..

impromptu trip with some friends tonight to go see a fireworks show tonight, which apparently was a competition of some sort? literally no idea, it was so wet and rainy i couldn't hear anything they were trying to say over the speakers. anyway. freezing cold, pissing rain, i'd climbed onto the railing of the pier for a better view and sliced my hand open but it was aaaaallll worth it for the cute little loveheart fireworks <3 was actually a very impressive show, but i am biased and think any pyrotechnics are good pyrotechnics

one of my favourite animal charity events is doing it's final run this year as costs of living is too high and the organisation is no longer reaching it's fundraising goals. it's such a shame, i've met so many wonderful people doing the event when i still had a dog, and i have spent the last few years volunteering my time as a vet nurse to be on stand by for any pet injuries that occur on the day. the organisation has been running it for 30 years, it's so sad to see it go :( i had a lot of fun today though, as always; everyone who volunteers there has so much genuine love and passion for animal rescues.

anyway. get involved in your local community events; volunteer, participate, promote - everyone takes these things for granted until we lose them for good. here's some wonderful pups from the booth today

this weekend was a combined birthday/mother's day weekend! i spent the entire last half of last year dreading my birthday just because i'm on the later end of my 20s now and it feels like i should be more advanced in life than i currently am, but! that's the bad vibes talking and there's no real way to do life so fuck it, as long as i'm having fun then who cares. i didn't do anything super special to celebrate; brunch with friends and dinner with family so we could celebrate mother's day at the same time.

i've been suuuuper into matcha recently and have been spending absurd amounts of money on it while i'm out, so i got a really nice matcha set + some fancy tins of powder for home, which is very exciting! currently drinking a homemade iced matcha as i type this which is much easier than going all the way to my nearest cafe that do them, plus they close at 1pm so i'm usually just completely out of luck if i want one in the afternoon. i also thought i'd do a little cheeky treat myself and bought a pack of interesting looking film for my camera that i've seen floating around on ads. it's a pack of 5 different rolls that all look like i'd have a lot of fun working with them - i've never really tried anything fancier than kokak gold before, so i'm really looking forward to these ones coming! should be here by the end of the week.

also because i don't know where else to talk about this but i really need to share these photos; i ALMOST brought a stray kitten home from work. oh my god he was the sweetest little bean i've ever met, no microchip or tags or any kind of registration but i just couldn't keep him knowing that he might have a loving owner out there somewhere because he was SOOOO sooo smoochy. he was fully asleep and purring like a machine in my lap the entire day. i miss him every day i need a cat so bad

i did something silly todayyy and got up nice and early, got ready for work, drove my ass all the way there and clocked in before someone told me i wasn't supposed to be working today :') it's alright though, i decided to make the most of my early midweek morning and i went for a beautiful hike! it's getting cool now and this is my favourite time to go exploring my local wilderness.

i decided to take my camera and go for a nice long walk through my favourite part of a nearby national park; it's a beautiful valley with a bunch of waterfalls and rivers running through it. i ran into a lost little dog friend who kept me company for a little while before he wandered off back to the carpark. it was lovely; so quiet, not a soul around but me. all i could hear is the water and the wind. the circuit takes you around the river and waterfalls, then down to the bottom of the falls and through a cave, and then back up the other side. took me about an hour or so.

the mark of any good impromptu hike is coming home covered in mud and also bleeding a little, in my opinion. i took a bunch of photos on my film camera too, so once that roll is up, i'm gonna send it in alongside another one i've been hanging onto for so long that i don't remember what's on it. probably next week. hopefully the pics come out nicely!

i have been thinking about mongolia a lot recently.

