There's plenty of stereotypical things you can associate with Australia. Boomerangs, criminals, beer - but all of it takes place against a sun-scorched backdrop of rugged beauty. Well not this week baby. It's been pouring rain constantly since shortly after I hung my washing out last weekend, and when it rains in Sydney, it really rains. Britta had heard about how much it rains in Ireland, but when she got there and witnessed it she mocked it as a constant drizzle. Over here it REALLY comes down. Four days ago in a different suburb two people were lifted off the roofs of their cars by helicopter when they got caught in flooding. And it's been going constantly ever since too.
So my washing didn't get dry, for starters. A couple of days ago I gave up waiting for it to clear up and brought most of it inside to put in the bath. And I couldn't do anything was the other problem. I sat in the apartment slowly developing cabin fever. I printed out and sent to job agencies a bunch of CVs, and made shorter CVs for applying to bars, and trawled job websites, and read books and watched DVDs and talked to birds on the windowsill and became progressively lethargic and irritated. Dizzy and Britta would come home in the evening and be perfectly happy basking in one anothers' company with the television on or whatever, but lacking any such foil for my desires to be interested, the downward cycle continued. Before I go job hunting I need some interviewy clothes, and although I brought some trousers and picked up a shirt and (ugh) tie earlier in the week - or was it last week? - I need some kind of a jacket thing, I think, and until my trousers dry I can't dress up anyway. And until I have a few spare changes of underwear I can't leave town. Going crazy.
So I started resolving to do things again. I'm sick of the idea of jobs at the moment, and once Britta has got a voicemail service on the phone (I tried, but the account holder has to requisition it) I don't need to be in the house to answer the phone anymore. So yesterday I went looking for a SCUBA diving course down the road, and found one. It's just under three hundred bucks, or a hundred and sixty Eurobucks, and lasts four days, includes two shore dives (as opposed to dives off a boat) and leaves you PADI certified down to 18 metres anywhere in the world, apparently. So I discussed it with Dizzy who did a similar course previously in Sydney, and whose dad likes diving, and who talked about diving to Tom, a friend of ours who really really likes diving (he's nervous about heights and thinks I'm mental for going skydiving, and I'm nervous about the sea and thought he was mental for going SCUBA diving, so I reckon this'll put me in the lead now), and he said it looks fine, so today I went down and booked into it. It starts this day week (that's a Saturday) and runs til the Tuesday.
I had to get a medical check done to make sure I'm not going to pass out and drown underwater or anything like that, so instead of accompanying Dizzy & Britta doing grocery shopping and the far more daunting task of buying dress shoes for Dizzy (imagine the worst creature in the universe to bring clothes shopping, and then bring it shopping for neat clothes that it doesn't care much about, whose opinions on the items in question are redundant, and who's hardly ever going to wear the damn things) I headed down to the Chatswood Medical Centre to get my urine examined and what-not.
It cost 77 bucks, and I had to fill out a form to which the answer to everything was "No" except the one about deafness (deaf in my left ear due to mumps when I was seven, doncha know) and whether I can swim (there was no "Err, sort of" answer to circle so I went for "Yes" in the hopes that it's just like riding a bike except that you can get better at it by not practising being crap, for about ten years). Actually Dizzy says you have to swim a few hundred metres as part of the training course. I've never done more than seventy five, and that was for my 75m badge when I was in primary school, but I'm assuming that what I lack in talent I can make up for in grit. So anyway, filled that out, and got called into a doctor's office, where he did a bunch of stuff I'd never had done before, like testing my blood pressure. Fortunately he didn't need a blood sample, so I get to go another indefinite period with my blood remaining unsampled ever, huzzah. Then I was brought to a different room for a hearing test, probably like what I had when I was seven and they were checking what had happened to my left ear. There was a set of headphones and I had to press a button whenever I heard three beeps, which were usually pretty quiet and varied in pitch a bit. That lasted quite a while, like between five and ten minutes, but apparently the results were satisfactory. Then I had to have my urine tested! First time for everything. Fortunately I'd specifically emptied myself out before leaving the house, so there wasn't an insatiable flood trying to squeeze into the little jar - some things in life just aren't designed to be stopped before they finish, and that's one of them. Then I had to blow through a tube to test my breathin' iron, and I had a bit of trouble with this - the tube was about the size of a twenty Eurocent coin in diameter and there was no resistance whatsoever, it was just a case of exhaling fast and hard. And I kept generating a bit of resistance in the back of my throat, despite my efforts not to. That was pretty annoying, especially since I failed the damn test three times before I managed to suppress the instinct that was screwing it up sufficiently to get by.
So the doc says I'm good to go! The batch of nerves I'd had when the idea first came to me has passed and even though it remains the recreational activity I am most afraid of that I can imagine, I'm not worried about it or my ability to cope with it anymore, there's just a little bit of a thrill of excitement when I think about it now. I'm thinking of taking off to Canberra, the capital, for a few days next week, to kill the time before the course, and after the course I reckon I'll do a course in Bar Skillz in the place where I did the RSA and RCG certs, because I've no experience in the area and it'd be good to know how to pull a pint before asking for a job.
Dizzy & Britta STILL haven't come back, I suspected that buying shoes would take much, much longer than having a medical examination. I got some cheap sushi for dinner, and The Matrix Reloaded opened here yesterday. We went along to see if we could get tickets just before the last showing in our local cinema last night but it was sold out, but we bought some for tonight instead, so that's a good plan for the evening. It's not out in Ireland for ages yet, so if you're reading this from the Auld Sod, all I can say is neener-neener.