there are no words

But, man, are there a lot of pictures!  

Our first hundred days.  In Sydney.

These guys.

This guy.

Our fish market.

The bridge that Oprah touched.

Charlie and his school hat hit Bronte Beach.

View from the zoo.

This is what chlamydia looks like.

Charlie and his daily activity of tormenting an Ibis.

Scootering at Bondi Beach.

Darth Maul and some other guys.

A younger Aussie version of Martha Stewart.

Just a roo.

The Cross City Tunnel.
At $5 a pop, it is always this clean and empty.

My new favorite artist:  Marise Maas.

1st goal e-ver!

Charlie is the one over-stretching in the middle.

One guess.

Shelly Beach in my shoes.

One of the smaller Australian spiders.

Max cannot not put up the bunny ears.

You can't escape them.

Charlie multi-tasking with cricket gear.

Our Anzac Bridge.

Seconds before that bad wet dog trampled my good dry purse. 

The one day a year where it is legal to bet on a coin toss.
We won $40.  And then I lost $40.

It's true.

let's not talk about my organs

When you move to a new country, what do you do? Explore? Shop? Have surgery? Same.

I had surgery this month and not on my boobs. Long story fragmented: shattered kneecap in Los Angeles three years ago, wired back together, life went on, hardware broke in New Zealand right before we moved to Sydney, and ouch.  As much as I hated the thought of surgery, the reality of being shredded from the inside out with every step from poke-y broken wire bits was worse. So I found the surgeon with the best Australian accent and a date was set. That was that.

And then the public service announcements began.

These public service announcements.



It was Donate Life Week in Australia and the loved one I lived with didn’t know diddly about my wishes.  Not because I’m mean or an organ hoarder or all rotten inside, but because I never wanted to put that sort of thing out there.  Into the universe.  Where it could accidentally manifest itself into reality like things you put out in the universe always end up doing.  But I was about to have surgery.  And we’ve all seen Grey’s Anatomy.  What if the surgeon with the best Australian accent wasn’t actually a doctor but a nut job who couldn’t cut a cake and things didn’t work out so well for me and I ended up with the brain activity of a carrot?  Then what?

This thought haunted me.

Then came date night.  In our living room because I have no idea where they keep the sitters around here.  My husband and I were watching the most genius show e-ver.  Homeland.  Is he a terrorist? Is he not? We don’t know! When all of a sudden that PSA came on.  Again.  With all the questions.  And the music.  And the oh so sad faces.  I couldn’t take it anymore.  Without giving it a second thought, I turned to my loved one and gave him a look.  A look that pretty much said it all.  

A look that said this: 

Listen up, Loved One.  I'm only going to not say this once.  If something bad goes down and I can’t make decisions for myself, you know what to do. You know you know what to do.  SAVE ME!  Find the best doctors in the best hospitals, shake them by their doctor coats, and tell them to SAVE ME!  Send home the slackers.  Weed out the weak.  SAVE ME!  Make sure no one gives up.  No scratching heads wondering what to do next.  No talking about topics other than me or the saving of me.  SAVE ME!  I want baseball caps turned backwards, sleeves rolled up, dream teams assembled.  If Patrick Dempsey is free, get him in there because he or his handsome character might have a solution.  Don’t mock me.  SAVE ME!  Heroic efforts, out-of-box thinking, throw money at the problem, whatever it takes.  I’m going to need everyone to come together for this one goal, one purpose, one moment, and SAVE ME!  But.  Sigh.  If after all of that, there is absolutely no chance that I can be saved and I have a carrot for a brain and this has been confirmed by no less than five doctors and Patrick Dempsey, then you know what to do. Scoop me out like a cantaloupe and save the others.  Save them.

My husband's look in response said this:

Wha-?

And Homeland was back on.  As Carrie went bonkers from being off her bi-polar meds and my loved one reached for my hand, I knew.  He had heard everything I didn't say.  And this, my friends, is one of the many reasons why I married my husband instead of Patrick Dempsey.  

so now i live in sydney

And about 7,530 miles from home.  Somebody please change my subtitle thingie.

Opera House.  3 o'clock.

A handful of Saturdays ago we left Auckland, moved into our beautiful new 12^th floor apartment overlooking the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and could not stop staring at our amazing view.  This amazing view.  It was breathtaking.  Spectacular.  Boat-y.  We found Nemo.

Two days later we moved out.  It came down to sanity or a bathtub.  Just like it always does.

In Auckland we only had showers.  If we didn’t want to be dirty, vertical cleaning was our only option.  Our bathtub toys were out of a job and pissy.  But day after day after every other day of standing in a shower, bending over for a dropped this and a misplaced that, were just really bad action lines in a porn script and ex-hausting.  I longed for a lazy horizontal soak, where I had the option of participating or not and still ended up clean.

12^th Floor Apartment had a tub.  I know this because as soon as I stepped into that apartment, I was in my bathtub suit, horizontal, and up to my neck in water.  For an hour.  I didn’t have a washcloth and emerged spotless.  It was great.  And then night fell.

The fear of living in an apartment was always the neighbors.  You know the ones.  With the loud parties and dumb friends and terrible music and weird cooking smells and not smart choices when it came down to smoke or not to smoke in bed.  Well, as the story goes, those neighbors were not our neighbors.  I actually have no idea who our neighbors were because we didn’t hear a peep out of them in the 48 hours we lived there.

What we did hear a peep out of was EVERY SINGLE THING ELSE. 

Every Single Thing Else

1.  The cars.  That drove back and forth across the Harbour Bridge.  In and out of our amazing view and our ear canals.  Where were those people going at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the morning and why couldn’t they take the super quiet and very underground train???

2.  The master air conditioning unit.  Which housed about thirty very giant black cables the size of my very small thighs.  On my 8-year-old son’s patio.  That sucker went on and off every five minutes.  It sounded like a Zamboni was resurfacing our ice rink and just couldn’t get it right.

3.  The bedroom windows.  Made of 10% subpar window material, 90% wind gusts.  Sleeping pills shoved down our throats only made things windier.  

4.  The words.  Between me and my husband.  Over and over, always the same.  "What're we going to do?"  "What can we do?"  "I don't know."  "We have to do something."  "Well, try to sleep."  "I can't sleep!"  "Neither can I!"

5.  My tears.  

When you can’t sleep, you cry.  I cried.  I didn’t know what we were going to do.  We signed a year lease.  I couldn’t not sleep for a year.  I would be bat shit crazy by Tuesday.  My husband hates when I’m bat shit crazy.

So on Monday morning, after being robbed of sixteen hours of sleep and subsequent beauty, the man I lived with told me to pack.  He was going to work and he was going to find us someplace else to live.  That day.  And then he said this line:  “I will not having my family living like this.”  And I cried.  Because I hadn’t slept and I was probably already crying and I loved that line and he was going to save us.  And also because I needed to drown out the jackhammers that were suddenly busting up the uncooperative earth in the empty lot next to our building.  That's right, freeway on one side.  Day one of "hey, let's build a high-rise here" on the other.   

That afternoon we broke that lease, shoved our only piece of furniture, a brand new mattress, into a handicap taxi van, and moved to a quiet little apartment in Balmain.  And that night we slept.  Like very sane babies on a brand new mattress.  

The next morning I did the only thing I could do:  Shower.

I will miss you, view, but not you, crazy stupid irregular corners.