i have it in my head that i want it to be my next big solo overseas trip; there's some beautiful things to see there, and i was considering doing some kind of week long photography tour or something like that. i am a horse girl through and through and i think getting the opportunity to see a przewalski's horse in real life in the wild might be a bucket list item for me if i had one (in 2019, i read a book called THE LAST WILD HORSES by maja lunde, which is a post apocalyptic novel about przewalski horses and being human. it really gave me a new appreciation for them!). it sounds like a silly reason to want to go to a whole new country but is it really any different from wanting to go see, like, a big clock in london? both things bring me great joy. aside from that, it's just such a beautiful place that i know so little about. this checks so many boxes on my "should i go there?" list that i think it would be silly not to.

anyway. welcome to my mid-april check-in post. aside from borderline civil war at my job, everything is fine and normal :) i had like five days off from work in a row for easter, so i have been taking some very nice chill out time catching up with friends whos schedules often do not align with mine. i wanted to spend a bit of time geocaching this weekend since it's getting cooler and easier to take long bushland treks, but unfortunately it has rained for the majority of easter weekend so i didn't get the chance. stocked up my trinket collection to drop into caches, though!

i have recently been spending time revisiting older stuff i used to really enjoy - it kind of started with a new FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS playthrough and then backslid into digging up some older things i never finished or always wondered about. just yesterday, i 100%'d the IB revamp on steam, which was such a delight; great revamp while still retaining that nostalgia.

one of my favourite re-discoveries, though, has been NASTY RED DOGS. this is a webcomic i started following in 2018 as its first chapter was being posted on tumblr. i think i caught up in 2019 and it was on a long hiatus, so i forgot about it for several years. i went to check in on it and to my surprise, it not only had way more chapters on it's new site, but just recently finished chapter 8 this week! this is such a delightful comic, i cannot recommend this enough to anyone who's interested in horror, occult apocalypses, and a bunch of fucky astral plane shit. be warned it is 18+, nsfw, and tackles a bunch of rough themes, but an overall absolutely banger comic and i am sooo fuckinggg excited to be back into it again.

otherwise, getting back into spooky old media kicked me into gear enough to draw my first two big art pieces of the year (in APRIL!!! shocking!!!). i usually manage to produce something substantial every month, but i haven't had the drive to draw much this year, unfortunately. i think a lot of that has to do with the fact that i have nowhere to post stuff anymore - dA went down the shitter and i don't like art based discord communities. i am weighing up doing an art page here just as a dumping ground - for now though, NRD has motivated me to work on my spooky projects again, and i wanted to tidy up my artfight page and get everything up to date there before july, so it feels nice to be back in the swing of the art thing again :)

happy end of march!! the year is going horrendously fast already

kind of a chaotic month for me so far! we had the cyclone, of course, and then a massive fuck off tree fell onto my house, snapped a powerline and bent the power pole, so all of that needed replacing and fixing. we had to cut down the tree ourselves to free the cars and eventually, it took so long for SES to even get out to us that we had just hacked away at the tree on our own. we had two weeks total without power or water, but we live on a pretty small secluded street where everyone knows each other, so we did get to borrow a neighbour's generator for the last week. could have been worse, all things considered! i ended up taking Hopscotch to his vet to be boarded for the duration, just because with no light, heat, or fresh water, i was getting worried that he wouldn't be getting adequate UVB, which can lead to vitamin d3 deficencies and a whole load of other problems.

on the bright side, i didn't have a lot to do for 2wks, so i was doing a LOT of reading. i don't think i've gotten through so many books so quickly since i was in school. it was nice, actually, i'm hoping to keep up the pace and at least finish the series i had started.

books i read this month!
you can check out my thoughts in my media log page!

it also meant that i was staying out of the house as much as possible to stave off the boredom, and i ended up going to some places in my town that i had no idea existed, like a whole ass performing arts precinct?? i saw my first ever stand up comedy show this month! i'm usually not suuuuper keen on stand up, but i was invited to see a comedy show with my coworker, who also recently moved to australia from south africa and wanted to see this south african comedian who was performing there. a couple of us ended up going to dinner and the show, which was better than i expected! there was crowd surfing involved, it was a lot.

