About the Dark Side, The UPside and The Flying Finn

As you all know last two weeks have been super difficult at work. I had hardly any motivation to wake up, dress up, get myself to the office and stay there for some good 9 hours and enjoy other parts than lunch and coffee breaks and leaving the office around 6pm. Eventually by the end of the week the *hit kind of piled up and I ended up feeling very upset, out of place, sad, angry, cynical, snappy and everything in between. I think I hit the first low mark here, I knew it would come at some point and it came at a milestone of 2 months. The shitshitfuckfuck of life. (do not worry, it lasted 2.5 days in total and I’m a lot better already) Anyways for the 2.5 days I felt I am in a dead end and lost my smile…a violently familiar feeling that made the year  ago happenings feel like yesterdays news although the situation here is totally different and nothing makes the 09/2010 and 09/2011 comparable. I think the familiarity freaked me out even more.  On Friday I was so thankful to get my dear Marijke back to Bris and get quality time with her and have time for proper life updates. She has been through the same, understands the mix of feelings and says “it’s ok Anna, you are doing good and the things you are experiencing are part of the deal”. I can be a total basket case, unable to articulate the mess of feelings, be and look upset and say *uck five times in one sentence and wave my hands in an overly expressive way and she still says it’s ok. I am very thankful for having her in my life. She's a close friend aleready and I am lucky. And I look at her in her life and think in 4 months I will be ok too. She has made it, I can make it.  So on Friday night I was a basket case and she was well rested and full of energy after good holiday, some sort of a balance in the universe I would say. Jamjar was delicious as always and I think it is so far my favorite restaurant here. Saturday was still spent in The Dark Side although I very much tried to make the most out of it. It was also the first day of Brisbane City Festival and Riverfire was the kick-off for the 3 week period of cultural events in the city, like the Helsingin Juhlaviikot in August. We went to look the fireworks to Southbank amongst 10 000 teenagers. The event was declared to be alcohol free and there was a security check before entering South Bank but to our disappointment they didn’t even check our bags and let us straight in. A sign of us being too old or too trustworthy not to smuggle alcohol to an event like this. Anyways, the fireworks were very impressive and the show lasted almost 30 minutes. For the night we had tickets to a Festival week opening up party at George Square with 60s theme…I called it a night very early, crashed when getting back to home and went to bed early. Major inner BUUUU! I don’t want to be Darth Vader.

Waking up well rested on Sunday I decided to make it my therapy day. I did my morning run with new record of 55 minutes which is a pretty decent performance without breakfast and when feeling like shit. I think I have never been so thankful for the endorphins bringing the smile to my face and making me realize life is greater than emotional downturn and that I am in Australia BABY! Around noon it was about time to do the regular Sunday escape from Brisbane, another routine that I love here. The options were Montville (a small city 1h drive from Bris recommended by my colleague) or day in the city but in my unstable state of mind I was in definite need of the magnificent Pacific Ocean so decided to head to Burleigh Heads near the Gold Coast.

Burleigh Heads was beautiful and perfect place for a day of therapy. I got to walk in the sand, wet my feet, sit in the sun, be quiet and watch the waves form. Had excellent roasted pumpkin salad and a glass of sauvignon blanc for lunch with a beautiful view  to the beach (including very talented surfers again) and Gold Coast silhouette ahead and of course big portion of ice cream for a dessert. I think the pumpkin salad brought the smile to my face for good, and who says women aren’t easy?  Body, mind, soul, stomach, dessert stomach…in that order satisfying all. With my third spoon of honey comb chocolate ice cream a guy next to us was attacked and got beaten up right in front of our eyes. The guy attacking him said “the girl is my sister and you will never ever touch her again or I will kill you”. Right. That kind of a brotherly love. The whole event took most likely less than 2 minutes, ended when the attacker guy hurt himself when they both fell to the asphalt. He walked to his fancy sports car right behind us, got few high fives from his friends and drove away. Idiot. I felt shaky and started to cry. I have never seen a person getting beaten up in front of my eyes. I am 31 and this was the first time, unfortunately so. I wanted to give the boy being attacked a hug…he was very confused with the happenings, and his nose was bleeding badly. Poor guy. As the smile was again gone from my face the therapy day continued to Tweed Heads, to the border of Queensland and New South Wales, the town where you can change time zones and celebrate new year twice within an hour. The view and sunset was beautiful and afternoon sun very gentle. Forget what just happened as life is good. This is why I need my weekends and why I love to be here. It’s not easy, no one said it would be easy, but the upside is worth it. Right now this is the place to be.

