or: How An Australian Started The Day After A Couple of Years Away

My first full day back in Australia after being away for a couple of years began as follows:

– woke up for an extended period in the night to total silence (thank you jet lag for the opportunity to read in the middle of the night). As the day dawned in pinks and oranges, parrots, magpies and cicadas greeted it in their respective languages. I fell back asleep, content.

– properly woke up a few hours later and drank 500mL of water while still in bed. I read and then checked Facebook. Normally I wouldn’t do this while still in bed but today was different. The FB memory for that day was a YouTube video of a kookaburra laughing. My comment was “one of the 974 things I miss while I’m out of Australia”.

– decided I should eat and be social. I went into the kitchen, my cousin (the groom, which is why I’m back in Australia at the moment anyway) sliced the bread for me (his Dad is a baker and pastry chef extraordinaire so he has been trained to do this well. I cut doorstops and don’t want to ruin anyone else’s loaf) and put it in the toaster while I managed to splatter milk throughout the kitchen, successfully missing the container I wanted it in, cleaned that mess and made myself a cup of coffee.

– ate my breakfast of Vegemite on toast, sitting outside while fish body-slammed against the canal surface where two black swans had swum the day prior before flying back to Western Australia.

– my cousin told me he needed to collect gumnuts for the beach wedding festivities.

I laughed and thought “this is Australia” and had the Sounds of Then tune stuck in my head for a good chunk of the afternoon!

Not too shabby a start to my time here.

* Thanks to deadmau5 for the title to this post.