In two days I’m supposed to attend my ten year school reunion. I am very excited but also a little nervous to see everyone. I have spent the past few months planning the event in detail with my girlfriends. We have decided to hire a limousine to take us to the formal and pick us up after so we can get to the after party in style. I know that some people may think that it’s a little over the top to be hiring a limousine, Melbourne school reunions are a big deal. We have all picked out our dresses, making sure no one is wearing anything too similar. We are all going to have our makeup done professionally and I’m thinking about getting laser hair removal. Melbourne friends have convinced me that it’s the best option, I’m very excited. I’ve never had hair removal done before other than shaving, I have heard nothing but good things about laser hair treatments. We all booked in the same time to go in for our monthly anti aging injections in Melbourne. We had to book our appointments weeks ago just to get in, that’s how popular this place is! It’s going to be crazy fun getting ready together. It will definitely be a memorable day of pampering. We are all going to spend the day at a beauty spa getting facials and a spray tan. You can’t use tanning beds anymore, they’re just not worth the risk.
I’m hoping that my old high school crush Chad is going to be at the reunion. Nobody has seen him since we left high school and I can’t find him on any social media sites. He’s a total mystery and something of a legend among our graduating class. There are many theories as to what happened to Chad, some say he works on a king crab fishing boat in the Bering Sea. Others are convinced he gave up all his worldly possessions and lives in the wilderness. If you ask me he just doesn’t know how to use a computer. I have this dream where I arrive at the reunion in the stretch limousine, Melbourne is beautiful warm and sunny, he is waiting for me at the red carpet. He opens the limo door and lifts me down into his strong arms and we walk hand in hand together. A nice dream but one I’m sure will not happen, he’s probably married by now. In the off chance that he isn’t married I want to look my best for this event, I’m pulling out all the stops. My skin is usually pretty good and I don’t look my age at all but I’ve definitely added a few wrinkles and lines since high school. Nothing that can’t be fixed by a round of anti wrinkle injection followed by lip fillers. Melbourne town hall is where the event is being held, quite the fancy location if you ask me. I’m going to have a few glasses of champagne in the limo to relax before the party starts. I don’t want a repeat of the last day of school when I tried to give Chad my phone number and instead handed him a napkin.
Getting beauty treatments for the reunion
Melbourne Mum Doesn’t Make $5563 by Working Online…
Sometimes I’m very afraid of where technology is going. Today, we’ve got 4G tablets and 128GB of storage within a tiny phone. Tomorrow, we’re making it so that you can launch explosive projectiles out of a pen and you can zap people with Google Glass lasers. Everyone will be a living weapon. No one will be safe!
Don’t go thinking I’m a Luddite. Technology, as it stands, is wonderful. My own daughter is away in Melbourne doing a web development course, and she’s having a wonderful time. She was always good with computers. She was the one who taught us the important things, like how shutting the computer down doesn’t wipe the whole thing, and that offers of free ringtones are often false. I had to ring up the other day to check if this video of a Sydney mum who made $5563 EVERY DAY was false as well. She seemed to nice, and she wanted to share with us the secrets of getting rich! They made a video and everything! I watched the whole thing, even though it went for an hour. It was all very convincing, something to do with…oh, I don’t know. You give them your bank account details, login, passwords etc. and they’ll hook you up to their system and deposit loads of money to your account with zero effort on your part. It was grounded in economical science, apparently. And yet, I thought on a whim that I should ask Hayley what she thought. Sure enough, plenty of people have been sucked in.
Though if it had been anyone except Hayley, I’d have had my doubts on their advice. The Mum in the video was so sincere, and she had kids, and she was so nice. But this is EXACTLY why I’m talking about, you know? Even these well-meaning propositions from the internet can’t be trusted. I’m happy that Hayley is doing her fancy web design course, clever clogs that she is, but where are we going? When will it stop? And if this method of getting 100% free profits was false, what IS the real way to do it? Maybe I should get paid for doing some quizzes…
-Amelda
Watching from the windows
I’m a watcher. I never thought I would become one, but I have. I sit here for about seven hours almost every day, staring out the aluminium windows at Melbourne, splayed out below me. At least, sitting here, I have a good view. It’s a good vantage point, to watch people from, and they can never watch back.
