Back in Brisbane, Back Online

It’s a quiet, slightly gloomy Easter Monday and I’ve spent the better of my afternoon lurking in my bedroom with a copy of William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavour and The Jane Austen Argument’s Somewhere Under the Radio on repeat. I’ve been meaning to write a catch-up kind of post ever since I went to Rockhampton a few weeks back, but I didn’t and somehow the fact that I kept accumulating things to blog about only meant that the gap kept winding on. Bullocks to that, though, so I figured I’d peel myself off the bed and give you the highlights.

Firstly, I went to Rockhampton and it rained a great deal. This resulted in about ten hours of fun at the Rockhampton airport, watching them cancel and reschedule flights, until finally my 1:30 PM flight out finally happened at 2:00 AM instead. It made for a long day, although I did get to duck out of the airport and see the launch of Rockhampton Stories, which is one of those projects for which I take minutes, process paperwork, and otherwise admin as part of my dayjob. It’s kind of cool, and worth checking out.

I will say that there are worse places to be stuck than Rockhampton Airport. They have free WiFi, for starters, and there are plenty of people who will take an interest in your predicament over twitter when you start tweeting and slowly losing your mind due to boredom.

I also went to Melbourne in the same week, which started as a I’m here for dayjobbery type trip and ended as a short holiday where I caught up with veritable avalanche of Melbournian friends who I don’t get to see often enough. This was originally one of those things I intended to blog about in detail, mostly so I could point you all in the direction of friends who are doing interesting things, but over the last few weeks the events of Melbourne have blurred together and I’m not sure I can articulate things well enough. So, instead, I’m just going to throw out some highlights in dot-points.

• Dinner with my friend Kevin Powe, who led me into the wilds of Melbourne in search of particularly tasty vegan/vegetarian food, scotch, and decidedly evil hot chocolate. Kev’s one of those people who, as a general rule, I’m quite happy to follow along to restaurants and bars because he’ll pick something that’s both outside my experience and utterly outstanding.
• Catching up with Heidi, who I’d gone to university with many years ago and promptly lost track of when she fled the Gold Coast like all sane people eventually do. It would have been about twelve years since I last caught up with here, which is ordinarily a length of time which makes me nervous about seeing people again, but Heidi remained very much the person I knew and liked back when we first met. She gave me a pack of the greeting cards she produces, and reminded me why Facebook is occasionally useful despite my reservations about it.
• Chatting with Jason Nahrung and Kirstyn McDermott, who kindly helped me fine the Melbourne Supper Club after I’d organised to meet a whole bunch of people there and utterly failed to recognise that the blank, unmarked door hidden between two restaurants was actually the entrance I was looking for. Also, there’s something remarkably pleasant about seeing people I normally only see at Cons outside the convention environment.
• Getting in a night of C’Thulhu gaming with recently relocated friends Al & Nic, although we did drag in Chris Green as a forth player. It was a good game, and we discovered that Al is a tricksy, tricksy bastard, but also some kind of mad C’Thuloid

And then, mixed in among all that, there was shopping for a new laptop (Fritz, alas, couldn’t quite cope with being stuck in Rocky for twelve hours), work, the post-trip flu that knocked me out for a few days, more work, new books, new videos, a rather disasterous viewing of the new Conan film from last year (I may have savaged it via twitter), and a bunch of things I’m forgetting. Like moving. Oh, yes, I did forget that – I returned from Melbourne and discovered my flatmate/landlord was buying a new house, which means we’re moving in May or so.

Somewhere amid all that it became April, which is one of those months I had plans for, but somehow they didn’t eventuate.

Or, rather, they haven’t eventuated yet. I’m guessing there’s still time to whip April into shape. And pack things.

Best I get on with that, yes.