Carry the Bags

Cannot wait for the Brisstyle markets this weekend – Brisbane etsy sellers come together to sell their wares in real life!

You’ll find the cutest clothes and jewellery plus bags and lots of children’s stuff.

It’s at St Augustine’s Church Hall in Hamilton this Saturday 4 July.

It’s been nearly a year since I updated this blog.

But now I’ve linked it to my name domain, I don’t know what to do.

I’m not that interested in blogging like I used to … twitter takes care of that.

Not sure where to go from here.

If you’ve ever heard something on the internet that you wish you could save and keep, I have got the tool for you.

Audacity is a great free audio editing tool that allows you to record and edit sound on your computer.

It has been very useful for me to practice editing for my course and hopefully to get some work in radio.

Those of us who live in the city may talk about what we are doing to save water, and how the water restrictions are affecting us but I have just driven to Canberra from Brisbane with my parents and I don’t think that we urban dwellers have much of an idea how bad it really is. Our high falutin talk about water tanks and washing the car with a bucket is so petty when you see the situation that the land is in.

We drove for twelve hours today and I don’t think I have ever seen the country drier. There are isolated spots where there must have been some rain but generally the country is brown all over. The sheep are indistinguishable from the land because it is all dust. There are areas where there doesn’t seem to be a blade of grass. It must be just heartbreaking for the people whose lives are tied to the land and the weather.

One can’t help but wonder what is going to happen to these towns and farms if the current patterns of frequent droughts continue. It seems inconceivable that anyone can keep on doing this for long but I suppose there are people who have been living through it for 50 years or more.

I feel quite hopeless about it all.

I am not very nice to be around for the first few months of being in a new (or in this case old) town. Although I really like living in different places, I do find myself being irritable and not very happy during the settling in period.

The problem is amplified because Brisbane is not somewhere new, not somewhere exciting (for us) and there isn’t too much for us to discover. Whereas usually we have all those experiences of finding the interesting places to eat and shop, here it is all a bit familiar. It feels like the end of the new and the rest of our lives stretch out before us.

I have never been a person who can imagine spending the rest of their life in one city. Hopefully Brisbane can be a sort of base for us where we spend a few years and then go somewhere else for a while and then come back again.

At the moment, we feel like we have at least three home towns. London felt like home when we were there, it felt wrong not to be getting off the plane to stay in Sydney when we landed there and Brisbane is where our history and families are. It is all very confusing but I don’t regret living in any of those places for a time. I think that diversity of experience gives you a totally different perspective on life.

It is difficult to know where we fit here as well. Our old friends are here, but most of them in a very different stage of life to us. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to hang out- not at all- but I suppose we need to re-establish ourselves and find things to do.

This is not helped by the fact that we can’t move into a place of our own until we get jobs. I think I will feel much better when I can have my own space and the cats back!

Anyway, apologies to anyone around whom I seem cranky. And as a side note, if I seem reluctant to talk about our plans, it isn’t personal, it is just another weird thing about me. I find it hard to talk about that stuff in detail.

I have never minded the push-a-button-to-get-to-the-right-section thing when it comes to phoning companies. Usually it is pretty efficient and you can get to where you want. I have never really had a problem with that.

What drives me crazy is the voice activated system used by Telstra where I have to listen to an overly polite, sickly sweet voice asking me what I want and then waiting for my verbal reply.  I hate it! I hope you have internet monitors Telstra!! And while we are at it, I also am annoyed by the woman with the speech bubbles in the Westpac ATMs. She is equally smiley, sweet, fake and frustrating.

Most of us are used to dealing with computers and automated systems. We have all adjusted to that quite well. However, when an automated system pretends to be a human, it is infuriating. Don’t pretend we are getting personalised service when we are not. Don’t make us actually have to speak to the machine- it is humiliating. It reinforces the idea that companies think consumers are stupid and will be fooled by a pre-recorded voice.

Please Telstra, go back to “Press 1 for mobiles, press 2 for internet”!

It doesn’t matter who someone is or what they have done, I don’t think it is right that a person is put to death.

I am sitting here having just heard that Saddam Hussein has been executed in Iraq. He committed appalling acts that lead to the deaths of thousands but I still can’t agree that he should have been killed.

Let him rot in a jail cell until he is an old man, forgotten about by most of the world. Let that be torture enough.

The state puts itself in the same league as a murderer by committing the same act.

Executions may give some sort of feeling of revenge to victims but the state should be bigger than that and not condone acts that ultimately have no benefit to society.

This blog was created to diarise our trip overseas but you know, I quite enjoy it and think I am going to keep it going. It doesn’t really matter if no-one reads it.

So from now on it will be about whatever I get inspired to write about.

Stay tuned…