I'm still here I havn't fallen off the edge of the earth! I know its been long since I've updated my blog so its going to be more of a summary style, instead of daily descriptions.

I'll start with big news: me and Chloe moved out of our suburban retreat in Ringwood and to a place closer to the city called Windsor. Its not within easy walking distance but this depends on how avid a walker you are; for those of you who consider over an hours walkas good for accessibility, then I stand corrected. Its also right next to the buzzing and hip, inner city Chapel Street, which basically boasts endless cafes', restaurants', bars, shops etc, so theres lots of variety and certainly something there to suit everyone. I've walked the length of the Chapel a few times, on my quest for a job, and I'd say it takes a good half hour/40 mins average walking speed; which gives you an idea of how much there is available.

We're a good enough distance away from Chapel that its easy to get to and from but its quieter where our road is and the building isn't full of mental backpackers, more of a mix of permanent and temporary residents; so you can get a good sleep. Im such an old woman.

This leads me nicely onto our lovely flatmates: Christine (Chris) and Jo! They're a couple from North London and have been living in this flat for approx 6 months now which i interpret as a positive sign, since you just need to give a weeks notice to move out. They have been very nice and welcoming, showing us round some of their favourite places to eat and drink and where to go to catch the best happy hours' woo. One particular bar that has probably seen a little too much of us recently is one called, Wonderland, and their house red is actually really good! Its worth mentioning the quality of more affordable wine over here is much better, or in other words, you get better quality for your money, although, I'm just referring to wines' on the cheaper sideof the market. One of the main reasons for this is due to their large number of vineyards and wineries, especially being close to one of the main wine regions, the Yarra Valley. Yeah so I'm loving the wine and we've been promised a visit to one or two of these wineries by our aunt and uncle at some point during our stay, can't wait!

The flat itself reminds me of student accomodtion: a bit on the tired looking side, carpets and sofas very dubious looking, bathroom and kitchen probably could do with updating and generally in need of a bloody good clean. But its not as grim as I make it sound, its comfortable enough and everything works, plus its the best of what we looked at and for the cheapest price, so really can't complain.

We've been here now for just over two weeks now and soon to get some new flat mates, as Chris and Jo are moving to New Zealand for a year, in just under two weeks! Me and Chloe are a little nervous about the people we'll be getting to take their place..

As you may have noticed theres no more days, like the structure of my previous blogs but I will throw in a few significant dates when I a) remember and b) feel like it.

Ok so a significant date would probably be when we moved to Windsor: 14/10/10.

That weekend we were invited by Terry and Dianne to join them on their mini holiday to Hobart, Tazmania. We obviously jumped at the chance of this amazing offer and had such a terrific weekend.

We flew on the Fri evening (15th) into Hobart where we stayed. The flight was really short, taking about an hour and a quarter, then the drive from the airport to Hobart was gorgeous. In the dark the stars were really bright and clear and we drove over this V-shaped bridge, all lit up; echoing an almost festive feel.

We went for a brief half, or possibly a pot, just bigger than a half, before settling down for the night. Me and Chloe stayed in backpackers accomodation called The Specalled Frog, the building was green hehe.

We had an earlyish start for the morning maket in Hobart, with breakfast in this sweet little cafe, where everything was organic and fresh and tasty! We wandered the market and typically bought some foodie treats of caramel fudge and gingerbread cookies with ginger and choc chips inside. The market was pleasant, apart from the organic and none organic food stalls including breads, cheeses, vegetables, there were stalls selling hippy style clothing, wooly warm looking clothing, wooden crafts, one stall selling pre-historic rocks and other fancy rocks Terry and Dianne purchased a couple of, there were also some amateur musicians playing and selling their music; an acoustic guitar man who played pretty, relaxing music and a North American band who were energetic and fun.

After the morning market Terry and Dianne drove us out to the bush, to a place called Tahune, southwest of the Island, in Hartz Mountains National Park. Here we did an airwalk, roamed around in the bush and ran up and down, jumped and rocked from side to side, on a few swinging bridges! The landscape was rich in vegetation, with some very old, very tall trees and lots of eucalyptus trees. Although it was raining and a bit nippy the views were breathtaking and we soon forgot about the weather.

