Well, Zaubi will be happy since my new employment means he will be seeing me wear some (gasp) skirts.

But, it has just dawned on me that this also means that it might be a good idea to obtain a full-length mirror, since assessing the tidyness of one’s outfit is very difficult to do while teettering on the edge of the bathtub, alternately squatting and stretching to try and gain some idea of how one looks in a rather small and narrow face mirror (my current method, if I bother at all)…

Worse yet, I think I may actually have to obtain… an iron.

Horrors!!

Ironing is one of those things that I have never been able (or willing) to do…

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…

The rain pours down outside. I was told Brisbane winters were supposed to be completely dry. I am told this rain is highly unusual. Oh well, while it is the Brisbane equivalent of February, it’s still some 55 degrees outside, so how can I complain?

Nevertheless, it’s a day to bake cookies, to wrap oneself in a blanket and drink cocoa and read trashy novels and nap.

Therefore I am sitting at my desk writing (bad) code for my website. I could make life more interesting and keep working on my PHP Carcassonne game instead, or read the books on the Ancient Near East I took out of the library yesterday. Or I could curl up on the sofa in the big purple blanket, convince Elma to sit on my chest, and trail off to sleep…

Changes are in the air.

I can’t quite explain it, but my state of mind has changed somewhat over the period of time I was in Israel.

I have essentially quit my Masters program — I am taking only one class this semester, and that mainly for the reason that I have a lot of independant research I’d like to do that came into my mind while I was in Israel, and I don’t want to lose access to UQ’s library just yet. The more I think about UQ the more disgruntled I am about it — I don’t see that I am going to gain much worthwhile by staying — that is, being a full fee student, I don’t feel that anything I could gain by staying is worth the considerable financial commitment. The do not offer courses or advisors in my field of interest, and that’s that.

I hear that the Australian government has been cutting funds to universities — perhaps this contributes in good part to the decay of Australian higher education — I don’t know. For all I know, UQ could once have been a solid and reputable university: but right now, I find myself severely disappointed.

So, that’s that. Kirilisa decides to edge out of school and as such I now seek a job. None of the coding jobs I have applied for have even bothered getting back to me, which fact I find rather frustrating. All of them seem to insist on only hiring people with a degree in IT so perhaps they are automatically demoting me on that count — I don’t know. This country is definitely more trade-based than the US — perhaps people’s minds are trained to look at the degree rather than consider real-life equivalents… whatever.

Somehow I no longer find myself stressed out about all this. It’s as if, while I was away, and met people and looked at all the things I could have studied, could have done, could still perhaps do, I realized that a career, per se, is not for me. I know I will never be a person who is on one track to a certain career… I mean, I always knew this, but could never accept it before. Somehow over the past month, my protest has melted away and I feel instead a strange lightness of being.

So I am applying for jobs, different sorts of jobs: I no longer feel insistant about a certain job in particular… it’s as if I’ve just realized that anything I want to study, or do, or learn, I can do myself. And it doesn’t really matter what other things take up bits of my time. Since I know I will never have a ‘career’ — could not, indeed tolerate the same thing over and over — I do not have to concentrate on heading in any particular direction. I shall do the things that interest me in the moment, do the things that come along, and see where the tides bring me.

I’m glad I went to Israel.

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There is a lot of potential travel this Spring (Fall: I can’t get used to the idea of calling Oct-Nov-Dec ‘Spring’). In mid-October Zaubi is being sent to a Robotics conference in Germany: I will likely come along and we plan to take an extra week or so to visit friends and family there. In November, it’s our plan to head back to the States for 2-3 weeks to see our parents and siblings, and in the first week of December, Zaubi has another week’s conference in NZ, which I will also most likely amble along to. And then, over Christmas, mrtee has announced his intentions of visiting! I am terribly excited!

This is a post about cats.

During those two weeks we all spent at the ETAP Galilee hotel near Tel Hazor, I befriended a good many feral cats. Israel is crawling with scrawny dirty scarred up feline specimans — they lived all over the parking lot next to the hotel, hiding in the bushes, lounging under parked cars, playing behind the hotel where we did laundry and pottery readings. There was one I was particularly fond of — Scarface. She was the mother of 4 half-grown kittens (there must have been 7 or 8 cats with kittens and others pregnant) and had had half her face and neck flayed in some recent accident. I guess another cat did that to her — it was utterly gruesome.

When I first saw Scarface she had a huge flap of rotting skin hanging off her wound and she stank abominably. After seeing her for a day or so, I lured her over with some cheese and held onto her while Jon chopped the dead skin off with my Swiss Army Knife.l After that it seemed her wound started healing a bit better and she didn’t stink nearly so badly. From that day until the day we were so suddenly evacuated, I made sure to feed her and her kittens twice a day (bought some cat food at a grocery store in a neighboring town) and ‘operated’ on her face a couple more times to get rid of the rotten skin. She was very perky, doing great, and then we were evacuated and I never saw her again.

There was another kitten, not one of Scarface’s, that was my favorite — he was the runt of his litter, very tiny, very black, missing one eye altogether and mostly blind in the other. I’m sure he won’t live long in this parking lot of much traffic without being able to see… indeed, on the day we were evacuated, I found him lying between two garbage cans, panting weirdly, for all appearances dying, and I figured in his blindness he’d been clipped by a car, and I was heartbroken. A man who worked nearby had brought him a cup of water, so I left him a few bits of catfood before I was rushed onto the bus. The next day we were allowed to return for 1 hour to gather our belongings, so I gathered mine in about 15 minutes and then went out to feed the cats one last time. ALl of Scarface’s kittens were there, and many other cats besides, but there was no Scarface, and my tiny kitten (and the food bits) had vanished from between the trash cans. Perhaps he got up and walked away, who knows? did not see him again, and I will always wonder.

So the rest of this post is dedicated to Scarface and her kittens and little black kitten too.

Well, I’m home.

I feel weird, though. I don’t feel like I’m really home. I feel like I’m ghosting somewhere halfway in between…

Walking around, doing normal everyday home things, I feel like you feel when you are about to go somewhere very far away for a long time… everything has a kind of final feel to it, like it is the last time I’ll be doing something, like I am saying goodbye. I feel… transient. Like things are about to change.

I don’t like it.