Safe home

We brunched with my folks at Sydney air­port and swapped presents. We were met at the air­port in Mel­bourne by 

crys­tal­storm

and the Hamish part of 

kir­mish

, which was awe­some. Then we dropped by Fruit Ped­dlers in West­garth to pick up fresh fruit and vegies for mush­room and asparagus risotto, went home and cooked lunch, caught up with Ann, the fab­ulous woman who has been living upstairs here since 1970 (I think she’s in her 80s) and now Doug is crash­ing out for a while. I’m doing the “power on through” thing, at least for now. 

But then, I slept on the plane. Whenever people ask me that “if you had a super­power, what would it be?” ques­tion, I usu­ally say some­thing like “con­nect­ing people together” but Doug argues it’s the power to fall asleep any­where, any­time, in about five seconds flat.

It’s inter­est­ing being back. It’s our flat, but the fur­niture is in odd places and half the stuff is Jack’s, not ours. Our room has to be sorted out and even the bed has been moved. So it feels like home but not. It also feels bizar­rely like time has con­cat­en­ated and the last eight months didn’t really exist; instead, we just stepped from Janu­ary to Decem­ber in the same house with the same weather but the fur­niture shif­ted overnight.

I can also sud­denly see so many flaws with the place. In my ima­gin­a­tion over the last eight months, the space has been warm and filled with my knick knacks where I knew them to be. I didn’t pop­u­late that vision with wine stains on car­pets and awk­ward metal blinds. I’ve known for a while that I wanted to put floor­boards in the lounge room, but now I want to do the bed­room too. I also want to put in cedar blinds through­out. I ima­gine I now can’t do that until I get a job although we’ll see – I’ll get some quotes and get star­ted on it.

Yes, yes, I know. Don’t I ever just *stop* and enjoy? This *is* me enjoy­ing. I like having things to do and to organ­ise. Wed­ding first, then back to jobs and the apart­ment. All good.