Guilty as charged

Of being AWOL again. No excuses, just busy. At least my blogging habits are a mild improvement on my childhood secret diary keeping efforts. Someone would give me a diary with a lock and key for Christmas and I'd get all excited and fill in the 1st and 2nd of January and promptly forget about it until I got a new one the following Christmas.

Why am I busy? Well for starters I work in health and safety and there's this small thing happening at the moment. You might have heard of it - Swine Flu (or more correctly H1N1 Influenza 09). Which means I got a bazillion phone calls a day about possible swine flu scenarios. Then there's the fact that I work in the public service and it's approaching the end of financial year which means projects to finish, reports to write, budgets to forecast, yada yada yada. Add to that, a business trip to Melbourne the week before last and another one I fly out for tonight.

My last Melbourne trip was great, despite all the sagas going on at home (see below). Work was actually interesting, and I took an extra day to do a spot of shopping and catch up with my dear friend and her family. We've been friends for 30 years (*gasp*) and I managed to whisk her away from her kids for an evening and eat good food, drink wine, and catch up on her eventful year so far, in which she has lost both her beloved father to a heart attack and her home to bushfires.

I also managed to find my new favourite shop in Melbourne, in Flinders Lane. I stumbled across it last year but could not for the life of me remember where it was. Strolling down Flinders Lane one evening I stumbled across it again! A quick peruse netted me one pair of awesome shoes and a handbag. Seriously these shoes are awesome! Very high wedges, brown and red and oh so funky. I love Flinders Lane, all these quirky little shops and arcades full of great dingy cafes.

If you're planning on dining in Melbourne CBD anytime soon, I can highly recommend a bowl of pasta at Cafe Andiamo in Degraves St (served by a most delicious and flirty Italian waiter), or a meal at the Urchin Bar in Hampton (great mezze there, no cute waiters but very friendly service).

And what's Mr Calamity been up to in all this you ask? Well besides finishing off the biggest project of his working career, the morning after I flew out to Melbourne, Hannah is hit with a screaming case of tonsillitis, requiring him to be a stay at home Dad to a sick child for a week. I flew home on the Saturday night to find him delirious with fever himself after catching said tonsillitis (despite him being sans tonsils himself!). Now that he's recovered, he's off to the US today for 2 weeks for work. We toyed with the idea of locking the children in the house with bread and water for two days while I was in Melbourne and he in the US, but decided against it and asked a favourite Aunty to stay our place instead.

We are all looking forward to July, when hopefully we will have 5 minutes to kick back and relax...maybe