Bienvendos - Welcome!

Hi everyone!

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Vanessa, and I'm a Melbourne girl living away from my family and friends in Adelaide. Well, actually, that's not strictly true - the people I work with are like family, and I've made some very good friends here too. But anyway.

A week or two ago I was on one of my favourite blogs of all time, Cakewrecks.com. Cakewrecks had a link to The Pioneer Woman, and that's how I found my new favourite website. Sorry, Cakwrecks, but Ree Drummond (AKA the Pioneer Woman) is officially my hero. PW caught my attention with her drool-inducing, waistline-fortifying, mid-western recipes, and reeled me in with the story of how she and her husband, Marlboro Man, got together. It's called Black Heels to Tractor Wheels: A Love Story. It's addicitve. It's very addictive. You have been warned.

Anyway, for a while I've been thinking of a way to better keep my friends back home in the loop. I feel like they're not as big a part of my life as I would like, and vice-versa. I don't care whether or not they want to read about my life here, I'm just giving the opportunity to do so and they can take it or leave it. And yes, I am conceited enough to think that somebody will be interested!

Basically, I realised some time ago that most of the minutae of my life gets a bit "lost in translation" if you don't talk about it on the day, or shortly after the event. This came to light when a friend came back from a 3-month honeymoon. I was mulling over it with another friend, who I email a gazillion times a day, because I was concerned things would have changed now that she was married and had been gone for so long, and that I wouldn't be able to express the ups and downs of the last three months - things that had been super-important at the time; the excitement; the setbacks. Or that she wouldn't understand, because she wasn't there. Or that she wouldn't care. So I emailed her af synopsis of the three months that she had been gone.

Apparently 3-4 months after the event, the teensy, tiny, insignificant details of our lives really lose their impact, because the reaction was a little lukewarm. I don't know what I was expecting - perhaps some sort of acknowledgement of the stuff that had happened that had seemed to big to me - but I figured that at least I'd done my part by communicating it, and that it didn't really matter what kind of reception it got. And it certainly wasn't that she didn't care, it was just that she didn't understand the context because she wasn't there. I suppose this may be one reason that I have heard very little about the honeymoon - because it was her and her new husband's time, and she didn't think I'd understand or care, because I wasn't there. Having reached the realisation that this assumption that nobody will care seems to be a two-way street, I realised my error in hesitating over sending her my little synopsis of the last three months. This is an assumption that we all need to stop making, people! - because let's face it, there's so much that goes unsaid. Friends are there to listen to things you don't think anyone will care about, amongst other things. Give them the benefit of the doubt and tell them anyway.

SO. That's what I'm trying to prevent - all the teensy, tiny, insignificant (but really, REALLY important-at-the-time) details slipping through the cracks between here and Melbourne (no need to worry about the cracks between here and Canberra, which are well-grouted with email and SMS!). And I'm also going to have a bit of fun with this, like PW does. She, after all, inspited me to put it out there, and as far as creative outlets go, this isn't a bad one. I won't update this every day, by any stretch of the imagination! No, I'm aiming for weekly, or whenever something interesting happens, whichever happens... I was going to say first, but I somehow doubt that (no, I know myself too well to go making rash promises like that)... whichever happens second, then! Today's should be long enough to last you for at least a week, anyhow. And I can't say how long I'll keep it up for, either, but I'll have a crack at it.

Also, I have no-hoooooooooo idea what I'm doing, so I apologise for my unimaginative and disorganised (can I say crap?) format in advance. I'll get it right one day.

Enjoy! (or not)

Love, Ness xoxo