Happy Hogmanay/New Years!!
Insert long winded reflection on 2013 here:
2013 was awesome, so much crazy stuff happened and ceased to happen. Let me explain (humor me):
You know when you were in your late teens, and you started making a list as to how your 20's were going to go? At least, most girls do…I think..anyway, the point is that my list has always been this, in this order:
- Get a degree
- Go travelling
- Get a career
- Buy a house
- Get married at 25.
The planets aligned quite tidily behind me for a few years because my list was completed on schedule; I even managed to acquire an Isaac to complete numbers 2, 4 & 5 with. Everything was documented, ticked off, stamped, hole-punched and filed alphabetically by age 25. I did a nerdy internal fist-pump then tore up the list. It was like an assignment I’d handed in. I’d worked hard on it, got it in on time and got good marks. So that’s that, time to enjoy the situation that I’d worked so hard on putting myself into.
We got back from our honeymoon. My bosses had let my work pile up on my desk while I’d been away. We bought a car (MoMo, our fabulous little red 1990 Mazda MX5) and got on with our lives. Receive pay packet, hand it to the mortgage, receive pay packet, hand it to the mortgage, receive pay packet, hand it to the mortgage… and so forth on a fortnightly basis for 4 years. The excitement in each day came from playing the ‘will I get to leave work before its dark today?’ game. Pay packet, mortgage, pay packet, mortgage, pay packet, mortgage, pay packet, mortgage…..wait wait wait hold on hold on hold on. We are turning 30 next year. THIRTY. Are we going to spend our 30’s like this too? I’m feeling postal already!
I had a plan for my 20’s. I never thought about our 30’s. Perhaps my downfall was not sitting and doing another list after my first one became obsolete. I didn't do one because I didn't know what to put on it. I still don’t. Kids, more work, some investments I suppose. But… do I want kids? I never have before, plus we couldn't afford a house big enough for them nor the time off work to care for them. I was already working more than an overworked person does, so I couldn't work any harder.
Had I been paying attention, buying the classic midlife crisis car (MoMo) would have alerted me to the fact that my life compass had become balls-deep in magnets the moment everything was ticked off my list.
Perhaps making the list in the first place was a mistake?
We were still happy…but happy in the way that a homeless person is happy to receive a hot drink. Happy but not happy.
So what to do? Drink of course. And so we did, exuberantly (which was awesome, thanks Dan!).
INTERMISSION!! Congratulations, you've earned a break from this excessively long blog post! Watch a song! Yippee!! (We saw Newton Faulker play this song live last year, it helped our lets-run-away-juices flow)
So there we were: it was mid June and we were on the couch after a few too many sherbets on a Sunday afternoon to quell the pain of the coming work day, and I thought to myself, ‘Man...remember Scotland? Fark that was great..imagine if we could work there! I’m gonna Google it right now!’. Helpx came up in my Google search along with images of secluded isles, snow topped mountains and beautiful sunsets over a foreign ocean. I looked a bit more into Helpx and our finances, and started running outlandish options through my head like ‘we could rent out our unit, or we could sell it, or we could just go on a short holiday, or we could go balls out and try and get jobs and buy a house in Scotland and live in the highlands and have a hairy coo as pet and we can call him Nibbles!’.
We considered the idea of doing Helpx to be just a bit of a fancy for a couple of weeks…we wouldn't sell our property, that’s a stupid financial decision. I couldn't leave my job, what would they do without me? Pure whimsy. Pure, unadulterated whimsy. Seductive whimsy…the kind of whimsy that doesn't leave your mind for longer than 11.7 seconds at a time. Within a matter of a couple of weeks, we made a date to have one of those ‘serious’ talks. We went for breakfast before work at our local cafe.
“So…do you want to run away to Scotland?”
“Um…yeah...I kinda really want to’
“Yeah…I want to too”. Nervous laugh. Gulp.
Everything fell into place and we committed to the cause completely. The universe was on our side; our unit sold after being listed for 2 days, MoMo sold the day we left, and we gave all but our most prized possessions to charity and friends (sorry people who ended up with shit loads of our shit!). I learned that the best financial decisions aren’t necessarily the best decisions.
We’ve no jobs and no home. We just welcomed in 2014 in a little pub with a bunch of people who were saying ‘Aye’ and ‘Lassy’ a lot.
2013, woah.
2014….we are quivering with anticipation.
