I’ve slowly started to get up & around this city as time goes by, and I’ve found the complexion of the place is different in many unsubtle ways depending on whether you’re a school kid, a tourist or a “suit”. I’m sure there’s other categories, but that’s the ones I’ve been, so that’s how I look at it :) As a kid, you got off at Town Hall because that’s where all the Fun Stuff was. The arcades, the movies, the southern, less serious end of the city, bordering on Chinatown and Darling Harbour. You knew vaguely there was a whole lot more to the city further north, but even Martin Place seemed a long way away. Life is simple - you find the places where you can have fun, and you stick to them with your friends. ...

Walking back from the station, pitch dark (except for the part where it’s a clear night and it’s a full moon). I’m walking though the darkest part, where there are no street lights and there’s a forest to my left, and the wind blows that much harder. I pull my scarf tighter around my neck… Then, I think, “If I was going to mug me, I’d use the scarf to choke me until I passed out. It’s right there already, and it’d be so easy to grab…” I look around, suddenly concerned, and readjust the scarf to avoid choking hazard. Yes, that’d be the mugger lying in wait on a cold winter’s night for semi-trendy pretentious businessy types walking past in the middle of true suburbia thwarted. ...

Apologies to all those people I told I was coming down, and then didn’t do anything to actively go meet - in the end, it was about spending time with the family, who really define where home is. It’s been a fun couple of days, and I’ll be back in Sydney tonight. My sister, who is in year 12, just got her half year results back - A A+, which means she’s on track to do better than me! Good on her, eh what? :D ...

It’s raining cats and dogs and possibly even hamsters. It’s a day when you get up, look out the window and rollover back into bed. You hear all over the radio that “the rain is good for the dams!” but sometimes you just want it to rain like this for a week straight so the environmental scare-mongers might just shut the hell up. My mood always sucks on days like this. ...

I remember about 6 months ago, I was thinking along the lines of “Wow, what on earth would I do for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year?!” as I entered the workforce. I assumed work would be at the pace of assignments in their later stages, and there’s no way they could keep that pace up, all the time, could they? And yeah, while there were days where things ran together and suddenly the sun was setting outside and I barely realised the time, it wasn’t crunchy, it wasn’t like “whoa where did that hour disappear to?”. But I’d also had the opposite, days where I stared at the screen waiting for it to tick over to the next hour, and it just seemed to not want to. ...