So, it is my 4th week of working in Canberra, it is Mom and the kid's second week of living here and Milord's first week (he arrived on Friday night). I'm enjoying Canberra, it's very laidback.
We have had all sorts of weather: A fair bit of rain. A couple of days ago I scraped ice off my windscreen for the first time since leaving England! And today it is warm and sunny and at lunchtime I took a walk in a nearby strip of wooded parkland and picked tiny alpine-type flowers from the bright green grass under the pines, conifers and oak trees. Very un-Australian!
We are settling in nicely to our pristine 4-bedroom rental house. My Mom loves having her own room, and we are all loving the space! It is so good to be living in a rather new house that needs nothing done to it. The heating is very effective and we are extremely comfortable.
There are just a few boxes left to unpack and each day when I get home from work the place is a little more organised. Mom and Milord are handling the house and kids, and while I sense that they have not figured out their roles in the new place yet and things might be a bit tense when I am not there, it is coming right.
Work is going well, they are a nice bunch and the work is plentiful if not very challenging. Of course, the places with challenging work didn't want to hire someone who had been at home for 4 years, so I am trying to relax and enjoy the lack of stress. The commute (20min to half an hour) is a doddle in my little car. I cherish the time on my own, listening to my choice of radio station! My office is close enough to the center of town to be able to walk there at lunchtime, but still far enough out that I can get a parking space.
Milord has finished off the Sydney house and we have an agent showing it to prospective tenants. Hopefully someone will snap it up soon! We may have to drop the price if no one applies within the coming week.
Milord is running a few errands and getting our new place shipshape and then he intends to jobhunt most seriously as he haaaates being a housedad! Somehow I can't seem to muster much sympathy for his plight though...
Mom isn't all that thrilled about being fulltime Granny-Daycare either, but until Milord has a job we can't afford to place the kids anywhere. I keep getting told to put the kids on waiting lists at all the local daycares, but right now having them home saves me $500 per week. That's almost our rent!
In other news I went to the doctor a couple of weeks ago for a cold that I couldn't shake. While she couldn't help me with the cold (it's a virus, go to bed), she did become concerned with my blood pressure which was very high.
A week later it was still high, and I spent this Monday wearing a 24 hour blood pressure monitor. OMG was that annoying! Every half hour in the day and every hour in the night the pressure cuff would inflate painfully tight while the monitor took a reading. While sleeping it would startle me wide awake and I was very happy to get the damn thing off the next day.
I see my doctor on Friday for the results. As my Mom and her Mom are/were on medication for high blood pressure I assume I'm going to have to start taking some too. Of course, the doctor has already told me to stop drinking wine, cut out salt and lose weight. But that's not going to happen!
Stepmom is in Australia right now, up the coast about 7 hours away. She has rekindled a very old flame who now lives in Oz and she is over here for a couple of months to check him out. The anniversary of Dad's death was a week ago. Life goes on, right?
