I'm never quite sure how to spell that word, but it's certainly what I have got at present.... I've spent most of the weekend in bed, and came home at 4:30 pm today, because my head was spinning. There have been so many people at work that have got winter illnesses that it's not surprising that I have succumbed. I thought I was doing all right until last week, then I felt a bit strange and then the howling gale over the weekend really finished me off. Frankly I think I will go mad if the wind doesn't stop!

I may well stay home tomorrow, even though I hate being sick in a hotel, just so that I can recover before the weekend, when I will be flying to Melbourne on Friday night, then New Zealand on the 10:45 am flight on Saturday. No long flights, but I won't get to my mother's until about 8pm on Saturday night, there are not so many flights on Saturdays. The funny thing is that my sister will also be passing through Auckland airport on Saturday, on her way to Vanuatu, I think we just miss each other. At least the flight from Melbourne to Auckland is on one of Air New Zealand's nice new planes with really comfortable seats, and no-one sitting next to you, so it shouldn't be too stressful.

So it's only two weeks until I sleep in my own bed again - I'm looking forward to all the mail that will be piled up for me. I ordered a whole lot of Carriage House Samplings charts from SBB, at the last opportunity (I'm devastated that CHS is no more), and I can hardly wait to see them. When I get back, it will be summer holidays and hardly anyone will be in Paris. Having spent all my travel budget on trips to Perth and New Zealand, I will not be joining the exodus to the south of Europe this year, so will be staying at home. I don't have to go back to work until September, as I have so much holiday banked up.

While I'm in New Zealand, I won't be online at all, or be able to answer emails, so if you need to get hold of me before about 10th August, it's this week or not!

Bad, bad blogger, Ally!!! And it is not as though I have any excuse, life here is rather slow, so much so that I am just sort of catatonic all the time. I get up at 6:45, go out for breakfast and get to work at about 8:15, then work until 5:30, come back to the hotel and vegetate. I've even stopped watching tv, as all there is is the election campaign and that just bores me. Worthy though the candidates may be, I just cannot stand the way the two main ones talk. I got told off by my colleagues the other day for saying they both needed interpreters, but I do think that was only a slight exaggeration...

I'm looking forward more than ever to getting off this island next Friday - even the packing doesn't seem so frightful, although I'm not looking forward to the whole airport thing, as I have to negotiate Hobart, Melbourne (twice), Auckland and Napier before I get to my mother's place at about 8pm on Saturday. I've started collecting 2 dollar coins for the trolleys at airports -memo to unsuspecting foreigners, they are only free at international arrivals - for domestic arrivals and all departures, you pay $4 in coins and you don't get it back when you return the trolley. Plus it says on the machine that you can use a visa card, but clearly not a French one, from my experience. I'm hoping the same system does not prevail in NZ, I cannot remember.

Only one more weekend to go in Hobart, let's hope it's a good one - last weekend was wet, and I was depressed, wandering around the museum looking at Antarctic exhibits. They were actually well done, but perhaps not the thing for a wet day. Fortunately the museum has one of the nicest cafes I've seen here, with perfect lemon tarts and extremely nice coffee.

And in three week's time I'll be back in Paris, I think I've spent about forty days at home this year, so it's fairly obvious why I am longing to get back.

First an update on my LHN Stitchers Pocket:
I think this will be very pretty when finished, and it is coming along nicely, a few more evenings of concentrating should work wonders!

Yesterday I went to the Craft Show, goodness, it was a long way out of town, at the Derwent Entertainment Centre. It was fairly hard to get there and back, the options were either a $25 taxi ride or an hourly bus ride. I quite enjoyed it, although it was small, maybe about twenty stalls, and there was really nothing much for embroiderers, apart from a few stalls that had fancy scissors and tape measures, and Dymock's book skop. However, I did buy some patchwork fabric and see a nice quilt exhibition from Tasmanian quilters.

Really I must learn to keep my mouth shut in public though - I opened it to admire a quilt at one patchwork shop's stall, and the woman behind the counter commented that I was not from around here, was I? Quite often people ask where I am from and so on, so I answered her when she did, and my goodness, she told me all about how Paris would be a terrible place to bring up children, because of the pollution which would prevent them from playing outside.... I had to ask, and no, she's never been to Europe!

Thinking about it later, I realised a couple of people at work had said how lucky I was to be able to come to Tasmania and spend time here, and I'm now wondering whether it is common here to think that Paris, and Europe in general, is very polluted and unhealthy. Which isn't the case, in fact. In Paris we can get hazy days in summer when it is very hot and they ask people not to drive, but this is only occasional and mostly the air quality is very good. In Cyprus we did get problems with dust storms, when we were advised to stay inside if possible, but again only occasionally.

I'm contemplating tomorrow with more equanimity than usual, since I have only fifteen work days left here. I'm just hoping I can keep from catching a cold or anything like that!

I am really counting the days now..... I'm so homesick, and I get intermittently quite depressed by the darkness. It gets dark about 4:30 pm here, and it always takes me by surprise when I am working. I go to lunch, come back, work, then look up after a while, then it's dark. I walk home in the dark and walk to work mostly in the dark, as well, so that is a tad depressing.

This week we had another new arrival, a guy who was in Estonia with me for a while, which is nice, because he's someone I associate with home. The people I work with here are very nice, actually, I can't complain about that at all. No Special Snowflakes at all! Most of our team went out for dinner to a fish restaurant (lots of those in Hobart, and some very good) on Tuesday night as a welcome to the new guy.

This morning was very cold - by Australian standards, not by Northern European! My knees were creaking as I walked up the hill to work, so the wind is clearly coming from the wrong direction. I'm hoping it will at least stay fine over the weekend, as there is a craft fair on at an exhibition centre not far from Hobart, and I have tickets. There is allegedly a bus that goes there, I'm trying to work out now how to catch it.... I'll report on the experience some time over the weekend.

Just a note to say that I have a Gmail address now instead of Hotmail - since the Hotmail got spammed and started sending things to everyone I know. Apologies to anyone who got the spam, it didn't look very nice at all.