Things sometime take a turn for the... unexpected?

I put it off for a while and realised the stupidity of the whole situation. I was going to be taking a risk with my knee that is still not 100% from my latest injury, the season was looking pretty average no matter how it turned out and I had a bit of debt racked up so I thought... the hell with the snow. I'm going to get a job.

And so that's what I did.

I landed myself a tidy little apartment with a super-sweet catch basically meaning I pay way less than I should for way more than I should be able to afford. Sweet. And as you can see; Melbourne in winter? Not as bad as everyone says.

I got myself a job so quickly I am sure I set some sort of record. I sent off an email; 30 mins later I had a phone call; 16hours later I had an interview and 24 hours later I started work. Wham. I am working in administration for Australia's second largest chain of fitness centres; Genesis. I am also studying for my certificate 4 in fitness part-time which will qualify me as a fitness instructor and personal trainer; I thought it would tie-in nicely with my snowsports qualifications in preparation for future non-shitty non-Australian seasons. Not that Hotham are going to be hiring me again any time soon. They weren't too pleased when they got my 'I'm not coming' phone call. But hey. That's what you get for telling me to sit tight and suck it up for two weeks.

I have slowly been getting myself settled in, catching up with the masses of Perth people who have made the exodus to the east coast: Oli, Monque, Simon, Miles, Miranda and I have recently heard from Mark Nevin as well. There are a lot of us here.

Genesis had their 11th birthday party on Friday night and things got surprisingly wild. Free drinks were flowing all over the place which made for an interesting cocktail of people. I even ran into one of my roommates from Whistler who was a friend of a boyfriend of someone at work. Small world eh?

Saturday was quite possibly the strangest, most surreal night of my life. If I am not open-minded I don't know who is. We'll leave it at that.

So as it comes up on one month in Melbourne things certainly didn't turn out quite the way I had expected. Welcome to James the Wanderer.