Well that weekend went fast! (I have to remind myself that our weekends in Sydney are numbered. In the hundreds, sure, but still numbered.) We spent Saturday morning looking for a new place to live, and why does this sound like a familiar refrain? Our lease was up this month and rather than “rolling over” (into a month-by-month tenancy), the real-estate agents have issued us a termination notice, “…to protect the owners.

Maybe I’m getting older. I mean, OF COURSE that is OBJECTIVELY true, of all of us. Even if time is multidimensional, we seem to be falling this way at near-light speed — with no clear way to steer, let alone slow down. We each grow a tiny bit older with every Planck time clock-tick, our cells die and replenish, the pattern of “us” which arises from and is embedded in the physicality of the universe transforms and changes, like a “river once crossed“.

It’s been a couple of weeks since our last post. Jules is back at school, giving Dee the space to ramp up her job search — with a twist, as she’s looking to move into agile project management (i.e. scrum master, product owner, etc.). Not something she’s (yet!) done, but seems like a good move (she’ll be good at it) and will be something she can enjoy — just as long as we can convince someone to take a chance!

Oh, it’s Easter again already? What have we been up to? We’ve now done a full week of the I Quit Sugar programme, and I think it’s been pretty good: the food has been yummy, the recipes easy to follow, and I haven’t felt like I’m missing out on anything. Of course, being week #1 I’ve not tried to be too strict — I even had a cafe-latte a day (and black coffee otherwise).

Sad-ish news: Dee’s contract is not being renewed. So she’s on the hunt for work! Jobs, you are ALLOWED to hunt. Just leave these guys alone. Despite our new single-income status, we spent last weekend at the Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, “glamping” in the Zoofari Park there. We explored the zoo on Day #1, before checking into our “tent”: a canvas structure, true, but we hot and cold water, electricity, a massive four-poster bed and a wooden deck from which we could watch the giraffes, addax and other animals.

A long, long week is finally done. I worked from home today, and Dee is sick, so we went to get Jules from “after-care” at about 4pm. (We could have picked him up at 3, when school finishes, but (a) he loves after-school care, and (b) we pay for it either way. Oh yes, Jules has (finally?) started at primary school; incidentally, we just saw his school featured on Channel Ten’s The Living Room — the same Living Room that gave us a lounge room makeover courtesy of Temple & Webster, yes.

The house is dark, and quiet. It’s peaceful here at the moment — almost half-past midnight, so not entirely unexpected. I’ve googled for a reason to drink an admittedly small single-malt (antioxidants! protection from dementia!) and snuck into the bedroom to retrieve the bottle. “Cinematic Chillout” plays quietly in the background, my screen is suitably dimmed and I’m about as relaxed as I’m going to get. It’s the day after (what I insist on calling) ‘Straya Day, perhaps better known (and certainly better loved) as “The Hottest 100 countdown”.

Let’s see: what happened this week? (My mum has reminded me that I forgot to mention the parental visits in my last post: we’ve had two two separate instances of “nannie/nanna” visiting, and Jules insists that he went to the moon with grandma, so perhaps you can understand how I forgot. It was lovely having visitors, of course. We did the usual “touristy” things when we could — ate more take-aways (and drank more wine!

My last post here was July. /me sighs. It’s not that we haven’t been doing things that are worthy of writing about — things I might want to remember later, to read and reminisce, to recall what it was like to be “young and free” (read: almost 40 and a parent) in my (hopefully short-lived¹) dotage. But, somehow, it has become very difficult to find the time/space to actually order my thoughts in to anything like a coherent narrative, let alone record them.

Today we spent over 20 minutes in traffic to go the 1 kilometre from home to preschool — it’s time to start looking for a house on the other side of Parramatta Road again. There is, of course, no urgency — we’re in a lease after all — but we’ve both agreed we should keep an eye out for a better property in a more accessible location i.e. Annandale or Leichhardt at this point.