I guess this habit of watching people developed after the accident. When you suddenly lose the feelings from your hips down you tend to do a lot of sitting. It was such a stupid accident as well. I regret diving head first into that lake every minute of every day. It was an accident that could have been so easily avoided, but that doesn’t matter now. I didn’t avoid it. Now I am here. The doctors say I can’t leave home yet. They say I’m lucky I’m not a quadriplegic, that things could have gone much worse for me, that I survived and should be grateful.
I know we’re going to have to leave this place soon. Living in a high rise apartment when you’re in a wheelchair isn’t exactly the most convenient option. Still, it’s going to be harder to watch people if I’m down below. My parents are slowly removing our possessions, carting them down in boxes, leaving with them, two at a time. I can’t help, of course, even if they’d asked. There are too many hazards here for me, they said, just like they said getting aluminium window repairs in Melbourne up here wasn’t cheap.
That was when I was mad. That was when I didn’t want to watch, I wanted to live. I’ll have the scars on my fist for a while, they said. So many scars, said I. There are the ones you can see and the ones you can’t.
Love found in a limo
I think a part of me wants this limousine ride to go on forever. I would not ask the driver to pull over if you paid me. Not that money has ever been a problem, by this point it’s all meaningless to me.I dislike the term famous. It has so many negative connotations what with all the reality stars ruining that space. The reason I don’t want to stop this Melbourne limousine to ever stop is because the most beautiful and perfect woman I have ever met is in this car with me. She smiles and giggles and wants to keep on riding this limousine till dawn. I will happily go through till sunrise if that’s what she wants. I will get a change of limo drivers if I need to, anything to stay in this place with this perfect being.
The conversion has been effortless, we have talked about going on wild road trip, about our families, our dreams. Sasha is fast becoming the most interesting and free person that I can think of, and she suggested that we do this. She asked me, can you believe that? This whole thing was her idea, the dinner, the limo hire. Melbourne by twilight is magical, I don’t use that word lightly. I’m happily just going along with her plan. I love this city, and I’d love to spend more time here, but to be honest, I could just stay in her arms in the back of this limousine all night. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like her.
I don’t know why but everything she does make me smile. Whether it’s her sheepish grin because she said something adult, or when she is laugh with tears streaming down her face, everything she does captivates me. I lover her wit and her silly jokes that are always told wrong. I can’t wait to see her again after tonight. My heart breaks a little more each I leave her. I’m missing a few vital pieces now that are hers forever. Every Time I ride off in my chauffeured limousines I can feel her slowly destroying me.
A heartbreaking funeral
I 
wish this day had never come. All I want to do is scream and cry but the only thing I have the energy to do is just sit here. On the floor. Staring blankly at the computer screen and hoping for a miracle. Hoping, praying, bargaining with some higher entity for them to give him back. Please, let me have my Rowan back.
I’ve only watched the Lord of the Rings films once, with Rowan when he was a kid, but there was a line that stuck with me. It struck a chord that resonated with the parent in me and I find myself remembering those words today. No parent should have to bury their child.
I neglected dealing with. I couldn’t. I asked friends and family members to deal with the logistics, from everything from organ donation to finding a funeral director. Perth has a lot of funeral homes, or so they tell me, but if I’m honest everything’s been such a blur I don’t even know which one I’m with. I don’t know who is burying my child. Not that it matters.
I’m hoping that in writing this, I get some sense of closure, but I doubt that will ever happen. It still feels as though he’s going to walk in the front door with that grin on his face, with some tall story about where he’s been. It still feels as though this is all one terrible nightmare I’m going to wake up from and everything will be back to how it was. But I know, deep down, that that’s never going to happen. I can feel it in my gut.
