the adventures of pinkaholic girl

internet! zomg!

It's been five weeks since I've had internet at home. I'm currently sitting at Niall's place after lugging my laptop halfway across London so that I can enjoy lounging on a couch while deciding what moves I will make in the five simultaneous games of scrabulous I have going. I'm also blogging (clearly evidenced by this post), upgrading iTunes, house hunting, reading up on what I need for my HSMP, doing some internet banking, researching ahead for a trip to Bath this weekend with the parentals, coveting laptops, and generally not really relaxing with all this internetting because I have a list of things a mile long that I need to get completed.

Curses to the flatmate who cancelled direct debits for the internet account then conveniently "forgot" to tell us that she'd done it, with the end result being a £200 cancellation fee and NO INTERNET FOR FIVE WEEKS (and counting).

It seems like the world is conspiring to keep the internet away from me. None of the flatmates are interested in signing up for a new internet plan for the house because I suspect they are all thinking of moving out in the near future. I know I'm keen to get out of there. Call me crazy, but I have hygenic objections to nobody ever washing up, and salmon being left on the counter overnight then put back into the fridge all smelly and uncovered the morning after.

Lucky for me, mobile broadband is the Next Big Thing in London and you can get a tiny usb modem for your laptop and a data plan for only £15 a month for 3G of data allowance. Which means you can take the internet anywhere! You can be sitting in a park and browsing right from there - wherever you have mobile reception you can check your facebook wall. How hot is that?!

Unlucky for me, this Next Big Thing is so popular that three, the provider with the new cheap plans, has literally sold out of the internet. The modems have been sucked dry from every London store and there's a backlog of internet orders that won't be fulfilled until October 2 (probably worse now since it's about a week after I was told that date).

I'm currently getting my daily gmail/scrabulous fix from work *sends a thank-you prayer to the gods of lenient Small Medium Enterprise internet policies* and random email fixes on the weekend from the local net cafe. Unfortunately the net cafe doesn't allow you to connect anything USB related to their computers, so I haven't been able to update my flickr photos or even draft blog posts on my laptop to upload later. :p

If it's a little while before my next blog update, you know I'm still suffering from internet withdrawl. I live in hope that I will once again be connected to the actual world from home some time in the near future. If it's any later than the near future, I think I might go insane...

posted by d @ 8:02 pm 0 comments

three hundred and sixty five days later

It's been a year since I left my hometown of Sydney with nothing but a backpack (and a laptop, and suit, and high hopes of earning pounds with some european travel thrown in). I can't believe the time has flown by so quickly, it seems only yesterday that I was standing at the airport, crying my eyes out as I said goodbye to my family and friends.

I do miss some aspects of home, but I think that moving to London is the best thing I've ever done. I've learned so much about myself and my surroundings; how I fit in to the world and what I want out of things. I've travelled through Canada, which was one of the dream holidays that I never really imagined I'd do until I was "grown up". I've seen a few European cities and countries that I never thought I'd get the chance to visit. I've challenged myself work-wise, met a lot of new and interesting people, and made choices and plans for my life that I didn't think were possible a year ago.

That period of upheaval was one of the most impressionable times in my life. I was with faced so much uncertainty of my own doing... I had no choice but to treat it positively. But short of moving to yet another city in the world, I doubt that I'll ever be able to replicate the feelings and thoughts that I experienced back then. Having to deal with all the random thoughts and emotions you go through when you move over here makes you grow up pretty quickly, so while this year has been short, I felt like I've moved quite far ahead relatively in my life.

London is always challenging and never predictable, but I like that. Life here is driven by what you make of it, and I guess my move over here has coincided with a stage of my life where I'm a bit more willing to take risks with work or seize travel opportunities I wouldn't have before. There are also many charms in this city that I have yet to tire of, I am nowhere near ready to go home :)

I wanted to post something more poignant (or at least a bit more "....here's one I prepared earlier") but because of snowballing circumstances, including having our internet account at home cancelled two weeks ago and a 3-day tube strike, I find myself sitting at an internet cafe after a 90 minute commute home on the bus, randomly babbling on about whatever comes to mind. I'm posting this in conjunction with another post that has been on the draft backburner for a while, which captures a bit more of the feelings I've been having lately. I hope this passage makes sense, but even if it doesn't, it felt kind of important to me to write something up to mark the occasion... one year since I've left home, and what a fantastic year it has been. :)

posted by d @ 7:33 pm 4 comments