What I did on my weekend, by Rosanne Bersten, aged 37 and ³⁄₄

While I wait in between inter­min­able reloads on this silly web-based CMS, let me regale you with a tale!

journey2master  and I flew up to Sydney on Friday night as it has been 20 whole years since I left high school. Strange but true.

Unbe­knownst to us, there was a huge elec­trical storm raging in Sydney town and so our plane was delayed for a while. We filled in the time chat­ting with thorfinn  who was coin­cid­ent­ally on the same plane. Finally they opened up one runway in Sydney, and all of the planes that had been wait­ing took off with 10 minutes each between them, aiming to beat the curfew into Sydney. We arrived in Sydney only an hour late, aided by 75kmh tail-winds (we’d left an hour and a half late). Mum was already circ­ling the air­port wait­ing to pick us up.

We went to the bag­gage claim carou­sel and lo! The number of our flight appeared on a carou­sel. But no bag­gage emerged. After a long time, I went and sat down and did some mark­ing while Doug waited. Even­tu­ally, there was an announce­ment that all flights from Mel­bourne, includ­ing can­celled flights to Mel­bourne, would be on carou­sel 3, all for Adelaide on 2, Bris­bane on 1 etc. What a night­mare! Told Mum to go park some­where. At a quarter to one in the morn­ing, we finally got our bags, almost three *hours* after we were sup­posed to land.

Next day, Mum, Doug and I trooped off, some­what exhausted, to the Walk Against Warm­ing March. That was quite good. Bumped into murphus  and chat­ted, which was terrific. 

The school reunion that night was actu­ally superb. Doug went out and caught up with anthonybax­ter , because it was a “no part­ners allowed” event. There were many, many women I really enjoyed catch­ing up with, many more preg­nant women than I expec­ted, and the food was just fant­astic – they’d gone to enorm­ous effort to cater to my food restric­tions, event to the point of making me a samosa out of chick­pea flour and having gluten-free dark chocol­ate thingies for dessert. I even net­worked a little… one of my former class­mates is now a human rights lawyer work­ing with a big human rights organ­isa­tion and we had a good chat about some future pro­jects with her cur­rent workplace.

Sunday, Doug and I went to Glebe Fair and dis­covered some awe­some new sources for all-nat­ural baby clothes and other stuff (must send out notes to every­one soon about gifts – we love the fact that people are start­ing to gve us things, but we’re embar­rassed about want­ing to give back the poly­es­ter things, and the PVC things and the things Doug is aller­gic to). Then we had a big picnic near the water with family and friends, dinner with the sister that could­n’t make it to the picnic and then plane home.

Exhausted, we slept in the van, because every item of fur­niture we own is cur­rently in the kit­chen so the floors can be done. Monday, the carpet puller-upperer came and pulled up the carpet, then the con­crete-lev­el­ler came and lev­elled the con­crete. Slept at fizit’s. Today, the floor­board-layer was sup­posed to come and lay the floor­boards but he was sick! So we have an extra, unplanned night either stay­ing with the lovely fizit , assum­ing she does­n’t kick us out… or sleep­ing in the van.