We had a coffee then drove back towards Hobart and grabbed some Thai food in one of Terry and Dianne's favourite places to eat, for our teas'. Me and Chloe were going share this coconutty, prawn, noodle, veg dish but on initial tasting we decided we'd need one each. Dianne recommended we go on this ghost walk her and Terry have done before, not for its genuine scariness, but for a brief background history of Hobart. In Dianne's words it was really flaky but we found it interesting at least, although, the cold and wet weather meant that I wasn't really in the most open minded of moods to begin with. Basically it was the perfect environment for my cynicism. I think the scariest part was when a women in the group, who had actually lived in one of the "haunted" houses we stopped to look at, objected to the urban myth the tour guide was recounting and contributed her own experiences of living in the house and the things that she saw. One of the most vivid images she described was a man pulling himself across the floor with his legs dragging behind, now thats the kind of scary I expected on this supposed ghost walk. Instead we were encouraged to take photographs of lots of things to try and spot the ectoplasm, which apparently reflects a spirits presence and energy blah bloody blah!

After a fun packed day we retired to our hostel for a relitively early night. The next morning me and Chloe were so grateful Terry and Dianne had loaned us one of their towels for a shower; so we didn't have to dry ourselves down with serviettes again - not fun, an important lesson learnt about backpacker hostels: they don't provide towels. Sunday we drove to Port Arthur, southeast of the Island, where they imported convicts from the UK to and had them working in mines, and other forms of manual labour. We visited a beach hut house built by convicts for the Officers' and their wives to live in, where we learnt a bit more about the Dog-Line, consisting of toothy, snarly guard dogs that would patrol the transition between Port Arthur and the rest of the Island, called Eaglehawk Neck; the only means of escape for convicts. We also stopped off along the way at various scenic beauty spots, for example, a lookout onto Port Arthur revealing a long stretch of unspoilt coastline next to bush land on shore. We briefly walked on the beach as we drove down and through a town with a tradition of naming their houses with the word 'doo' in them, just a few we saw: Dr Doolittle, Just Doo It, Make Doo etc, there were lots and probably some with better names than these. We stopped at a massive cave called Devil's Kitchen where its roof had fallen in on itself, as well as, other places I can't remember the names of.

Early afternoon we headed for a Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park, where to our delight, there were lots of other animals too. We saw some parrots at feeding time and we could see feathers drifting to the ground as they fought their way to the seeds. Luckily we also caught Tazzie feeding time and watched a Mother Taz chomp her way through a rabbit carcas, bones, skin and all! Whilst the three baby tazzies nibbled on some fleshy tit bits, from some animal or another. They were really competitive over their food and seem to adopt a Joey type attitude: Taz doesn't share foooood! At one point the person feeding the mother Taz picked her up by the carcas because she was definately not letting go anytime soon. We discovered some interesting facts about the little devils during their feeding time: they are marsupials that carry their babies in their pouch for up to four months, and have a life expectancy of approx 4-5 years. They can bite through bone up to 8cm thick, they have greater jaw strength than a crocodile and the guy working at the conservation had his wrist broken by baby Taz only a few months old during feeding time, which gives you an idea of just how scary their bite is! Sadly, they are also under threat from extinction. In the last decade there has been a significant decrease in the Taz population due to rapid spreading of a facial tumour disease, or cancer, passed on between the devils during activities, such as, feeding, fighting for mates and general play fighting, or in other words when they bite each other, which is second nature to them. There are scientists' currently trying to find a cure and prevent further spreading of the disease but its proving really difficult. I was a bit upset to discover this, to think there might not be any Tazzies running amok in a few years time. Very sad. On a brighter note, we got really close to some Eastern Grey kangeroos, that were lazing about in the sun. I was particularly fascinated by one mother kangeroo stood with little legs poking out of her pouch. I stood and watch for about 15 mins as the joey shuffled around, crawled out and then in again hehe. Me and Terry knelt right next to another kangeroo laid across the grass and Terry stroked its head! I was still amazed at just how close I was, so I might save the actual contact for another time - too much excitement might be dangerous.

Time was getting on and we needed to make our way towards the airport in Hobart, so we set off in thdirection. Having had a conversation about oysters and me and Chloe confessing to never have tasted them before, Terry took us to a restaurant close to the airport where we had time for our fist oyster tasing experience! We had them fresh, served with lemon and on a bed of sea salt. They are certainly an acquired taste, but I think one you can get used to. The only off putting part is probably the texture but its not that bad, the texture of seafood is tempremental, so its kind of the same as getting to grips with mussels if you've not had them before. My conclusion is that I couldn't eat a plateful but I'd happily have 4-5.. max. Nice with refreshing, crisp white wine!

