TGIF!!

TGIF everybody!! It's Beebs's last day at work today and we get the whole weekend to play together. yaaay!

We usually have date night tonight and I'm trying to think if I should cook something or if we should go out....it'd be nice to just have Subway and hang out I think. For those of you who don't know, finding a restaurant with a drink fountain is hard to do round here; they just give you little 16/20 oz bottles of coke....and if you run out you buy another one. Boooo! BUT the Subway here has a fountain! Granted they still don't give you free refills which is stupid because the store is obviously designed to allow for it, what with it being in the dining area instead of behind the counter....but whatevs. Sometimes I could just KILL for a huuge diet coke from the fountain. I'd really love one of those tonight. :)
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Happy Birthday!!!

Okay so my bday's not til February. BUT, Beebs found out that Taylor Swift is coming to Oz the same weekend and now I get to go to Newcastle and Sydney for my bday to see her! AHHHH!! We have floor tickets, so I'm going to get there like 6 hours early and wait for the doors to open so I can get as close as humanly possible without being trampled. WOOT! I'm so excited, I've never been to a real concert before. :):):):):)

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Love and Marriage

Bleh. Is it weird that I miss Beebs even though I saw him like, 9 hours ago? I hear about all these newlyweds who are like, at each other's throats every second of the day and that "the 1st year is the hardest" and blah blah blah.....we are really thankful that our marriage has been easy so far. WAY easier than dating....I don't know if it's because we've spent so much time apart that we truly are thankful to be together and see it as a blessing that we're on the same continent let alone under the same roof....but we just don't argue about stupid stuff. We don't even argue about important stuff....the only time things get tense is when we're really stressed (like before the wedding,) but even then we've never yelled at each other or had to take back something we said.

For example, we went to church on Sunday and I was under the impression we'd be having morning tea after the service at about 10:30.... I was picturing like donuts and little sandwiches and cookies and things, you know, morning tea....but it turns out it was a sausage sizzle (Aussies are BIG on sausage like we are on hamburgers) with chips and meat pies. I hadn't even had breakfast yet and, while I would eat it if I had to, sausage and meat pie for breakfast was just way too heavy for my blood. I asked Chris if it would be all right if I walked down to Cole's or the servo to get a coffee and a muffin or something. I pictured a difficult selfish husband in this situation would use this opportunity to start an argument about how I should just eat what they've made and suck it up (or something) but you know what he did? He refused to let me walk and insisted on driving me.

I really appreciate how he does things like that, and appreciate even more that we're not at each others' throats all the time. If the first year is the hardest, I think we're going to be fine....but, between you and me, I think the first year with *kids* is going to be the hardest. ;) I mean, it has taken some adjusting for me to figure out that, even though I missed him when he was at work all day, I should allow him some alone time to regroup when he gets home (extrovert vs. introvert.) And it took some adjusting for him to decide that hanging out with me on a Saturday morning is at a higher priority than playing Call of Duty.

We're also really lucky that we agree on just about everything. I thank OKcupid.com for this; out of the hundreds of questions we answered that were meant to measure our personalities on countless variables....we agreed on 94% of the questions. That's just about as compatible as you can get. So I guess we are at a mega advantage in that respect. :)

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All Hours of the Day

Most of my adult life (yes, all 5 years of it ;) ) has been semi-nocturnal. I've never felt that this was at-all unusual. I'd usually go to bed before 3/4am and wake up around 11am/12pm. No big deal, most of my friends and acquaintances were the exact same way. When you don't have a 9-5 job it's like a right of passage and, even those friends of mine who *did* have a 9-5 job would have a similar sched. to mine on the weekends.

It's been somewhat of a shock to me to come here and be jided for my sleeping schedule. Every where I go people gape in shock and awe....I just want to tell them to get over it and that THEY are the weird ones!! Someone just the other day was trying to shock me by telling me they slept in that day until 9 am.... .......... it took me a second to realize that she was serious. 9 am is "sleeping in."

Now, I started thinking about it....my parents have always woken up by 8/9 even on the weekends for as long as I can remember....Grandma and Grandad are up even earlier than that. So, I'm wondering if the only reason there has been this shift of schedule for young adults in America is due to the age of the 24 hour business, commercial businesses staying open until 9 and 10 pm, movies starting at 10:30pm, bars being open until 2am.... I'm not quite sure.

A night to catch up with my friends would often start with dinner and drinks at 9pm and a 10:45 movie. It's really really common, not like we were the only people out and about by any means....But here, the latest showing I've seen for a film is like 8pm (or something) and just about everything closes at 4:30/5pm. The grocery store is open til 9pm on weekdays....but closes at 5pm on Saturday and, until 3 weeks ago, wasn't even open on Sundays. It's like the opposite of shops back home where everything closes earlier on weekdays and then on Saturday, the busiest day, absolutely everything is open late. So of course you wouldn't sleep in until noon, how would you ever get anything done? Whereas, with Walmart being open 24 hrs, you can get just about anything you need any time of day. You can buy a lawn mower at 3am if you wanted to for crying out loud. lol I don't think businesses are like this everywhere in Australia, but even in Brisbane things close pretty early....it's a whole new world.

Long story short; I think it's weird to wake up before 9am for any reason other than employment. They think it's weird to stay in bed past like 7 am for any reason other than death. I guess I'm the outsider once again. It's going to be tough for me to change my ways. Going to bed at 9 and waking up at 6 makes me feel like a grandma. Like "is my life really this boring"... but I know it's far more boring here to sleep away the only hours that there's anything to do, so I'm going to have to try to shift things. Dunno how easy it's gonna be though.

The end for now!