well great now we're both stuck in this b(l)og!

Feb: hello this is my first entry welcome welcome come in how are you

take a seat get comfy hi hello I'm sorry I'm dreadfully unprepared for this and am writing with zero plans for what I want to talk about. Some may call this rambling. Some may be correct. Whatever, you clicked on this page of your own free will, now you must read the word vomit (or don't, whatever man).

So, I guess I'll start with a superrr brief little reflection on the year? Idk, it's been hectic. My life is in a very different place to what it was twelve months ago, and that is extremely cool I think. What's cooler about it is that it's the result of many deliberate gambles and decisions I've made with the aim of improving things for me and actually achieving something with my life that I can feel good about. That's pretty huge of me tbh. These aren't things that come very naturally to me, and I've never really done anything like it before. Usually I just kinda let life drag me around and mostly stagnate the rest of the time. But that kinda stinks and as I've gotten older and my brain has probably developed slightly more, I've come to the realisation that I can actually control what happens in my life, and choose to make it interesting and like.... actually nice? I have fun? I'm pretty happy almost every day? It's nuts really. Anyway, too much rambling sorry, I'll get on with it.
Last year I went back to school and did a course in conservation and land management practices - this was pretty life changing and was probably the best decision I've ever made. The course itself was okay, many things could've been done better and it overall didn't really teach everything it should've, but regardless of all that it still majorly altered the course my life forever. Like I've got a career and shit now. Wild.
I've met so many really interesting, hardworking, kind and all round admirable people, many that I look up to, and many that I owe a lot too for the opportunities they've given me and the chances they've taken on me. I've visited so many new places and seen stacks of vastly different environments, I've learnt about hundreds (possibly thousands?) of plant species, and hundreds more fauna. The way I see the world has changed - which is both a blessing and a curse really. I could talk for a while about that, and I think I might actually, just in another entry maybe with a little more structure.

Anyhow, skipping many many events from the year, I'm now in a particularly hectic spot where I'm self-employed, subcontracting for an extremely cool ecologist who is probably my biggest inspiration ever, working on monitoring projects for a threatened insect species (which is!! so amazing!! niche species are soo hard to get funding for! so the fact that there is somehow enough funding to allow her to hire me to work on it is nuts! I've been doing it for months and I'm still not over how cool and lucky this is!). I have also just quit my other job working in ecosystem management down in the city, because in another amazing stroke of luck I got offered a job doing essentially the same job, but based out of my home town! Which is insane because there is absolutely nothing in my town. We have a servo and a primary school, that is all. There's only like four hundred people here. Getting an actual job here is almost impossible. I got one though - I just started this week and so far it's been pretty cool! Pretty similar to my last one, except I don't have to drive two-three hundred kilometres a day to get there. Which is absolutely huge really. I have time in my day to like. Do more than just the bare essential daily-functioning tasks. And I get paid the same.
All this amazing luck couldn't come without atleast a little crap though, of course. I had my first car accident a couple weeks ago! I'm gonna make a little photo frame of my poor smashed up car for 'baby's first car crash!'. Anyway yeah it sucked. I mean no one died or got injured or anything so that's pretty cool, but it particularly sucked because it was my fault, and because I was sooooo close to avoiding it. And because my car is somehow justttt damaged enough that no mechanic is willing to fix it, but not damaged enough to be dead. Like it still runs fine. I drove that thang one hundred km home afterwards. It runs. It just looks very scary. It's still sitting in my carport bumming me out because while I COULD drive it, any cop that sees me is going to GET me I don't know how much trouble I'd be in but I do not want to find out. Whatever though, I will miss that little car - she tolerated so much shit from me and never once complained at all. Realistically I did need an upgrade because that poor thing was not a four-wheel-drive, and treating it like one every day was probably not very healthy for it. It's been a pretty stressful time though - crashing your car and changing jobs in the same week is really not something I recommend.

Anyhow, there is definitely more that I could and really should say to sum this up, but I am tired and it's almost time for bed so I'll have to cut this short - maybe I'll come back and finish it later, maybe not. I'll see I guess. Thanks for reading my first blog entry, if someone is. Sorry it's so messy. I'm not particularly good at writing - it's not something I've had to do for a few years now, but even back then I didn't really like it that much. It'll always be a bit rough and disorderly I think. My brain is not orderly and there's too many moving parts in there to try and arrange things into some sensible pattern before dumping it out. It's gotta be thrown outta my head so I can look at it, then I can figure out how to fix it. So this spray of letters is just the first bit of that process. I'm not good at remembering to do the second though.
Just vomit and leave boys, vomit and leave...

Good night, farewell, until the next time maybe.
- Your (sometimes) friendly (amatuer) ecologist (innattentive) webmaster,
Autumn :)