Tonsils

Would you believe that I received an email from a person who wondered if I had pictures of my tonsil stones? This was in response to my post from last May when I was suffering with tonsil stones myself. When I went back to look at the entry I was surprised to find so many comments. Many people read this entry and I feel like I've provided a little support group for sufferers of tonsil stones. I have a warm glow where my tonsils used to be :-)

For anyone else who might be interested - no I don't have pictures of my tonsil stones, cos they are difficult to take pictures of and that's just gross.

From now on...

Any trip related blogs will be posted on TheTrip from now on. It only makes sense...
It's easier for everyone who is interested in the trip to keep track of one blog and most people are only reading that one anyway.

I will continue to post about non-trip related stuff here - you know how weird I can be sometimes and Jamie doesn't always want to associated with that :-)

Normal service will resume in January as there will be lots to complain about - I'm sure. Jamie will be starting his PhD in Southampton and I'm going to be in the uneviable position of looking for a job somewhere between there and Dublin...

Books

I haven't been updating allconsuming.net with what I've been reading during the trip. I have been slowly making my way through Kings in Grass Castles (by Mary Durack) - about an Irishman who emigrated to Australia and was one of the early pioneers in Queensland and then Western Australia. It's good but I find parts of the book tough, so I'm a bit slow with it.
Here are some other books I've acquired and read since arriving in Oz:

We found a bargain bookshop in Sydney and I got Ruby Wax's autobiography - How do you want me? I've always liked Ruby Wax, I do find her funny, but I don't think she was destined to be a writer. The story is a little all over the place, but if you do make it to the end you get a complete picture of her life. I found parts of it surprising, shows how little I knew about her. What I did like though is that she is friends with Alan Rickman - I love Alan Rickman.
I would not strongly recommend this book to anyone unless you are a Ruby Wax fan and therefore interested enough in her life to make it through this book. (Oh yeah, I got the book for AUS$6.95 or EUR4, so as it was cheap I don't feel too bad that it wasn't the best book I ever read.)

Jamie saw this next book in a shop and thought I'd like it. The main reason being he thought that there would be alot in it about penguins - and I like penguins. I wasn't sure that there would be anything about penguins in it but the front cover is so cute....
Antarctica on a Plate: She Came, She Saw, She Burnt the Toast by Alexa Thomson, is about a woman so disillusioned with her life that she thinks taking a job a the cook on a (very primitive) Antarctic base would be just the zap of change her life needed. It's an interesting story, especially when you try to imagine yourself in her shoes. This is actually a very good book and very well written I would recommend this to anyone. This book is being posted home and kept in the Hilary and Jamie library.

This was the other bargain book I got in Sydney, also only AUS$6.95. I have to admit that in many of my book choices what attracts me to pick a book up in the first place is the front cover. So the publicist for this book should be really proud of himself - a doughnut in a coffin on the front cover got me curious enough. The Fowler Family Business (by Jonathan Meades) is not as funny or interesting as the back cover and reviews will have you believe. The story is weird and quite quirky and I got quite annoyed with it. I would have given up but after making it half way through the book I was then curious enough to want to know how it ended.
This book ended up reading like a Jerry Springer show, so unless you're into that kind of thing, I wouldn't recommend it.

The Whole Camping Story

I want everyone to know before I start this post that I enjoyed camping, I thought it was fun. There are parts of this story where I just want to explain how sometimes it can be a little harrowing, I'm not complaining

As I said we were on North Stradbroke Island for two nights. It was raining the afternoon we arrived but that passed after lunch and we went for a nice walk. We ended up at the most northerly part of the island (Point Lookout), which has a lovely, very long beach. We went for a cliff walk, during which we saw a family of dolphins frolicking about. It was so cool.

That evening Jamie cooked a lovely meal of tuna pasta on our camping stove. I have to say Kudos to Jamie it was a very tasty meal. He also had to suffer some obstacles, the main one being that in Australia at the moment it is dark at 6pm, so Jamie pretty much had to cook in the dark.

We got dinner finished just in time. Just as we finished eating a thunder storm broke out. Honestly I thought the world was going to end. We basically sat in the tent for the evening [note: if you are going camping bring travel scrabble as there is not much entertainment, alternatively camp on an island which provides entertainment for during storms.]

The next day was gorgeous and we spent the early part on the beach - we were woken at 7am by the very hot sun streaming into our tent. The water wasn't very warm but it was great fun once you got used to it. [Lil you would have loved it]. I got bitten - Jamie thinks it was sandflies, I didn't actually notice that I had been bitten at all.