otherwise it's just been a lot of trudging along and getting through the month. i'm having a real frustrating time at work at the moment but there's not much that can be done about it. i'm taking myself off surgical nursing for a week or two just so i can have a chance to chill out and breathe for a second; i usually love it, but there's been a reoccuring pattern of people specifically assigning me challenging and high risk anaesthetics because they don't want to do them and it is kind of disheartening when you go to work every day and just get piled with shitty, difficult anaesthetics and rough surgical cases. i need a few wins, yknow. a nice puppy spey that i can cuddle afterwards and not worry about. maybe a nice easy dental. just for a week or two.

i'm considering going away towards the end of the year; if not on my tentatively planned africa vetmed trip, then certainly somewhere else. i do also need to get my laptop looked at since one of the fans is absolutely fucked, so depending on if that's an expensive fix or not, i might just take a few weeks off work and go up north or visit my hometown or something. though this means i'd be driving and i don't think my shitbox would make it that far without a good service first, which i have also been putting off because the timing belt needs replacing and i'm just really morally against spending a few thousand dollars on a 15 year old car, sooo. much to consider.

anyway, here's some other non-related stuff i checked out this month that i want to talk about:

quick little check-in from my local library - all is mostly okay! the cyclone passed us by with no problems - it was actually a tropical low in the end anyway - but the rain has been relentless and softened the ground into a muddy sludge. all this means is that one of our huge trees that's been slowly listing to one side has finally uprooted and fallen onto our shed, mangled our powerlines, blocked us in the house and blocked our cars in the shed. so. no power, no cell service, no water, no cars for the last few days. i kinda just had to do some parkour through the branches and lines to get out and walked my way to the top of the street to uber to the library to organise some help.

but all things considered, it could have been much worse! nobody's hurt, the house is intact, the cars are intact. now we just need to weather the floods for a litle while and we're good to go. i'm going to try to free my car later on today - it's a 15yo shitbox so a couple of scrapes from branches won't be too devastating - but it's sort of stuck between two poles and will take about 180 3-point turns to ease it out, but i have faith. that thing will live forever out of sheer spite. but yes, anyway, just wanted to check in and update some stuff while i have a few spare moments to myself ✌️

i was going to hold off until the end of this week to post a blog entry for the beginning of the month, because i was supposed to be going to see green day in concert tomorrow night, however, there is a tropical cyclone headed towards my city and unfortunately it has been cancelled, so there's no thrilling plans around for the rest of my week.

so. the big news this week is that cyclone alfred has taken a sharp turn around and is due to hit the coast some time thursday/early friday. it's the first time the lower end of this state has been hit by a cyclone in 50 years! i'm certainly no stranger to cyclones, i used to live up north where certain parts of summer were just called "cyclone season", and i've gone through my fair share of substantially worse ones than alfred, so i think i'm more mildly inconvenienced by the fact that they've cancelled my indoor concert for it. granted, we are south of the cyclone and will be getting the worst of the rain, so i'm expecting a bit of flooding but, really, whenever i think i'm worried about it, i just think back to sitting in my dark empty house up north with no power while a category 5 shredded the walls and roof off for 10 minutes straight. nothing compares. i do think this nifty satellite map that's being passed around is sick as hell though - when i still lived in a cyclone area, all i could do is watch the updates live on tv until the power went out and the just had to say fuck it and wing it on my own

something i very much enjoyed doing recently was getting back in the saddle (ha) and getting into horse riding again! i love horses and used to ride when i was younger, but it's been a very long time since i got to ride a horse of my own accord and not just sit on one while it does a trail ride. i went to meet my coworkers horse and give him a test run, and i am honestly so surprised at how easy i found it to get into the swing of things. he was a very sweet old horse and quite receptive to verbal commands, so he was such a good starting off point for me to get back into this as a hobby; the reason i was looking into it is because some time in the next year, said coworker and i are looking at doing a 3wk long veterinary med course in south africa, working on a safari reserve! it sounds fantastic, and we both have agreed to also do a 7 day horseback safari to round off the holiday, however, you need to be a sort of advanced intermediate level of riding to be allowed to do that, so i want to get the practice in. i hope we get around to it though, it sounds like such a once in a lifetime opportunity given it all lines up for once. i'm so interested in wildlife vetmed and that's probably about as wild as you can get.