The funeral’s in Perth, so I won’t have to go far. I have a friend coming to pick me up in an hours time. I have to keep moving. I have to just breathe, to go through the motions. Rowan wouldn’t want me to be left a shell. He would want me to live.
The business signage process
As
a small business owner, finding a really good, trustworthy, high quality sign company in Melbourne can be difficult. You know you want something great, that makes you stand out from the crowd, that draws the eye, that makes people want to work with you and your business, but ferreting out those who say they can from those who can deliver is really difficult. Trust me. I’ve just been through the whole thing. Twice.
I own a local, organic green grocery. See what I mean? Small business, and yet I really want to get across what I’m all about through my business signs. Melbourne residents need to be able to look at my sign and know that they can trust me and my products. They need to be able to walk past my sign on the street and be interested enough that they have a bit of a look inside, or better yet, have a chat to me or one of my fantastic staff about our products. The sign is the hook, without it, they’re probably not going to want to have a look inside, and I need that to happen.
Going and talking to couple of different graphic design companies has been more or less a complete disaster. They’ve presented us with all kinds of different ideas and styles, but, in my opinion, it’s all been terrible. All I’ve seen are bizarre, comic reductions of our core message into gaudy images and shapes, or, alternatively, designs so mainstream that we would look exactly like every other organic grocery. It’s as if everything we talked about in our meetings, which were generally excellent, went in one ear and out the other. All I needed was for someone to listen to me, and that just didn’t happen.
I’ve come to the point where I’m just exhausted. I know signage in Melbourne is important, but I just don’t know if I can keep going through this process. I just feel done. I just want to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
How many of me does it take to fix a light bulb?
Today I did something t
hat could have been, and, with a bit of hindsight, probably was funny, but at the time it was just cringeworthy. And not just a little bit cringeworthy, either. It was major, pathetic, Three Stooges cringeworthy.
I like to think of myself as a pretty self sufficient kind of a person. I live, quite comfortably on my own and that’s always worked fine for me, but once in a blue moon I come up against something new. Something I haven’t had to deal with with before. As a pretty self sufficient kind of a person, I like to think I’ll be able to deal with these moments as they arise on my own. I guess you could say I’m stubborn like that, but, as I see it, it’s more that I’m fully capable of handling my problems on my own. So when one of the lights in my apartment decided to blow, I decided that, with a quick ‘how to’ search on Google under my belt, I had enough expertise in that area to handle the simple task of changing a lightbulb.
Even though I don’t have an aluminium ladder of my own, I know a mate in the ground floor apartment who does, so I figured it would be easy enough to borrow it from him. Irritatingly, Steve has one of those ridiculously huge Bailey ladders, and it wouldn’t fit in the lift, but that just meant a bit of extra cardio for me, carrying it up the stairs. The problem with that was that I got into a bit of a rhythm, where I wasn’t really thinking about much more than continuing up the stairs, so when I got to my flaw I just kicked the door open and stormed through. Thing was, I was holding the ladder horizontally. The whiplash was mind-boggling, and I was moving so fast that I actually fell down, under the ladder, which then fell on my chest. If there’d been a laugh track laid over the top of it, it would have looked like slapstick comedic gold. As it was, it looks like three broken ribs, cracked plaster, and a long hospital bill.
Oh, and one busted light bulb.
What to do for Sam’s birthday
My b
oy Sam is turning 9 two weeks from now and I just don’t know what to do for the kid. We’re thinking about booking him one of those party venues Melbourne seems to have plenty of, but darn it I’m just not sure we really should.
