A Mixed Few Days
I'm at Jon's place in Canberra right now. It's the first morning in weeks that I didn't wake up and have to deal with something straight away, either work, a bad dream somebody had, having to check out of a motel, or whatever. Instead, I took a hot bath and realised how wound up I am. So much for relaxation.
Accident effects
hopeforyou helped me realise a day or two that I'm still quite affected by the concussion I had a month ago. The two things they said to watch out for are in full force: tiredness and emotional fragility. They've made everything a lot harder.
When I arranged this trip (before the accident), my plan was to work from here a lot. I've done this before: I wake up very early to telecommute, and at about 2:30pm I knock off and enjoy the rest of the day. By 'very early', at this time of year, I meant just when the sun was rising in Sydney, which would be in time for the previous day's 11am stand-up in San Francisco. Many of my colleagues don't come to work until 10 or 11 anyhow, so we'd all finish at about the same time. This seemed to work pretty well the first few days I was here, accounting for illness and jetlag.
But the two days I worked this week were very hard. For one thing, both days had meeting at around 10am, so I had to get up even earlier. Even if I didn't, Melbourne's further south and west so the sun doesn't rise until somewhat later, and it's later in autumn anyhow.
Emotional fragility
I don't like rising before the sun at the best of times; it makes me rather cranky. But my ability to deal with life's little unpleasantries has felt diminished since the accident, even when it's been to allow something as wonderful as a trip to Australia, so rising before the sun felt downright traumatic.
It didn't help that there was no part of rickybuchanan's place that didn't have somebody trying to sleep in it at that time (I spent a couple of hours working in the car each day), and priorities at work had shifted significantly in the couple of days I'd taken off, so it took me a big part of the first day just to find out what I was supposed to do. Again, these are things that would normally be the rough and tumble of working while travelling, something I've done quite a lot of. And when I stop to think of it, I handled it all pretty well and did good work. It just felt difficult.
Lack of Energy
This was also a big stressor. No matter what time I get up, I normally function extremely well after seven or eight hours' sleep, and getting to sleep's never been a problem for me. I therefore just expected that getting up at 5:30 or 6am would mean being asleep by 10pm, and this wouldn't be hard once hopeforyou and whoever's hosting us understands why this would be important. But last week, when the sun went down at 7 or 8pm, I completely ran out of energy. This wasn't a big deal while we were road tripping; we'd just find a motel and crash. But when we were trying to socialise in Melbourne, it meant missing out on socialising. People were understanding and forgiving, but it was still a bummer.
Good stuff
Despite all that, I've had some really good times. My favourite day was the one after my last entry, when we drove from Sale into Melbourne, but made a lot of stops on the way. It was a big day for wildlife: we made a spur-of-the-moment decision to stop when we passed a 'Lyrebird Trail' sign on the side of highway B-460 and spent a couple of hours walking around the bush. Despite the name we didn't see any lyrebirds, but we did see snakes and spiders and wallabies and countless birds and even an echidna. We did more bushwalking on Phillip Island and saw more birds and wallabies, looked at seagulls with adolescent young at the Nobbies and of course there was the Penguin Parade nearby that night. That never gets old. Many of the penguins were malting so we saw less than usual come out of the water, but there were also hundreds just hanging around on land by dusk, something I hadn't seen before.
Another highlight was seeing the physio that australian_joe recommended. Jetlag and Mardi Gras prevented us from seeing one before the road trip so we booked a session with one in Melbourne. Finally, a month after the accident, some professional help for my arm! She moved things around and poked a bit and restored various abilities like being able to straighten my elbow and twist my wrist around. She said I should use it more and expect it to hurt a little, and for me to lose some of that mobility over the next couple of days. I should just see another physio in Sydney for further adjustments. It turned out that hopeforyou was in worse shape than me, though, and she implored her to get fitted for a proper bra and take more care of posture. More poking and prodding, a warning that she'd feel much more sore for a day or two, and a promise that in the long run things would be much better. That's pretty much what happened, too.
I've finally figured out how to summarise the virtues of Melbourne over Sydney and vice-versa. Sydney has the beaches and national parks and other beautiful natural features, and all the virtues of being an internationally-recognised city. But Melbourne has much more pleasant suburbs. rickybuchanan lives in a very ordinary suburb which isn't known for much other than the super-Orthodox Jewish church and the traditional dress that attracts. If you're not Jewish, you're not likely to ever visit it if you don't know somebody there. But it still has a few lovely cafés where you can sit outside and watch the world go by. While hopeforyou was going nuts in the bug gluten-free supermarket in Ormond, I wandered around there and found it to have similar features.
Unremarkable Sydney suburbs lack that sort of thing. Newtown and Glebe and Darlinghurst and beach suburbs other suburbs people go to have that stuff, used bookshops and cafés and trendy pubs, but I don't think you can say the same for places like Botany or Lakemba or Bexley or Five Dock or East Ryde. And Melbourne's more interesting suburbs, the kind of places people go to to hang out, seemed to cater better for our dietary requirements... okay, maybe not Carlton, but definitely Fitzroy and StKilda, where I had the best veggie burger I've had anywhere. And of course Melbourne's very easy to get around, too, although public transport's gotten kinda expensive and doesn't seem to run as often as it used to.
The Bad
A couple of other downers during the trip:
- Charmaine's Ice Cream is apparently no more. The one on Brunswick Street is gone, the one on Federation Square seems to have closed down very recently, and we couldn't find the one at Southbank. Directory assistance only had the Brunswick Street one listed and that number had been disconnected. Charmaine's has always been my favourite ice cream in the world. I even bought the T-shirt, but it disappeared in the accident. I was looking forward to replacing it.
- While driving around, my Treo started making a lot of noise: booping, turning itself on and off, stuff like that. I thought it was just in my pocket and that random buttons were being pressed, and since I was directing hopeforyou through her first-ever hook turn, I ignored it. I then realised it wasn't in my pocket; it had fallen into a cup that still had some milkshake in it, and all the booping was its last cries for help. It looked pretty dead at the time, but yesterday evening the boot screen flashed on briefly, proving that at least the screen is okay. I took it apart this morning and cleaned dried milkshake off the buttons and the contacts and the electronics. I hold some hope that it will be at least somewhat usable for a while, even though some buttons will no doubt be sticky, and I might have problems connecting it to my computer. Fingers crossed.
- A few people I didn't get to see. Neither pr0zak nor bratbitch returned calls, SMSes or e-mails; I lost golden_sands's number when my 'phone ended up in the shake, and dr_daisy apparently had 'phone problems of her own so we didn't get in touch with her. On the bright side, I did get to meet azhdragon and his partner, and we had a fabulous time with australian_joe and his primary, who were both glowing from life. It was nice that they were understanding about me being far from glowing after the sun went down.