I started typing this out the other night and then Internet Exploder decided to unceremoniously crash, so now I'm even further from being in the mood to type it again.

Thursday was a fairly important turning point – I put in my letter at work announcing my intention to move to the UK. I've got to say, the boss took it a lot better tahn I'd imagined, but then I guess one always overdramatises for the worst. He actually thought it was pretty cool, being something of an old-school 60's adventurer (the guy reminds me of Rampaging Roy Slaven to a small extent – always having a story about his personal experience in the most unlikely endeavours).

I knew it was going to be a change of pace moving back with Mum & Dad for the last few weeks of my Australian residency. I also remembered that it was a refreshing change when I moved out initially all those years ago. I just didn't realise how good it was to be out of there until this weekend.

For starters, it's obvious that Mum & Dad have gotten used to things being the way they want them, because I'll put something somewhere, and then come back to find it's been moved. Tidied up, if you will.

Now I know Mum means well, but she's a little prone to lecturing me on the evils of chemical food additives, etc. She's into Neways, which is a company that makes “natural shampoos” and soforth, and to support the validity of their products they circulate all these scientific findings about how regular shampoo is the main contributor to increases in male pattern baldness, and it gives you cancer, and all sorts of merry stuff like that. And then there's the food additives and nutrient balance discussion, so pretty much no matter WHAT you do, Mum will have a stack of “studies” that show that you're going to get diabetes and arse cancer from it. For god's sake, avoid the discussion about Milk being healthy at all costs. And of course chocolate milk has something else in it that makes ones testicles grow to the size of timpani. Every time she starts going off about one of these things, I keep wanting to reply “Shouldn't you be off at Stonehenge, dancing naked to celebrate the Vernal Equinox ?”, or similar.

Then there was Sunday – a couple of Dad's cousins, it turns out, weer coming to stay Monday night so I had to vacate the room which they've told me I can stay in for the few weeks, and it then had to be cleaned, rearranged, and all my stuff stashed out in the shed. Mum's lecturing me on one hand that I need to sort all my stuff out, ready to go away, and Dad's in the meantime cramming it all out into the shed because he doesn't want to know about it. Now I'm capable of some fairly swift feats, but sorting out a dozen boxes of items whilst they're still in their boxes is not one of them (note: Dad's approach to such a sorting process is to throw ALL of the boxes out, on the grounds that if you couldn't name what was in the boxes, you didn't need it that badly. THIS coming from a guy with 3 sheds).

I eventually regrouped and set my stereo up in the smaller room, and wondered at how I'm going to possibly reformat & configure 2 pc's before Thursday when they've been chucked out in the shed as well. I was amused that as I did all this Dad was *vacuuming* the room I'd just left, which led me to 2 thoughts: firstly that I'd only been in there a week, and there was no way it could have gotten that dirty, and secondly, I don't remember him vacuuming when I came to stay ! Hurrumph.

Anyway, as I keep thinking, it's not long now. 17 days or something, and of course my farewell party will account for 3 of those.

Bob & Kay are coming back to stay next weekend as well, so I've elected to stay in the small bedroom for the time being rather than have to go through the heartache and rigamarole of being shifted around again.

Having said that, I'll bet Dad's got Cousin Kelvin lined up to come & stay, and of course Kelvin *always* stays in the room that I'm in at the minute, so I'll be given the bum's rush yet again.

I think I might call Spiro and see if he's still got a spare room at his place ?

2004-04-12 : The days just fly past…
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