So I’m here.

On the Gold Coast.

By myself.

I was by myself for three hours in the car, and then again when I arrived here, and all of the long, ripe Gold Coast night, and now again this morning. And it is very interesting.  So even though I will be amongst a massive gaggle of bloggers all weekend, and my beautiful mate from Melbourne, who I don’t see nearly enough, will be coming up to join me this afternoon, I’m still alone.

In that the things that will be required of me will be whatever I want.

Just me.

I have a very easy life, and a family that indulge my desire to write these things here.  I have a job that I love, and I get to live in a beautiful place of warm open skies.  I have kids that are funny when they are awake and sleep like hibernation every night.  I have a husband who is a champion among men who is by my side every step of the way.  So you wouldn’t think that there would be anything missing from the landscape of my world.

So perhaps it isn’t something missing, instead, something to be added in.  Perhaps I could sketch in a little area down around the bottom right corner of the landscape, a little area of space that could have just me in it.  Nothing else.  No bells or whistles or sparkly widgets and link-ups.  Just a squiggle representing itself.

Last night I had a beer and ate some cashews and just sat in the thick silence.  I looked at Twitter to see what the other conference attendees were up to, and a few friends messaged me to see what I was doing, so there were spurious connections with the outside world, but mostly I just opened up the balcony doors and listened to the tumble of the waves and the echo of the cars below.

There’s something wonderful about just sitting isn’t there?

My mind wandered around, looked for things to latch onto, and then let them recede.  Just like the ebb of the waves.  Still there, still relentlessly swirling, but not requiring any input from me to maintain their impetus.  And there is something extremely comforting in that.  The world will turn and turn and turn, regardless of whether I’m plugged in, or checked out.

Disclaimer: It might be easy to say all of this when this is the view from my bed:

Problem: the sun is too, umm, sunny to get a view of the beach for a photo.

How about you, do you love your time alone?

Tell me your number one way to sketch out a space for yourself.

…From The Ashers xx

It’s been a busy week around here with me working FULL TIME (I know, unheard of!) as well as fitting in being a FRONT PAGE celebrity in the local paper…  By the time you read this I will be safely ensconced in the bath seminar room of the QT, enjoying a weekend at the ProBlogger seminar, getting pissed and going to karaoke bars with Nikki enriching my mind with ALL of the things a pretend professional blogger needs to know.

So here are the hits:

1.  YOU.  As you RRs would know I plagued the blog with posts about the ridiculously low blood stores this week, going on and on and on about it, until you were all so sick of hearing about it, you went and gave up the claret.  Well done.  Maroochydore Blood Bank rang me and said they had a bumper week, and even though it’s still not enough, it’s something.  So goodonya you lot.  Coco and the rest of The Ashers thank you from the bottom of our corpuscles.

2.  My big, almost ten year old boy, Liam.  As you might have figured out by some of my posts, he hates his sister and even once wrote a note plotting out his vengeance.  See exhibit A.

Exhibit A

Despite that, this week he started up a blog of his very own, and THIS was his post on Day 3.  Warms the cockles of me old heart, I tells ya.

Oh, and feel free to checkout the whole blog.  He’s at DJ Asher.  He would love to get some comments… Like the one he got from his Uncle Darren, who said, “I usually don’t read shit blogs like your Mum’s, but I’ll read yours.”  Liam thought that was hilarious.  Don’t worry, I banned him from the computer for a week for that. (I can’t have him being more successful than me you know.)

The dude even added his own little category of YouTube videos, unbeknownst to us.  How?  We don’t know.  And so the world turns….

3.  This yummy spread.  How good is it when you have older patients who bring you in awesome stuff they’ve made?  Bloody good, is how good.  I got this baby from a lady this week.  It’s delish, AND cute, with a sweet little love-heart topper.  Who even does that these days?  Grouse old chicks, that’s who.

Mmmmm, lemmmon

4.  And whilst I’m going on about food, how good are these?  Have you had one?  Of course you haven’t because you can’t have just one.  You have to eat the whole damn packet.  A perfect sweety-salty treat to keep me going on my long afternoon shift.  It’s just a shame they cost a bomb (considering my consumption rate).  They aren’t as expensive as printer ink, but they are close.  Get yourself some anyway.  Just tell the kids they are healthy and then you can eat the lot yourself.

Pumpkin = Healthy

5.  The QT.  It’s very colourful, and a bit too crazy for my eyes to take it all in at once, but I think this extremely comfortable bed is going to suit me just fine.

So soft

The only drawback so far is that the minibar stinks of cantaloup.  I don’t know how or why, but it’s doing my head in (as Smelling All Of The Smells is my superpower.)   My $9 Corona has a distinctly unsavoury odour.  But I’m soldiering on.

Well that’s it from me…  Have a great weekend.  I suspect I will.

Send me your Hits if you have the time.  I’d love to hear what you’re up to.

…From The Ashers xx

A little ways down the road from me is a strange and wonderous megalopolous of twelve-karat golden glitter.  It is the home of water slides and movie stars, cocktails, karaoke, neon and flesh.  So much flesh.  Flesh available for viewing.  All day and night, and whether you like it or not.  Or so it seems.

This city hurries and hustles you from the moment you arrive til the moment you leave, and it feels like you never really get off the back foot, never really settle in, never catch up to where-ever it is going, before it’s time to pack up and take your scalded retinas back to your muted life.  Everything on the Gold Coast is bigger and louder and more.  At lease more than what I’m used to.

The first time I landed on the Goldy I had been on a bus for around twenty-four hours, with double that amount of Uni students, who had been drinking and primping and flirting with each other for ninteen of those hours.  I’m pretty sure someone copped a hummer on the back seat, and I’m definitely sure someone spewed in the onboard dunny, between Gundagai and Jugiong.  No amount of LouLou could expunge the odour.

I stumbled down the stairs blinking and sleep drunk, and straight onto the cacophony of fluorescence and 1cent drinks and sex shops and street spruikers that was the early 90s version Surfers Paradise.  There was apparently a beach where you could baste yourself ’til noon, and we did venture down there once, to see if the sand really was golden (it was the same pale beige of my own town) and if the water really was warm (it was, and I was startled by how delicious the lukewarm waves felt on my two day bender tender skin).

We stayed and played on the Goldy for one flimsy week, and we crammed like no exam we had ever had before: Ripley’s and Seaworld and Hire a Bomb to Kirra, and Cocktails and Dreams and Condom Kingdom and Vespas on the Highway, and umbrella hats to save our blowdried hair from the humid wet rain, and flashing signs and drunk and Georges Paragon “Yes Sir! Half price seafood” to finish.

We had a seminar as well, and even that was bigger and bolder, buffing itself up to a shine, as if in step with the ebullient excess.

I’ve been to the Gold Coast many times since, and I’m always struck by the other-ness of the place.  It is nothing like the rest of Australia, nor does it apologise.  The Goldy of the 2000s has grown up a little, but not easily, and not without angst.  The Gold Coast of now is like an excited and troubled adolescent, full of cheeky fun and anger all at once.  When I’m there I’m half excited and half frightened.  I think I’ll have a good time, I think I can wrangle those streets, but I just might be a bit careful, in case I get bitten.

So today, I got my tickets to Problogger, a bloggy seminar being held at the colourful QT and I’m beyond excited.  This cyber-world I inhabit is strange and exciting and very weird, and PB will be a chance for me to see, and possibly talk-with-voices to, some of my internet heroes in the flesh.  So much golden flesh.

Okay, now this is sounding creepy.  Maybe not too much flesh.

Have you ever been to the Gold Coast?

Are you going to Problogger?