one year

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So it's been a year to the day (yesterday) since we left home.

We have fallen into that awful awful vicious cycle of full-time work and routine, which we so desperately sought to leave behind in Australia. Wake up, shower, deal with public transport, work, eat packed lunch, deal with public transport, cook dinner, go for a run/swim, pack lunch for tomorrow, lights out. Five days a week (well 4 for me at the moment, because our company has cut our hours for the months of February and March in order to 'save money'). It was nice having a routine after having a complete lack thereof during the time we were traveling, but the novelty of it wore off after about...a week. Whilst I've worked full-time hours since around the age of 19, I've always had the unpredictable stresses and chaos of university life to counteract the mundane and boring routine of work. Gin and tonic Fridays, blasting out happy tunes on late afternoons, and side-yard smoke sessions are just a distant and fading memory.

Anyway, back to the point.

It's hard to keep motivated working on the other side of the world, when back home life-changing events are happening to our friends. People are getting married, having babies, buying homes together, moving to a new stage in their career, meeting new partners. There's also the bad things too, like family deaths and break-ups and friends losing jobs. It sucks not being able to be there for our friends, not just for the good times, but to support them during the bad times too. What I really miss the most is calling up a friend one evening and seeing if they're free, and driving to hang out with them and just be.

But, we're here for a while and we're going to look optimistically and try and save a truckload of cash, and if all else fails we've got enough money for a ticket home.

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