KEEP IT IN THE PHAMLY

I was very happy and very glad to make it to Melbourne for a whirlwind trip in June this year. I was there for 48 hours and made zero other plans (sorry any Melbourne friends reading this) besides the 90th birthday and conspiring with my cousin to surprise my Aunty on my one free night. 

I stayed with childhood bestie, B (back when I used to have best friends, now you're either a good friend or not a friend) in her mum and the Birthday Boy's house in inner-city Melbourne. Their glorious two storey old Victorian home is where I spent most of my time when I wasn't at school or at home. The sights and smells brought back nostalgic memories of many years in my child to teen-hood. I hadn't realised until I stayed here again (this time in the guest room instead of B's bunk bed... partially because I'm an adult but mainly because her bunk bed is no longer around) that this house was my childhood sanctuary. The feeling of calm and nurturing that little me would have been too oblivious to observe and appreciate did not go over my head this time. 

Kitchen where I spent many hours of my youth

Birthday Boy was like surrogate father to younger me. He'd take care of us after school, made sure we did our homework and had snacks. When we got to high school because neither of my parents drove or had a car, he'd carpool Little Sissy Pham and me to school. He was always generously looking out for us growing up. I didn't clue on to the fact he needed us kids just as much as we needed him. 

The Maritime Union of Australia hosted Birthday Boy's big bash. It was a momentous occasion where they acknowledged the wrongs of the past that saw Birthday Boy ousted from the union and no longer employed. The timing happened to align with B bringing home a few kids from school who Birthday Boy took under his wing as part of his full-time stay at home dad duties. 

I was honoured and humbled to get an invite to his birthday, along with a function room full of other guests he'd positively impacted over the years. I wouldn't risk a COVID-19 lockdown and quarantining for many people, but Birthday Boy and B are extended Phamly. Worth the trip. Wish I could have stayed longer but I had a postponed 2020 wedding to fly to Cairns for. That saga will be another blog post. 

The always well-stocked fruit bowl from where I tasted nectarines and peaches for the first time

The first batch I made, being a jerk who doesn't read instructions, I tossed the tablet in cold water and I suppose I could have waited a few hours for it to disintegrate but, being an impatient jerk, I put it in a glass jar and microwaved it so the water was warm enough to dissolve the tablet in minutes. It was a lot of fun watching the bubbles fizz up. You can purchase glass bottles with plastic pumps from them, but I am reusing my plastic pumps. I'll upgrade to glass in about 400 years when my plastic pump bottles start to crumble.

I wonder if they regret calling their business Tirtyl (pronounced 'turtle') because it's a pain in my butt to tell people about them verbally. It's much easier to write.

I've been lucky enough to be COVID-adjacent for most of the past year and a half, going through lockdowns and closures and restrictions without drama beyond postponing or cancelling plans. But this most recent lockdown has been COVID-ful. Lockdown began like any other with the cancelling of plans and working for half the weekend instead to be productive... and then we got our first vaccinations, learned Boyfriend Pham had been in a close contact hotspot, went to a 24-hour testing clinic that just opened up in 8 Miles Plains, and got our negative results but still need to quarantine for a few more days.

The bright side of this latest lockdown is that AstraZeneca has been made readily available from GPs, and now I hear local pharmacies too. The tune has changed around not wanting anyone under 60 to have AZ. Boyfriend Pham and I booked in with the GPs for our first doses mid-week and, boy, was that a mistake. They do warn you that there are some side-effects for 24-48 hours, but really the messaging should be prepared to be out of action for 24-48 hours. 

I guess I'm writing this post so you're prepared if you choose to vaccinate with AstraZeneca. Please stock up on ibuprofen (we had Nurofen but any brand of ibuprofen will do) in case you need it. Not everyone's immune system responds the same way. From the six friends I've heard from since sharing my experience, the symptoms are exhaustion through to flu-like symptoms and lasts for half a day to the full two days.

So what did Boyfriend Pham and I experience? Immediately after the vaccine, we felt fine. I drove us home and we went back to work. About an hour later I started feeling flushed, my forehead was starting to burn up so I popped some panamax (not strong enough, it turns out) and kept working. After work, I walked the whole two metres from the dining table to our couch and felt utterly depleted of energy. Boyfriend Pham was still going strong. He played Xbox games while I played braindead.

When bedtime rolled I crawled into bed in a tee and Boyfriend Pham screamed 'cause my hands and feet were freezing. I couldn't tell my body was cold because my head was still on fever fire. So I got back out of bed, put on pants, a jumper and fuzzy socks and climbed back into bed. This time no matter how I curled up I couldn't get warm. I quietly suffered on my own until around 8.5 hours after our shot, Boyfriend Pham suddenly dropped off a cliff. 

