Hello everyone! Did you miss me? Probably not. Let’s face it, only about 3.6 people read this blog and I’m fairly confident that, apart from the occasional rando from Europe, about 95% of visitors share my surname.For those of you that are not my stalkerish parents, I’ll let you in on what’s been going on over the last year or so since I posted.

I don’t know if it’s actually been a year or not since I wrote anything, but it feels close. I squished a lot into the last few months and I’m only now sort of coming out of my I-have-so-much-shit-to-do phase.

I finished my thesis and handed it in. In the time it took me to actually complete the following things happened:

• Husband lost his job.
• I started working two jobs at separate hospitals to keep the bills paid and the kid in daycare thinking that he’d get a job soon. Nope.
• I got transferred to a new, much more stressful position against my will (thanks!) and took up more hours.
• We all moved in with my parents and rented our house out.
• Husband moved to Brisbane after finding work (ten months later). My job won’t release me from my contract so I stay.
• I realise I cannot be a single parent because shiftwork is so prohibitive. One day it literally took 3 different people to babysit the kid for varying increments between 5pm-930pm while I was on an evening shift.
• I moved to Brisbane, finally. My first six consecutive weeks off in 19 years!
• I started another new hospital job. It appears that yet again, I will be thrust into positions of responsibility due to poor/no staffing that I am untrained for.
• Develop severe anxiety.
• I temporarily lost the use of my eye after a dodgeball accident
• Daughter started school
• I realised I don’t see daughter anymore with school hours + shiftwork at the hospital
• I realise I actually hate being a nurse and I loathe the bureaucratic process that governs nursing.
• I leave hospital and start 9-5 in different industry (I stay at the hospital casually)
• New job turns out to be very stressful for first few months as half the staff are as new as me and there is a lot of catchup to be done. Some days I am out of the house for 12 hours.
• We get asked to leave our rental house because the owners want to sell it.
• Finally find the perfect house and miraculously get a loan to pay for it, despite having fuck all savings and me being in a new job less than three months (my boss wrote a letter waiving probation for me).
• Seller of house insists on ridiculously long settlement, so end up with 4 days between settlement of new house and lease expiry on rental house.
• Thesis gets done. Somehow.

Anyway, I got a totally not-shit mark for it which will enable me to skip my masters and go straight to a PhD if I so choose. I chose not to at this point as it has been a grand total of 9 consecutive years of me studying! I will concentrate instead on expanding the creative part of my thesis (a novella) into a full novel.

My life currently is very sedate. I have no work stress. Sometimes it’s stressful, but I don’t take it home with my any more. I have breakfast AND dinner with my kid every day. I have weekends with my kid and my husband. I make way more money. Husband got promoted after only a year, above the others that had been there longer. Kid is doing great at school and is really the most amazing girl ever. I see my friends regularly because I live in the same town as them now.

I am no longer running on 150%. I’ve spent the last two months watching television, reading books and playing games when I’m not working.

And I’m really fucking bored!