other fun news as of lately is that my beautiful dragonfruit plant that i have been growing tirelessly for 8 whole years gave me a magnificent flower display this month! dragonfruits soon, provided this cyclone doesn't obliterate it. the flowers are so beautiful, massive, have this really nice subtle sweet smell to them and bring in so many pollinators. i could hear the bees buzzing the morning they bloomed from inside my house. pics below + a bonus lilypad flower off a plant i have never seen flower before!!

speaking of photos, i also just finished off a roll of film the other day that i had sitting in my om-10. i'm not actually sure when i started it, or if i even finished it. i just took a few more photos until the dial read 28 and assumed that's all i had. i am going to drop it off later this week, but i don't know what i'll find on there, or if it even worked? it's some kind of film i've never used before, a higher ISO, and it made a horrific grinding noise when i rewound the film, so i also have a suspicion it wasn't in properly. all part of the unknowable joys of film photography, i suppose. i'll upload them here once they've been developed and scanned.

now. interests yap section. here's what i've been into these last few weeks to wrap everything up:

quick little mid-feb update just so i'm keeping on top of things here; it's been a humid and wet month, a lot of rain and very warm days. i'm looking forward to march & would really like things to start cooling down sometime soon. we had a horrible warm winter last year and it sucked, i need my three month reprieve from 30+ celcius days or i will perish. it has, however, been excellent for my garden. as of this week, i imagine everything will have one last big bloom for the year as spring comes to a close. things are already starting to flower. my beautiful thai constellation monstera got absolutely ravaged by caterpillars this spring, which i don't usually mind and i won't do anything with pesticides out there anyway, but it's coming back to it's former glory with a few shiny new leaves this week. i like trusting the process, it knows what it's doing. i also recently moved my carnivorous plants to my pond! they do great in the sunny patch i was keeping them in, but i struggle to keep them as damp as they like to be. i have a goldfish pond in a semi-shaded area, which might be detrimental to the plants, but the moisture coming off it will benefit them more, i think. i'll leave them there for a few months and see how they go. i cut the dead pitchers off the pitcher plants and they've almost immediately started springing up new ones, so that's a good sign.

this weekend, i went to a local orchid show! it's a little ways inland from me, hosted in a small suburb up the mountain. i like orchids but never have much luck growing them, though my dad has quite a sizeable collection, so i often go with him to see what locals have been growing and putting up for display each year. my dad is super into vanda orchids, not just for their beautiful flowers but their root systems! they grow crazy aerial roots and look fantastic in hanging baskets. we went in there with the intention of finding some odd and unique vanda's, and ended up meeting the guy who grew them for the show! he was very nice, gave us his number and invited us to come and check out his greenhouses where he grows them. i hadn't intended on getting any plants from the show, but he was just really nice and he had this hybrid vanda x that flowered so young and had beautiful orange flowers that i just couldn't resist.