He too started burning up and feeling freezing cold. He spent the next few hours physically shaking because his body was so cold. Eventually we fell asleep I think for about 1.5 hours then he got up to go to the bathroom, and I got up to get water because I'd sweated myself into dehydration even though I still didn't feel warm. We spent another few hours suffering before exhaustion put us to sleep for another hour. By morning I'd already told my boss I wasn't going to make it work work at my dining table that day. Instead, we spent the day on the couch feeling sick and sorry for ourselves. 

I can't even remember what we ate that day but I didn't have much appetite. Me! Yeah, I know, it means I was super sick. I had enough brain power for a family-friendly Disney movie. By 4pm, about 26.5 hours after our shots, Boyfriend Pham was able to get off the couch. I could shuffle about but I dreaded the thought of doing anything as focussed as cooking dinner. Instead, we ordered fish & chips and Boyfriend Pham drove us to collect it. I mainly ate chips 'cause the fish was too rich. We went to bed exhausted but at least we could feel the warmth of two blankets this time. The next morning, we woke up and it was like the last 30 hours hadn't happened. 

I'm told the second dose of AstraZeneca doesn't trigger any reactions. I have the day off work anyway to either stay home and feel sick or just to have a long weekend to celebrate my 100% vaccinated status. Good luck to anyone getting vaccinated, and good on you!

We made the right decision in installing an outdoor cat enclosure on our balcony so Rei could get natural sunlight when we're not home to leave our doors open. When I worked from home, Rei would follow the sun from our bedroom balcony door to our front door. She's squish up against the door ledge and it made me feel guilty that when I was in the office she only got morning sun in in our bedroom. 

Now that we have a cat enclosure, I barely ever see her during the day if I work from home. She'll come down a few times to check on me and each time I'd be boring work-mode at the desk so she'd go back upstairs. Basically, if I'm not sitting on the couch, my lap is useless to her.

Boyfriend Pham got a few quotes for cat enclosures and we ended up going with the most expensive quote because of the quality of their builds, and also the people seem like genuine cat lovers. Daniel, who came and did the installation, is indeed a cat lover. Once he finished the install, he stayed a while longer just to watch me coax Rei over the invisible line keeping her inside, and enjoy her new outdoor enclosure. There were cheaper, clunkier looking options, but being a townhouse, we wanted to have as little impact on the exterior as possible so body corporate would approve, and also so our house wouldn't look ugly. 

Happy Cat Enclosure installed Rei's little outdoor sanctuary on our balcony in a day. They were meticulous in securing the netting to the wall, ceiling and floor of our balcony. It's hours of detail work and the end result looks fabulous, and feels safe and secure. Rei has climbed the net and leaped from it daily and it holds fast. She spends hours each day lazing in the sun, watching the birds in the trees, climbing the netting when she sees a bug, eyeballing dogs and humans that walk past, meowing at us if we're down in the front yard, and overall just being a happy cat. 

My only regret about bringing Rei into nature is that she sometimes brings nature to us. The other day she brought giant grasshopper inside the house. It was so big we don't even know how it got inside the cat enclosure because its giant bug head looks bigger than the net spacing. I dread what bugs she'll drag in next, but ah well, it's all about happy cats right? Not so much an unhappy human screaming in the corner while Boyfriend Pham chases cat and grasshopper around the house. 

If you're considering a nice, minimalist cat enclosure I highly recommend the folks at Happy Cat Enclosure. Happy Cat Enclosures do all sorts of spaces either adding frames where needed or fixing to existing building structures like ours. They did a great job with our balcony, and recommended the glazier who installed a cat door for us too. Rei is a much happier cat now she can go outside inside.

Happy Cat Enclosures Brisbane

info@happycatenclosures.com.au

Do it! Your cat will love you for it, even though you'll see it less.

Temp desk before moving offices. Tad cramped.

In May 2014 a lady named Giselle contacted me about my 2012 Scrabble Letters post, asking to buy JADE off me for a room in her house that has a feature wall dedicated to scrabble words using the letters TYPO sold in 2012. Gisele collected them on eBay and Gumtree, and stumbled upon my blog on her hunt to build more words on her wall.

At the time, I had the letters decorating my desk. They were a gift from Little Sissy Pham and had sentimental value. Over the years, the letters have moved with me from office to office, and desk to desk until finally this year when I moved to desk too small to fit my standing desk and the letters. So I felt ready to finally say goodbye.

I reached out to Giselle on the off chance that 7 years on she may still want the letters and wouldn't you know, she did! In the spirit of Buy Nothing, I gifted the scrabble letters to Giselle. She lives interstate so it had to be shipped which is not in the spirit of Buy Nothing that aims to reduce environmental impacts by keeping items in your local area. But I figured it'd be better the scrabble letters continue their life in a home where they'll make someone happy, rather than go into storage and probably eventually landfill once I inevitably move desks again.