As I live most of my public life on Facebook (much to my own moral repulsion) these days this blog is well and truly neglected. But I’ve had a fun little interaction with a fellow blogger today (thanks Jonathan) which prompted me back here for a catch up.

This time last year life more or less ground to a halt on a global scale. For me work life carried on as normal (my company was at the tail of end of three major construction projects and it was full steam ahead). As I work in close to solitary confinement in my little office and drive the 10 minutes to work I carried on as usual. None of this working from home malarkey.

But my social life evaporated overnight. The planned US trip was cancelled and refunded. As were all the concerts, plays and musicals. We went from being out 3, 4 nights a week to just being IN.

N moved in which seemed prudent (isn’t that a romantic way of puting it… but who am I kidding, romance was stomped out of me years ago). Autumn and winter rolled on and we spent our nights at home, binging all the tv (if streaming services weren’t invented for a global pandemic I’ll be a monkey’s uncle – WTAF does that saying even mean???!!).

But the dust settled somewhat and I have found myself extremely busy again. In no particular order:

• Through some deeply serendipitous social connection Will found a perfect supported accommodation situation and slowly, gradually moved out of home. That sentence glosses over an amazing, wonderful, exciting, stressful and on-goingly time and bandwidth consuming process. While Will has settled in beautifully into what can only be described as a little piece of suburban paradise I have had to battle the NDIS gods in an exhausting battle involving my local MP and a number (greater than my fingers) of IRL and Zoom meetings, phone calls, emails and regular banging head on wall sessions. Still haven’t got to where we need to be but I’m a tenacious little creature and good will prevail.
• Miss M started Year 11, her penultimate year of school. Like most mothers I’m perplexed at how we’ve got here, given she just started kindergarten about 3 weeks ago. However she’s now a senior, which required a new uniform, half of Officeworks and a newly superior attitude to those in the younger grades. She appears to have much more work than I ever did at university – work she does while chatting to a minimum of three friends online and watching a neverending stream of chattering buffoons on a video platform outside of my geriatric field of understanding. Aldus Huxley didn’t get close to how it was really going to be.
• Speaking of studying, I’m now a student again. Towards the end of last year two things merged in my mind. 1) Did I really want to/could I even turn my love of cooking into a job? 2) How would I survive an already super boring job when our workload had crashed from very busy to nothing at all going on? So I asked my boss if I could work 4 days a week since work had dried to a trickle for the foreseeable future and then I enrolled at TAFE. So I’m now working on my Certificate III in Commercial Cookery at the local TAFE and LOVING IT! I love the cooking (though this stage of the course does seem to involve a lot of very basic retro dishes which are almost funny) but I love the different environment, learning new things, being with new people and NOT being at work five days a week.
• I’m reaching out to local cafes for work experience and hoping that they don’t laugh too hard when they see I’m 52 years old. I have my first shift tomorrow morning so stay tuned for a yay or nay update.
• I’m also deeply involved with the Parramatta Women’s Shelter as I’ve joined the board. This grew out of an initial contact with a desire to help the fledgling organisation to now being actively involved with the newsletter, bookkeeping (though I’m stepping away from that one), volunteer management and fundraising. There’s so much to do. We shouldn’t have to have such organisations but we do. We should have government funding for such organisations but we don’t. So I could complain or I can do what I can, which is what I’m doing.
• Our social life has gradually been returning as Covid is currently (could change at any moment/taking nothing for granted) under control in Australia. So we’re back to being out 3 or 4 nights a week and while it’s brilliant it’s also exhausting. I’m finding myself thinking back wistfully to last year’s lockdown. But I’m just a girl who can’t say no (wow doesn’t that song title seem outrageously out of place in the modern world?) so I will apparently keel over from exhaustion before I choose to stay home rather than go to a movie/play/musical/dinner/book launch/opening of an envelope.

I believe you’re all caught up. Hopefully less than a year until the next post. Eye roll.