I mean, it’s not like he’s mentally challenged or anything, he’s just real awkward in social situations and pretty slow on the uptake. He’s got a couple of friends at school, or so he says, but we never see them round at the house. We talked to his teacher to make sure the people he’d named in his class were real people, about six months ago, when I asked about his friends, it turned out he’d just made up names off of the top of his head. When I talked to his teacher about it she said there were no people by that name in his class. I gotta tell you, that made me real worried for a moment there. This time, at least the names were real, but we’ve got no way of knowing whether they’re actually his friends, see? And if they’re not, we wouldn’t want to book him out a party venue for friends he doesn’t have. It’s a complicated kind of situation.
Couple of years back, he got real into ice skating, learning to ice skate through lessons and such, but it was a cold kind of a pastime for such a warm country as Australia. I always thought learning to ice skate here was a real impractical thing to be doing, but he seemed to enjoy it a lot and that was good enough for me. Maybe we should have his birthday at an ice skating rink? That way he doesn’t have to talk to the other kids if he doesn’t want to, which, knowing him, he probably wont. I’m not a bad parent, mind you. All I really want for him is to have a good time.
Procrastination Leads to Clutter
There is some truth to the phrase ‘if you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding’. It’s true, truly truthful. Because, and this is thinking really hard about the issue…if you DON’T eat your meat…how CAN you have the aforementioned pudding? Meat comes first, before pudding you see. The conquering of the meat is paramount to progressing towards the pudding.
This is a really deep thought for a Thursday. Maybe I need to roll things back to something a little bit lighter. Like my will! I have this legal will draft that I’ve just been casually chipping away at for a while now, and it’s my primary source of procrastination. That’s probably why I keep having the deep thoughts, you know? I think that I really need to get onto that last will and testament that people think is so important. But that means going through my possessions, and that’s the end of that because I always find something terribly distracting. Just yesterday I dug up my old coin collection. I used to be mad on those things, polished them every day. I was under the delusion that my friends would actually be impressed by this collection of small metal objects. Still, I managed to score a few limited edition ones. One day, those are going to be worth something. But not for a while, so if I’m getting on with making a will, those should go to my grandchildren. Kelvin is so obsessed with shiny things, so I hope that’s going to continue into his adult years. He’s gonna love these coins!
It’s all so much to deal with, lots of trinkets and baubles to sort through. Makes me want to make my will just a matter of writing ‘you all just work it out amongst yourselves, and be civil’. Then my family could just roll with that. But a last will and testament isn’t quite so easy. Back to it, I suppose. Until I’m distracted again…
Putting a Stop to the Hackers
The level of excitement I feel for the upcoming Galaxy Conflict: The Push Wakes Up is just phenomenal, more than anything I’ve ever felt before. I absolutely can’t wait to get my tickets, because I was at work when they were released and my boss wouldn’t let me take a break at that exact moment to go and get them. Seriously, boss. But still, I want the full cinematic experience and nothing less. That’s why I’m in a bit of an online war.
See, I have these friends doing web development courses in Melbourne, and I’m doing a similar thing up here so we’ve kind of connected online. I thought I knew them pretty well, but as it turns out…not so much. They’re part of this super-shady hacker group who are trying to get a copy of The Push Wakes Up before it airs in cinemas, which is just unacceptable. For one thing, they’ll be viewing the cinematic event of this millennium on their stupid little laptop screens, which just makes me sad. And then, it’s morally wrong, because they’re essentially stealing something that belongs to a paying audience. Those in my web design course feel the same: online does not mean free. Thus, I’m now part of a group trying to protect The Push Wakes Up from these nefarious hackers. I’ve already informed the colleges where they get their education, and strong corrective action has been promised. There’s nothing more to do but sit and wait for the next cyber-attack.
I can’t believe I thought they’d be better. I bet if their fellow web development students knew about this, they’d feel the same way: it’s pure selfishness, and they’re spoiling the experience for themselves as well. Maybe at some point, they’ll realise. But maybe, they just need to complete the entire web design course experience, and then they’ll see the light. It’s themselves they’re hurting, in the end…