The flight back to Melbourne was, again, short, over in a jiffy and I was thrilled to complete my first ever suduko during the journey. If they couldn't have already done enough for us over the weekend and given us such a lovely Tasmanian experience, Terry and Dianne drove us back to our place in Windsor.

I wrote this sometime ago, around the end of November and forgot to upload, oops.

Me and Chloe haven't really been doing anything very exciting recently.

Since the Hobart experience nothing else has matched up to it. This is probably mainly due to our actual living over a longer period in Melbourne, as opposed to travelling through it andhaving limited time to see and do everything. Sadly staying here longer requires earning money, in order to do so.

Chloe's fine and dandy in her new job at this Irish pub called Bridie O'rylies, with regular shifts running from wed-sat. I on the other hand feel like I've applied to a million jobs with Ozzie Seek.com and Gumtree, as well as, physically handing Resumes' out to numerous places. After a few weeks I've heard back from a few places, and turned down at some cafes' due to lack of experience; they take their coffee very seriously here. But fingers crossed I can hold onto this waitressing job at an Italian inspired restaurant I'm currently working at in the city, with an a la carte menu (whatever that means), called Trim food and drink. My last shift had its ups and downs: ups being the really cool Jazz/Soul type band they had playing on Sat evening (oh dates! ok this would be 6/11/10) and friendly tidily people who gave me tips. However, the downs, well just the one down really, was pretty bad when I forgot to put through an order, so a couple didn't get their meal, and by the time the order got to the kitchen and their meals were ready, they had got up and left. I felt terrible. Despite this shaky shift, I still have some more this weekend, thank God!

Unfortunately the weather was ghastly on Halloween, so our best intentions of celebrating it with plans of face painting and a few drinks on Chapel Street were shattered. A drizzle wouldn't have been problem but the rainfall was on a flooding scale. I was really looking forward to having a panda face again too, next time. Halloween wasn't a total loss, Dianne rang the night before and suggested taking us to Healesville; this animal conservation close to the Dandenong Mountains, further into the bush. It's one of those must do things if your visiting or passing through Melbourne and of course if you like animals, but who doesn't want get up close and personal to some dingoes, koala bears, roos, reptiles, snakes and so on?!

It was pretty cool, even though, as previously mentioned; the weather wasn't great, we saw some awesome animals. My personal highlight would have to be the reptile and snake talk we stumbled upon, where I got to touch and hold the underside of a Python eeek, seriously thought I would never touch any sort of snake but I did and it was goood. His skin was scaly smooth and when I held his belly I could feel his muscle(s) contracting and relaxing! He didn't pose a threat because Pythons' aren't venomous and this particular one was familiar with human contact, however, be warned because Pythons' in the wild kill their prey by squeezing them to death. These little animal based facts are for those who don't already possess this knowledge, I just thought it would be interesting for people to know - share and learn people.

The koala bears' were unbelievably cute; they looked so cosy hugging their eucalyptus trees. I discovered that they actually sleep 20 hours out of the day, as well as, being nocturnal, so it's rarer to see an up and active koala than a sleepy one.

We also saw a few more roos, without trying to sound too blasé about it, since it's our third encounter now. They were close to and shared visual similarities with the Wallabies, who were a bit smaller in size to the Eastern Grey roos there, and had shorter arms and smaller ears. I felt a bit sorry for some of them who missing eyes'; its worth mentioning most of the animals at the conservation were rescued from some sort of accident or inhabitable circumstance.

We also caught a birds of prey show when we first arrived, where we were introduced and told a little about each of the four different kinds of birds. I will have to look up some of their names but I know one was an eagle and another was a very pretty barn owl called sky. The eagle's wing span was enormous, reminding me now a little of the wings of that monster in Jeepers Creepers.

The drive there and back was really enjoyable; with the views of the Dandenong Mountain Ranges and the surrounding valleys'. When we arrived back at the flat me and Chloe were a bit pooped and didn't fancy venturing out into the rain again, resulting in our Halloween evening spent watching consecutive episodes of Buffy.

Be warned dates are jumbled and again, this was written a couple of months ago.

I see a pattern in my blogs of late; a little sporadic. Anyway, I hope this doesn't affect the clarty too much. Mine and Chloe's initial flatmates from our lovely abode in Windsor have now gone. They actually left about a month ago now, they headed for the Gold Coast before jetting off to New Zealand to live and explore for a year.Chris and Joe left in the early hours of the 8th November, later that evening to be replaced by some new homies: Zoe and Lea, fellow Windsorians.