On Monday I had the second try of the Defensive Driving course. I had triple checked the date earlier the week and double checked on Sunday morning. I arrived to the Motor School office at 7.30, was welcomed by the same guy Nick who last time accused me being “a no-show”, did the alcohol test and was asked to take a seat in a class room to take a knowledge assessment. Q1. What is the legal minimum tread depth for a tire? *ok, there might be a chance I can fail this part of the course” A: 3,0mm (out of my sleeve). Q2: How do you check the oil level in a car? *I know about this, have seen this back in 1998 in driving school but further than that absolutely no idea*. A: With the “stick” on the front part of the car. Q3. Are you allowed to do a U-turn in traffic lights with no sign? *aaaahaaaa, easy* A: Of course not. Etc. Most of the questions were dealing with traffic rules on different situations and some of them were sure tricky, mostly because of vocabulary. After finishing with the assessment we had about 2 hours of lecture about the concept of defensive driving, walk-through of key traffic rules and mine site specific hazards and loads of statistics about accidents on site. I learned bunch of stuff like, that whilst reversing you are allowed not to wear a seatbelt, if you are 3 m distance from your car and the car is not locked or the window is more than 5cm open you get fined , it is legal to touch the control panel to activate Bluetooth but not to touch the phone at any circumstances while driving (ending up to a conversation about Nokia Bluetooth functionalities and me being an expert about it) and with “no speed limit” sign the speed limit is still 110 km/hour in Queensland Australia and there are a lot of cheap 4WDs on sale in NSW as it is required by fairly new state law that car should have ABS brakes. After the lecture we had a “car inspection” (something one should do every time when driving a car that is not familiar) and I finally got a demonstration about how to check oils (and bunch of other liquids under the hood I didn’t really get). Also Nick explained in 90 seconds the process of changing tires assuming everyone knew how to really do it leaving me shaking my head when he asked “all clear?” He promised to give me a chance to change a tire before the end of the day but eventually we didn’t have time. So now I need to keep my fingers crossed and hope all goes well at Dysart next week…or count on the fact that I have bunch of miners driving pass who are more than happy to help if I end up with a flat tire.

Around 11.30 it was a time to hit the road and head for a lunch and then to the practice track. We were driving towards Mt Glorious and ended up in the middle of country side and eventually to a deer farm. It was another bizarre moment in Australia, I was attending a driving course and having lunch at a bambi farm. Weird. The owner said the flock is all ready for Christmas and I said I should try to get a ride to Finland then. He was all question mark and I needed to educate him about the origins of Santa Claus and Rudolf the reindeer. “That’s funny”. It wasn’t funny, it’s a fact. After the lunch we headed to the driving track. It was only some 3 minutes away and literally a cattle field. Jep, we parked our 4WD in the middle of flock of cows like it was the most normal thing to do. There were 4 baby cows and I learned they were born only 4 days ago. I took pics of course and my fellow course participants asked if we don’t have cows in Finland. Sure we do, this is just very absurd moment of life so I need to capture it. Nick started to place on the witches hats (a.k.a muovitottero) and the cows realized for their own safety it’s wise to back off for the upcoming couple of hours. Soon we had an empty “race track” in front of us. Oh my.

Next it was time to get behind the wheel and walk of the talk. We did bunch of different exercises like reversing through a line of witches hats (from left and right in turns) using the mirrors only and passing the test no hat could fall (I passed with first try, proud). Next was the ABS brake testing part where I got the title of “The Flying Finn” for speeding up too much. The idea was to speed up to 50km per hour and as the instructor gave a sign with a flag the driver should emergency brake and swerve to the direction of the flag. With my second try I got angry to the instructor for giving the sign to break so early (and giving me more distance to brake and turn and making the exercise less challenging) and he said “Miss Anna, you had at least 65 km per hour speed so it was a MUST”. Oh, really? I argued a bit about the speed but my passengers verified the fact. Bummer. But I still made the turn in time even with 15km/h extra speed and didn’t get a fine as this is an educational session, well done Flying Finn. What I found more difficult was the threshold braking, i.e the normal braking “just before the ABS kicks in”. This led to comments of “you must be the all or nothing type of a girl”…No comments *so true*.

The last exercise was the most fun. On a race track (or the cattle field) we were to practice curve driving. We all got 3 rounds and the idea was to try the “wrong way” (hugging the inner side of the curve) first, then the right way (hugging the outer side of the curve) and third one to repeat the same. I thought that with the first round we should go all wrong and with high speed also and half way my first round I heard from the radio “Anna, please slow down, you are off the road soon”. No I am not, let me go faaaaaaast! My passengers were once again commenting the experience to be closer of a rally race and I explained them that Finland is very famous of a) our well known rally drivers b) the unfortunate thing of rally English too. Anyways, with the second and third round I went easier and got good feedback out of my performance. It was fun, the first round I mean. After some 4 hours on the practice track we received our feedback from the session and headed back to the office in Albion. There we got our certificates (my very first Aussie qualification) and greetings of safe & defensive driving moments ahead and a special note to be careful with the accelerator. I think the whole day was very useful in getting more confidence driving with a big 4WD and learning a lot of useful things about the Australian traffic rules. A good day, it was good to finally LEARN something (hint hint hint). In the evening I had coffee with Marijke at Three Monkeys and was very happy to realize that only 4 days at the office doing the boring stuff ahead before weekend. I am still counting days to weekend. And I am still very bored at the office.

What else? This blog post comes late because I have used all evenings to do things and see people as next week I need to be alone again in the middle of nowhere, this time in Dysart. Most likely I will miss my precious Sunday and need to live up the whole week in six days. I also went to yoga on Tuesday and realized I should really balance out my rage runs and give my body and soul a bit of a break too. As soon as I am done with the mine site visits for a while I will focus on yoga…also with the idea that at that point I am less furious after work and need less of the rage runs to keep the lights on. We’ll see. On Saturday I saw a guy with “I live for weekends” shirt and I think I should wear that on the Casual Fridays at the office. I won’t. I’ll wear a dress.

Night all!

//Ansku

PS: Another reason for my late post is Extremely Lound & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. A brilliant book. Highly recommended. Also promise to add more pics to Picasa :)