something i have been trying to work on this year is generally healthy mental health, and a lot of that means getting away from the screens and computers and doing stuff outside. it also means i've been keeping a physical daily journal where i just scribble down whatever is on my mind, but i feel like i'm only really good at that when i'm super anxious or frustrated about something and need somewhere to get my thoughts down. i never really talk about the nice stuff in there, which is a shame because it means i never get to reflect on the positive stuff!! i guess that's kind of what this is for anyway - i made this entire website because blogging on wordpress just wasn't doing it for me. anyway. i guess it is kind of working because i do feel better than i have in a while, despite the state of everything going on right now. some nice things from this month i want to highlight are:
- one of my co-workers randomly presented me with a very cute little origami fox on a slow day the other week and said "your favourite animal is a fox, right? here you go!" and it was just so endearing because omg what do you mean you remembered the one time 2yrs ago i mentioned i like foxes. so sweet. i cherish it. it's stuck up on my locker in the clinic at the moment.
- a friend of mine recently went to melbourne and when she returned, she gave me a little resin cast seahorse that she had picked up from an oddity shop because it reminded her of me. i also love it a lot and it is proudly in my cabinet. i am very glad people see taxidermy and immediately go 'oh yes, vulpes' lmao
- went out for a nice lowkey dinner with my coworkers recently and was reminded of how much i have probably got one of the best teams to work with on the planet. i have never worked with a team i like this much before. never felt as comfortable at a job as i do in this one :)
- my frog was having lameness issues with his leg for weeks in january but i think that is fully resolved! i haven't seen any issues since, and he's put on the weight he had inexplicably lost and has been maintaining a good healthy 50g

a good month overall! so far. now i am going to yap insufferably about the Interests Of The Month (tm), because i like looking back at the end of the year and seeing how long something can rattle around in my brain for.

its been a smooth start to the new year for me, for which i am very grateful. despite the full car headlight meltdown, which was easy fixed. december was kind of a nightmare for my work life but it seems like things are settling down and starting to go nicely again. i have officially been freed from the role of head nurse! my contract ends in early feb and i'm free to just go back to normal and stop worrying about dumb shit i don't care enough about. new staff is in the works so we can function to full capacity again. i cannot wait. we have had some crazy stuff coming into the clinic recently too, i think we had three consecutive emergencies back to back one random day last week. hectic! i'm really looking forward to my contract ending because this means they'll be hiring a new head nurse instead, who actually has that experience which means i will finally have someone to ask my questions to, rather than just having to figure stuff out on my own.

i did get to do a bunch of cool stuff this month already - took my dad to our local theme parks for the first time, i got to visit the university jellyfish research labs, got to visit a native wildlife conservation park and see loads of cool little critters. i have been enjoying sprucing up and maintaining my new fish tank which is also doubling as a hydroponics setup for pothos at the moment.

in other semi-related news, i had to take hopscotch to the vet a week ago for an issue he's got with his left arm. it seems to be uncomfortable for him; he'd been holding it a bit funny and seemed reluctant to extend it all the way out. it comes and goes, sometimes he will wake up and won't move it, and then suddenly an hour later, he's up and clambering all over the tank like nothing happened. i took him into my local exotics vet and had a consult that only really ended in some NSAIDs dispensed for him, as even if it was broken, there's not much you can do about it. can't splint a frog leg! the meds have brought down the swelling in his leg, but it does still randomly seem to bother him from time to time. there is a high chance that this will just be a lifelong thing, possibly an injury or issue during his juvenile development stages. hard to say! he is still mobile and it doesn't hinder his movement or climbing when it goes into that 'locked' state, so the vet isn't too worried about it in the long run. i learned a lot from my vet trip though, it is truly humbling to be a client for unfamiliar species, and he is a super cool and knowledgable man.

other stuff i've been up to; i'm trying very hard to get back into reading again, as it's been sooo so long since i enjoyed a book properly. winding down in the evening with 30min minimum of reading has meant i'm absolutely tearing through books i thought i'd never finish. my friend had dragged me into an admittedly really good tiktok based musical about the oddysey, of all things (EPIC: THE MUSICAL, you can watch a whole playlist of the songs and animatics right over here!) and i actually really, really love the oddysey, so. i'm re-reading my fagles translation, and i went and bought a new translation i've never read before that i'm going to read next.