It took me the whole day to prepare for their arrival, in terms of the cleaning and tidying of the flat. Chloe was at work in the morning and early afternoon, thus leaving me with the fun chore of cleaning Chris and Joe's old room before transferring all of our junk into it from our room. This took a little longer than expected, especially getting carried away with things like scrubbing black/brownish marks off the walls the best I could - there's nothing like being thorough!We decided to move into Chris and Joe's room because it was bigger, simple as. That day, I also prepared Zoe and Lea's room (our old one), as well as, vacuuming most of the floor space in the flat, minus the toilet and bathroom; Chloe's allocated cleaning assignment.

I'm going to back track approximately a week.. We went to Melbourne Museum on 1st Nov and it was awesome. There was a Titanic exhibition on but we weren't interested since we had already seen a similar (possibly the same) exhibition a few years ago in London, it was also pricey and we wanted to see the cool dinosaur related paraphernalia. We started off in the dinosaur section, featuring an array of fossils, replica dinosaur skeletons, detailed timelines on the evolution of fish into land animals; including other information about their changing environments and the effects on the animals and habitat. I must admit there was a lot to absorb, especially since my knowledge of pre-historic Earth is not very extensive, although I did learn some things that should come in handy in some future dinosaur related discussions.

Basically, I learnt about the different pre-historic periods: Palaeozoic (occurring between approx 505-245 million years ago), Mesozoic (occurring between approx 208-65 million years ago), Cenozoic (occurring between approx 58-1 million years ago). The Mesozoic period is divided into the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods'. During the Triassic period is when the first dinosaurs and mammals appeared, then the Jurassic period saw dinosaurs dominating the Earth. The Cretaceous period was the dinosaurs pinnacle time and when flowering plants grew more extensively. Its believed by the Cenozoic period dinosaurs were extinct and there are a couple of theories offering explanation to their demise. The first and probably better known, is the meteorite/ asteroid theory. Approx 65 million years ago it is thought a meteorite struck the earth, blocking out the sun and causing most of the fauna to die and the dinosaurs along with them. Another theory explaining dinosaur extinction is of the climate changes and dispersing of land masses bringing about rising of sea levels in areas of the world creating tropical conditions and giving way to more cooler seasonal climates in other areas.

After the dinosaur fest, we moved onto the taxidermy portion of the museum. It featured indigenous Australian wildlife, with some non-Australian animals thrown in there too; like a panda, a polar bear, a moose etc.

We breaked at this point for our second coffee in the museum, before exploring the section all to do with the human mind. There was a timeline of the discoveries and advances in treatment of the human brain, its basic biology and functions of different areas, as well as, psychological aspects and how the mind creates various emotions, behaviour, affects memory and our dreams.

Unfortunately, we didn't get chance to see everything there was in the museum and had to leave because it was closing, although, we were wavering a little at this stage anyway. We'll probably go back with our Mum when she visits.

I'm not sure if I've already mentioned this, but I'm working at this restaurant called Trim Food and Drink in the city; finally my persistence with Seek.com proved fruitful. I started there early November and hopefully will be there a while longer, until we plan on heading on at the end of March.I muddled through my trial period, and can't have been that terrible because I'm still working there, but I'm starting to feel alot more comfortable with the job now then when I first started; I totally underestimated the fast pace and number of things that need to be done simultaneously! The worst thing I've done to date is forgetting to put through a couple's order and only realised when they complained of waiting so long for their food. Anyway, when the kitchen made their food, just before it was taken out they had up and left! Eeeek, it really was my bad. I think the trick is to try and remain calm, especially when it gets hectic at peak meal time periods and also, learn to prioritise things whilst remembering everything that needs to be done, in other words a bit of a juggling act!

http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.internal.schools.net.au/edu/lesson_ideas/dinosaurs/images/dino_timeline.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.internal.schools.net.au/edu/lesson_ideas/dinosaurs/dino_wksht3.html&usg=__ZWJgeeTnIsM5AA24zQTDUrCK6Mk=&h=228&w=502&sz=12&hl=en&start=2&zoom=1&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=vWOtniDZu4iKrM:&tbnh=59&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dprehistoric%2Btimeline%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-US%26tbs%3Disch:1