As Mr T would say....Paaaaaaiiiiiin!

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The last few days have been painful to say the least, which has resulted in me not doing too much but rest back at Bondi. I drove back from the Blue Mountains on Saturday morning, much to the relief of my roommates who no doubt endured a dreadful night's sleep while I snored through my mouth, on account of my bloody and blocked nose.

The drive back was uncomfortable - my back hurts far more than anything else so steering was interesting. Back at the car hire place, I managed to get 50 dollars refunded to me on account of the sat nav failing to charge up in the car I was driving (not sorry to see the back of the Corolla - not a patch on my Hyundais...), so there was some good news at least!

The rest of Saturday and Sunday I mainly rested up - went for some uncomfortable walks to keep mobile but that was it. Sunday I even braved some shopping at Bondi Junction. I felt a bit sorry for Jesse when he took me and my battered face for coffee. People do look at you strangely when half your nose is missing and you've got stitches above your bloody eye. Bless his heart, he tried to tell me it was hardly noticeable however the strange and pitying looks I subsequently got at the juice bar and the clothes shops I wandered into told me otherwise!!

It hurts to laugh - and this house is full of laughter which is lovely. The hilarity didn't stop yesterday when Jesse and Heide decided to go on a trip to Ikea with the intention to purchase a matching Billy bookcase (the world's most popular bookcase, apparently!) to the one they already have. Sure enough, they returned with Billy, and Jesse managed to construct it within 5 minutes. You'll probably be wondering where this story is going.... well, it only transpired that Billy these days comes in different depths and the one they'd got was twice the depth of the one they wanted. Cue much debate about what to do, before the decision to disassemble Billy was made.

Now anyone that's ever made any flat pack furniture will know that the final piece of assembly inevitably involves hammering small tacks into the backboard of the piece. If you ever need to disassemble your own piece of flat pack furniture after it has been constructed, let it be a lesson to you not to hammer said tacks in too hard - disassembly becomes near-on impossible as a result. Jesse has the patience of a saint - something that I guess I already knew, seeing as he managed to live for an entire year as the sole guy in a house of 5 while we were at uni (where one of the housemates was me - and patience is definitely needed when living with me, that's for sure). As he's trying to remove the tacks, the heads are shearing clean off. By now I'd have lobbed the whole thing off the balcony, or at the very least 'Basil Fawlty'-ed the living daylights out of the thing. Particularly as he was fighting with Billy while Heidi and I were just watching. Not our Jess - he merely took his rather frazzled and stressed out self to the fridge, and calmly scoffed a yoghurt. No one dared say a word, but once the yoghurt had restored some calm to our fearless warrior, he once again took to dismantling Billy and reassembling the contents back in the boxes that fortunately we hadn't thrown away. An entire evening spent, in dire humidity, with the most spectacular thunderstorm going on outside, assembling and disassembling a bookcase. Still, all we have to do is hope and prey that when we take the bookcase back tomorrow, no-one opens the box to inspect the goods - there's a backboard with 12 holes hammered clean through it and only half the number of tacks than there were when the set was first purchased....the lucky few that made it through the disassembly process!

So now today I'm off to the beach to try to keep my tan up, which has been fading of late with too much time spent indoors as a result of the horse... I am still so surprised how much I love Bondi this time around - I remember loving Coogee so much more in 2008, and while Coogee is still beautiful, particularly the south side of the beach and the walk along the edge of the cliffs, I've fallen in love with Bondi. After a spot of sunbathing with Emma this afternoon, we had a couple of cocktails at The Bucket List, a pop-up bar in Bondi Pavillion. $30 well spent in my opinion - this bar has deckchairs and wooden tables, overlooking what I now think is the best beach in the world. Not the quietest, most secluded or most stunningly beautiful, but just a lot of everything. Character, fun, beauty - Bondi has it all. Emma and I discussed that we don't ever want to leave and I had the first real moment of sadness since I left Perth. The feeling that this is it for me in Sydney for now, and within 48 hours I'll be on the road again, leaving behind a city that I've now totally fallen for. It helps enormously that I've caught up with some really great friends and their partners - Jesse, Heidi, Rebecca, Ross and Rob, as well as met Elise for the first time. However at the same time, it means that I can really see myself living here, with a ready-made group of friends just waiting around the corner.

I've got some really difficult decisions to make, that's for sure - just when I've properly settled back home, the curveball of loving Australia so much has come back to hit me right between the eyes. And that's a painful place to be whacked right now, given the horse-related injuries in that very spot...

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