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 ✌️

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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: