Catching up on life

It's been a while since I blogged. Our end-of-summer months have been a whirlwind, full of happy and sad times.  The sad part of our year was the passing of Toby's mom. She had been sick for a long time, and we were lucky to get to spend a fair bit of time with her over the past couple months. We were also lucky that Toby could stay with her in the States for two months, while I was back in Sydney. It was a rough time for the family, and we will miss her terribly. She was such a funny woman, and she had so much love for her children. The silver lining of this cloud was how loved our friends and family made us feel, both our Aussie and American ones. While T was away caring for his mom, I had so many people looking out for me in Sydney. Not only that, but I sent a running list every day to Toby of all the people who were asking about him and his mom. I think it's partly due to the nature of our friends here - most of them are expats and know the stress and challenges of being far away from your loved ones in hard times. But it's the first time I've felt the full depth of the friendships we've made here, and it was humbling and heartwarming for both of us. We feel so lucky. In other news, while T was away, I decided to surrender in the battle with the huntsman spiders. As much as I hate to admit defeat, I have given the apartment over to them and their new human roommates. The upside is that we moved to a new place, just a few days after T got back and a few days before I left for San Francisco. The new apartment meets all my hard-learned, anti-spider criteria: concrete building, at least three floors up, and no jungle plants surrounding the windows. 

This is new outdoor space. Less green = less spiders! 

The straw that broke the camels back was the morning back in February (right before T headed off to the States) we found a big black spider on our dining room floor. Per the usual spider routine, we caught him in our spider container, but quickly realized that it wasn't the usual huntsman. Panic set in when we looked it up online and found that it looked very much like a funnel web spider, one of the most venomous spiders in Australia. That was the morning I started looking for apartments.

  In an effort to be good Aussie community members, we read up on what to do with such a spider. Turns out, the government collects these guys, and they are milked to produce anti-venom. There are "collection stations" all around the city, but only one was open on a Sunday. So we rented our GoGet car and headed up the Northern Beaches to deliver the spider for collection. It goes without saying that driving around with a scary spider in the backseat was not how I wanted to spend my Sunday morning! Before we moved out of our old apartment, Mother Nature gave us one last gift. We got to see a spider wasp take down a huntsman and drag it back to its nest. The spider wasps are really big and bright orange, but otherwise they look exactly like wasps from home. They battle with huntsman and paralyze the spiders with a toxin. Then they drag them in a straight line back to their nest, keeping the huntsman alive so they can incubate their larvae in it. We watched this whole process go down (minus the larvae) at an alarmingly close distance to our front door. But it was fascinating enough that it was worth it!

I won't fully miss living in a nature documentary, but I will miss some things about it! Besides the joys of Australian wildlife, things have been good in Sydney. I moved to a new office building that's much higher up, so we have a really lovely view of Darling Harbour and the city.

The office is really nice, with lots of beautiful spaces and a lovely big kitchen.

 

When Toby got back, I took a day off work and we hung out for the day in Newtown, poking around the second oldest cemetery in Sydney and seeing a movie.

 

One solo weekend, I took the ferry up to Manly and enjoyed the sunshine for a day. It's been very rainy, so I wanted to soak up as much of the last summer sun that I could!  

 

  I met a friend for lunch on another solo weekend, and we happened across this weird dog red carpet event. There was even a photographer there with some professional equipment, shooting pictures of the dogs. I left the situation with more questions than answers!

  Mostly, it's been a rainy, hectic few months. As soon as my work trip to the US is over, I'm looking forward to being back in Sydney, catching my breath, and enjoying the beautiful fall days of Sydney.  

Happy Easter!