Almost exactly four weeks ago, I returned home from an interstate trip.
My brother-in-law dropped me off at the airport, at a drop-off zone that was usually congested, but that time he had no trouble finding a spot to pull over.
Inside the airport was much the same — at the bag drop kiosks, there was only one other woman. I only passed a handful of people on my way to the lounge. Continue reading
I had written up a short post on Saturday morning, and I thought I’d published it successfully from my phone, but now I cannot find it amongst my published, draft, scheduled or discarded posts, so I have no idea what happened to it.
But, whatever, there wasn’t much in it. Just that this week has been a bit busy. Add to that an impromptu trip to Canberra, and it hasn’t left me much time to blog. Even so, I’m not ready to break my long-standing post-per-week streak (as tempting as it is, I think it’s also a matter of pride).
Hopefully back to “normal” next week.
And by “impromptu” I mean I booked the flights on Thursday night, and I was on the plane Friday morning. Don’t worry, it wasn’t for any serious emergency, unless you consider providing emotional support an emergency (although I think the trip did me just as much good as it did for my friend).
As it turns out, Canberra is really pretty in the autumn. My favourite sight was the trees with a gradient of leaves from green in the lower branches, to yellow then orange and red and brown at the top. Unfortunately it didn’t occur to me to take a photo at the time, but I got a few other magnificent landscapes. Here is one for now:
I suppose to most people autumn is a lacklustre time when everything and everyone is preparing to enter some kind of dormancy or hibernation, but autumn is actually my favourite season. To me, it’s full of amazing colour, vigour and vibrancy.
Seeing trees aflame with deep red leaves, or shimmering with golden sequins, or even to see ghostly bare branches casting intricate patterns across the sky – these are the sights that evoke wonder and intrigue.
Just a thought that occurred to me the other day:
There are people willing to travel interstate or fly across the country to attend concerts, sporting matches and other live events. They might only stay for one day or one night before returning home, but, as far as I know, this is not generally considered a very absurd thing to do.
Essentially what these people do is pay a lot of money to go a long distance to see one person (or a small group of people) for whom they are but one in a crowd of thousands. Chances are they will not interact directly nor meet face-to-face. Yet, people still do this.
So is anyone then going to tell me that it is absurd for me to fly interstate just so that I can visit a friend for one day, one night or one hour?
Is it much different to attending a live event? Well, apart from being a more balanced ratio (one to one)
Yes, with technology, you can make video calls, send photos and whatever; but you can also watch sporting events from anywhere, and there’s bound to be concert footage on the internet somewhere. Still, it’s not the same, is it?
It’s not the same as being there in the flesh.
A very close friend of mine is preparing to move to Canberra in just over a week’s time. I have lost sleep thinking about how much I’m going to miss her. Just about the only thing making this easier is my confidence that we will keep in touch (we have already started making plans for visiting each other).
I think this will be both one of the hardest and easiest good-byes.
And if it is absurd, then I don’t care.
I feel like I’ve been very absent from the Thursday Doors scene – in fact, I know that I’ve been very absent because I’ve missed many weeks of Thursday Doors viewing and posting now. And I must apologise, but hopefully I can get back to a more regular TD schedule (probably still not weekly, but maybe every 2-3 weeks)
I’ve actually been re-inspired by a friend who’s honeymooning in Europe at the moment. She sent me a few photos of some lovely Swiss doors she’s found. I’d forgotten that I’d even told her about TD, but she clearly hadn’t forgotten! Continue reading
I started learning Japanese when I was in grade five. It was easy to tell that our teacher, Mr M., was rather passionate not only about the Japanese language but also about Japanese culture and everything else to do with Japan. He’d often teach us random tidbits of information that weren’t necessarily relevant/important to us learning the language. (But I suppose you could argue that fostering an interest in Japanese culture would help keep us motivated and enthusiastic about learning the words.)
I can’t believe it’s already been about five months since my friend and I went to Japan, and I’m barely even halfway through blogging about it. But I’ve come, at last, to one of the highlights of the trip (I probably have too many “highlights” from the trip, but who’s counting and/or enforcing a limit? If you are – stop it. That was a rhetorical question anyway.)
Ok, so after I started writing this, and got a few paragraphs in, I realised I was doing that thing again whereby I write this long preamble, and don’t quite get to the point. So, originally, I was planning to skim over the events of February 9th, and get onto our visit to Mt Fuji (which was the aforementioned highlight), but looks like that’s not gonna happen in this post. Even if you’ve enjoyed reading about my Japan trip so far, feel free to skip this one, and wait for the Mt Fuji post (hopefully coming up very soon). Continue reading
pistachio conspiracy #63 