In the afternoon, after a lovely lunch of fish and chips, we headed back to our campsite. Just as well really as an hour later (when Jamie was off taking a shower) it started to rain - torrential rain storm - and I was stuck in the tent. While sitting there I realised that puddles were forming around our tent and were soon going to be under our tent. And very quickly our little tent with me in it, was floating. I didn't know what to do and then I remembered our rucksacks in the apse. My rucksack got wet, put no damage was done to anything inside. When the rain finally stopped we had to move the tent to higher ground, in case it rained like that again. It was lucky we did as we were subject to an earth shattering thunderstorm again that night.

The island seems to get the worst of all the weather. Brisbane apparently didn't get the storms as bad as we did.

This morning was lovely and we packed up the tent in the sunshine. Everything was dried off. We cooked breakfast before we left. It was quite nice really. Then we got the ferry back to Brisbane.

The Thing About Camping is...

Actually, there are a number of things about camping that I would like to mention. I just had my first ever camping experience. We spent two nights on North Stradbroke Island in our new tent.

I was very excited about the camping and my spirits weren't remotely dampened by the rain which poured down on our arrival to the island. We made our way to the campsite and it stopped raining long enough for us to pitch the tent [I've even got the lingo :-)]

Now here's one of those things about camping. It's supposed to be tough (?), ya know getting back to nature, no luxuries.... Not at all. We were surrounded by families who were camping in tent mansions. I'm not kidding, they had a living room (with telly included on powered sites), a kitchen area where the cooking went on and the sleeping area(s). I was really taken aback. But I had to laugh when you see these people packing up - it takes half the day and they need a van and sometimes a trailer too..... I like that me and Jamie arrived with all our bits on our backs!!

I need to get a bit personal at this point... to get to one of the other things about camping. You see I wake up every morning without fail at 6:30am for a pee. This is easy when you're living in a one bed apartment. You can keep your eyes closed and crawl in whatever you wear in bed (in my case, vary little) to the bathroom, sit on the loo and do what you have to do before crawling back to bed. You don't even need to wake up completely and can go back to sleep for another couple of hours. I blame these episodes on the onset of shrinking bladder syndrome which comes with old age.
Anyway, now picture the same scenario in a hostel..... totally different. You have to wake up, find clothes, put on clothes, find room key and go to bathroom, where all the bright lights definitely wake you. By the time you get back to your room you're wide awake.
The same scenario in a tent? For some strange reason the "call to nature" does not come at 6:30am but instead at 4:00am. You have to crawl out of the tent in the freezing cold to get to the loos. And Jamie has me trained to check under the toilet seat for spiders. Apparently a very dangerous kind of spider can get in to the toilets in places like campsites and hide under the seats. So this, in your mind, while holding your bladder and freezing to death, walking across a strange field with snoring tents at 4:00 in the morning is enough to rattle anyones nerves. But it's ok! If you're lucky enough you have an hour to get back to sleep before the sun rises waking the birds and therefore everyone else around them...

Would you believe, despite this I actually enjoyed camping.

Muppets!

That's me and Jamie I'm talking about there - total muppets! And here's a little story to prove it.

You all may have been aware that Monday, just gone, was 29th September. Jamie and I were not! Jamie and I were supposed to fly to Brisbane from Sydney on 29th September at 1pm. On Monday, Jamie and I were, in fact, enjoying our last day in Sydney.

We were sitting in Farah's apartment waiting for a taxi to the airport on Tuesday morning, complaining about how late the taxi was, when we came to the horrifying realisation that Tuesday was in fact the 30th and we had missed our flight to Brisbane by a whole day.
Now I hate to be late for anything, so you can imagine the panic, upset and general anger at myself for being a whole day late!!! [Johnny, picture the stressed out head on me that day!]

Just as well the taxi had been late, though. Can you imagine the embarassment if we made it all the way to the check-in desk without realising our folly, for ground staff to point out that we were so late for check-in?

In the end it turned all right. We got a standby seat and flew out on the 2pm flight and because it was standby we didn't have to pay.

Then of course we had to pray that the room we had booked in the hostel for two nights (the first night of course having been missed) wasn't given away. It wasn't, but we have just paid for Monday night in a Brisbane hostel when we were in Sydney - MUPPETS!

I can't say this enough - Muppets, muppets, muppets!

It's all ok now, we're in Brisbane and we will never be late for another flight again.