REJOYCE, FOR SHE HAS ARRIVED!!!

i have never shipped a fish to me before. this was an absolutely insane concept to me, but, i saw this pretty fish online and just had to have her. her name is tobiko! following my sushi theme i've always had for my bettas. she's a koi halfmoon plakat, and only very young! i've never had a female betta, nor any short fin species, so this is all firsts for me. she's very active and curious, i'm so happy with the choice i made. but i believe that is it for this long ass blog post! it was a delight to set this tank up, i'm excited to have a long running tank of bettas in the future :)

just a little short of the 3wk mark today and i have to say, i am thrilled with how things are progressing here. my plants are absolutely thriving, the roots on my frogbit are almost touching the ground! the pothos i experimented with are growing roots in the tank water, and all of my shrimp are still alive! i actually saw a moult just a few days ago, so they're growing too.

i added in 4x more plants this week - some dwarf grass for ground coverage, and three mystery plants that didn't have names for up the back. they're delightfully leafy and dense, and i saw roots growing out of the tops of the stalks, which means easy to propogate later down the line if i want more. i got one very tall one that was growing out of the surface of the water in the pet store. the two bushier compact ones i got for the middle of the tank are these beautiful red toned leafy things that i hope will maintain their colour without a co2 system. i did also have to soak them in a very diluted bleach solution to rid them of any snails, since i saw a few of them in the plant tank.

i have unfortunately had to pluck two snails out of this tank so far and i am not happy about it. there's not much i can do given the shrimps in there, so for now, i am going to hard limit the shrimp food and only feed them every 7-10 days and let them forage on their own. ideally, whatever snails did manage to sneak in there will eat the very limited algae that's in the tank and eventually die out with no food left. i don't want to kill them off because they are good for the tank in a managed population, it's just that managing a snail population is borderline impossible. nto catastrophising yet, though! nothing is wildly out of control at the present moment, so i can hold out for another week or so and see where we end up.

happy new year everyone!!!! I hope everyone had a good night, be it sleeping or enjoying explosions

personally I headed out to the beach at midnight to watch the the city's firework display with a bunch of other rowdy drunk people and it was a delight. I love new year so much there is just something special about everyone gathering to celebrate another arbitrary lap around the sun and collectively deciding to mark it as a fresh new start together. joy and whimsy. also I love pyrotechnics

I did a lot in 2024 without really even realising it. I saw concerts and got into the local live music scene, I went to local theatre productions, I met my two best online friends a handful of times and we all met in person together for the first time in 8 years! I had a major promotion at work, which wasn't always a good thing, but really did test my skills in both nursing and management skills. I threw myself fully into some cases and got really involved, there's some Im really glad I followed through to the end. I went to Japan with my best friends! That really challenged my ability to adapt and learn, and I came out of it with a better knowledge of the language which was awesome.

I have a lot of faraway plans going into the new year both in personal life and in terms of creative projects (+ my site!). I think last year I really grew into myself as a person and I spent a lot of it working fervently on bettering myself. I'm a little short of the goals I wanted to achieve but I'm close enough that I dont want to go into 2025 with that rise n grind mindset, yknow? This year is about taking it slow and appreciating the moments, spending more time creatively and appreciating the little things.

site-wise i think I want to further my technical and coding skills and really work on making this place clean and streamlined and learn WHY we code the way we do rather than just pasting in something from stackoverflow because it works. i originally started this site because i wanted somewhere to talk about my life and interests, but i'm really, really bad at maintaining physical journals. i'd seen a friend blogging about stuff on wordpress or something, and i thought that was such a neat idea if i could think of a way to compile things into their own sections. and so this site was born! it has truly been such a valuable outlet for me to ramble about whatever i want on here without having to bother everyone in my life about it. it's original purpose was to talk about my taxidermy and yap about my day to day life, and it has become so much more than that in the few short months i've been maintaining it. I'll have to accept that I'll never be happy with the layout because I simply can't settle! but that's the joy in a personal web page I suppose, it'll only grow and change with me. I also really want to work on my side project site that I haven't really told anyone about and that's why it's so slow going, I think. I need that pressure of being perceived to really work on anything!

good things ahead, I believe!! 🩷