-like and don't have to trek my jumbo pink laptop back and forth. So exciting. I want to do the clicky dance from the Microsoft ad. Such a sucker for musical advertising.

Bourbon Street, New Orleans, the morning after. Most tourists don't see it, but  at about 6am street sweepers come down Bourbon Street, scoop up all the rubbish and beads, and then spray lemon scented hospital grade disinfectant all over the streets. So Bourbon Street at 4am smells like beer and puke and smoke. By 7am it smells lemony fresh.

And I have a work Christmas Party at a restaurant on the water in Brighton Le Sands on Friday, and a lovely brunch and shopping day planned with my awesome mother, Kate.

It's no Bourbon Street night out, but birthday loveliest has definitely taken the edge off having to grow up. Maybe next year I'll be around to walk through lemony fresh Bourbon Street in the morning for beignets and lattes.

Typical Wednesday. What of it?

So I get home today...

...and Mr Richard has bought me a birthday cake and is singing "Happy Birthday Eve to You!"
Totally makes up for the cranky people I spoke to on the phone today at work.

Now he's trying to learn to play happy birthday on his piano iphone and throw rice on me.

Kittenface.

I was going to write a proper post, but I have a kitten who has decided that his new favorite game tonight is trying to attach and eat my fingers while I try to type. So since he's insisting, I may as well introduce him.

 This is Wayne. R named him, after I said I wanted the name to remind me of New Orleans. He suggested Lil Wayne, and then spent the next hour calling the kitten nothing but. Now the kitten wont answer to anything else...only Wayne and Kittenface.

 This is how he feels about me writing this right now. I've temporarily relocated him to my lap, but he's clawing my foot a bit so I'll have to make this quick.

He was rescued by a friend who found him wandering around alone. She thought he was a bit teeny to be out on his own, so she took him to the vet. He didn't have a microchip, so she took him home and found him a safe room where her big puppy couldn't eat him, and put posters up to try and find his owners. A few weeks later, she'd still had no luck, and she couldn't keep him there locked up in one room away from the puppy, so she asked if anyone wanted him. R miraculously said yes, and we picked him up a few days later. R likes him just as much as I do, he just wont admit it.

He's one of those cuddly little things that follows you room to room. He gets in the way of whatever you're trying to do. Beats you to the bath, sits on the laptop's keyboard, beats me to the bath.

And he's especially fond of recipe books as beds. This is him relaxing on the open pages of Jamie's 30 Minute Meals (while I'm trying to plan dinner) but he's also quite partial to Cajun Country Cooking too.

Everything is coming up rosy

So things are looking rather up. 

Not to jinx myself or anything, but I'm kind of coasting right now. Do you ever get the feeling that you're on the verge of something interesting? Not when you know everything will go your way, but when you know that things are going to change...and it's going to be big.

I love this feeling. The only other times in my life I've been in this position, I was sort of not in the right mindset to embrace it. Now? Bring on the change. I've kind of learnt that every single thing I'm used to can fall apart, and I'll be fine. I've got all kinds of fall backs, and even if I didn't, I've got the strength now to pick up the pieces.

I'm enrolled to go back to uni next year, at a really cool campus, and in a really cool course.I'm studying to become a speech pathologist. Which is super cool, because it's a helping-people-and-doing-good kind of job. Even the days it sucks, at least I'll know I'm contributing in a very direct, tangible way to bettering people's lives. It's also an industry that is experience massive growth, a huge shortage in pathologists and a massive demand. The option to work in public or private health, to run my own practice, to work with the wealthy and charge lots, or to work for next to nothing in a community that needs the help. I can do this work all over the world, and I can earn as much, or as little as I want, and work as much or as little as I want. I'm pretty excited.

I'm also moving house in less than two months. We've been looking at little run-down rentals by the beach. We're going to downsize, ostensibly so I have less financial pressure on my while I cut back work hours to study, and so we have a better chance of saving some money to travel with. 

I've also got a shiny new job. Also with a major florist company, but this time the environments couldn't be more different. Have you ever been in a really horrible situation - a job, a relationship, a friendship, whatever - and it wasn't until you actually got out of it and into something functional and sane that you realised exactly how effed-up it was? Thats how I feel about my last workplace. I knew I wasn't happy, I knew that some of the people I was working with were toxic, but it wasn't until I started working in this lovely office, with sweet, funny people who want to help. In a company that isn't run entirely on someone's ego, and that has actual policies and supports in place, where my boss talks and listens, and doesn't shout, gaslight, verbally abuse and throw temper tantrums - often when he's the one at fault. It should be a given, but I'm still amazed every time someone acts like a decent human being in this office...the contrast couldn't be greater between it and the last company. 

I've got not a damn thing to complain about at this new place, and I'm so excited by that.

Cheating on my blog

It's been far too long an absence, little blog.
I'm pleased to report that my absence has not actually been because I've been lazy and neglectful and not writing at all. I actually have been writing. I've been road testing a couple of options, because this blog was starting to feel a bit angsty. I kept going to start a new post, and it kept quickly turning into a woe-is-me self pity party about miserable and uncomfortable things like miscarriages, workplace bullies, funerals I've attended and people who have been astonishingly nasty to me. And I don't want to fill this pretty little space with all that negativity. This was meant to be about adventures - the good ones and the ones that turned sour. But not about everyday, banal misery.

The thing about writing is that for me, at least, can't help but wander into the cathartic category. So I couldnt write here without writing about the sad things. So I found somewhere else to channel it. Have you ever heard of the 750 Words Project? Here's the theory:

"I've long been inspired by an idea I first learned about in The Artist's Way called morning pages. Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in "long hand", typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It's about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day."

The problem is, that while I can muster the motivation to get up a bit earlier and write three pages before work if I start at the leisurely hour of 9:30am as I did previously, when I changed job to one requiring regular 7:00am starts plus smart casual grooming standards, the idea of getting up at 4am just to write first thing in the morning didn't really fly.

I also dug out a brand new 365 Journal that I bought years ago and didn't use, because I had already started one in another colour and tried to write in it every day. Its actually reasonably easy, because theyre single, unlined pages per day. So when you have a crap day and don't want to go into it, a large fonted "fuck" in the middle of the page would suffice. Other days you write really tiny to fit it all in. If you're like me, you forget to take it with you a lot, so you have lots of notes scrawled on napkins, and envelopes, and work stationery stuck into it. I love my 365 books. The dream is to have a lovely row of them, each one documenting a year in my life. I'm not quite that disciplined yet. I journal in fits and starts and then when things get too rough, I don't want to play anymore and I stop writing until things calm down, and I get bored and restless and need to inspire myself again.

So, I'm trying to turn over a new leaf with this blog, and focus on the loveliness. And in that spirit, here's some prettiness:

The baby lop ear rabbit I had when I lived in Summer Hill. His name was Iago (he had a brother called Othello) and he slept in a vintage suitcase and ate bok choy and celery.

 I like very few things more than how clouds look from planes...when I was little I daydreamed about getting out and walking on them. I hate how information gets in the way and ruins plans like that.

 This bird lives in an old Irish pub in Glebe. I've forgotten it's name, but it tried to join in our shoeless pool game one afternoon.

 Back when I worked in a Swedish stationery shop, this is what happened when we worked too many hours, had not enough customers and not enough to do. We invented faux Swedish names, made name tags and called each other by our Swedish names for the whole day. We also perfected our Swedish chef impersonation, ate lots of ginger snaps, learnt pointless swedish phrases - like "Santa is coming" and "Register Fairy". <3