Happy-making things, January 2013

• The beautiful buttery light this morning that helped me forget how dry and brown and sad the environment is right now.
• Making new friends my age who are as dorky as I am and share my excitement over veggie growing and other such things.
• Dragging my arse back to the pool after months and months of injury an still being able to make my old minimum distance of 1.2 km (though slowly).
• Noticeable improvement in the bung knee, although there's still some way to go.
• Fresh eggs from the chickens and the pleasure of creatures in the garden (I'll miss them when the go home next week, even if their occasional escapes have done some serious plant damage).
• The joy of digging up fresh potatoes, which hasn't got old yet.
• Watching the Tasmanian community pull together in response to the fires, and being part of that.
• Sorting out my friendship with Kat and spending a lovely Sunday evening just enjoying each other's company.
• Having a work-mate's Chilean scientist wife agree to translate my resume for me for a fair fee after the local translation company quoted me $740 (or 50 cents a word!)
• Berry season!
• Neighbours who have become real friends.
• My bushfire photos turning up all over the place.
• New challenges and responsibilities at work.
• Realising I'm actually making real progress on changing ingrained old behaviours, slow as the process may be.
• Amazing, wonderful friends who give me confidence in people and love and humanity.
• Actually reaching for a dream instead of choosing the safe path.

=o)

Edit
Unhappy-making things:
Trying to book flights from Santiago to Lima and having LAN airlines site reject my credit card payment and the guy on their help line disappearing on the call then hanging up on me. Grrr!

Ah well, I have flight numbers and prices now, at least, and have worked out the logistics of getting from Santiago, Chile to Cusco, Peru and back again without having to leave Santiago airport, pay the $90 entry fee, convert money into pesos and spend a night in a city I don't much like.

Having flight logistics sorted also means I can finally confirm my enrolment with the language school too! Oh sweet progress.