A Hill

I've struggled with making friends since moving here, mostly from lack of opportunity – as I'm not working the only people I meet are other parents at the pre-school or women at the gym. But also because I am not naturally sociable, I am the world's biggest snob and have a tendency towards arrogance. I do, however, do my best to internalize these negative traits and am generally friendly (I think?). But there have been weeks when the only adult I have spoken to is the husband and as much as I adore him I need other people as well. I have one friend here, who has kept me sane and I am enjoying getting to know her (Hi Jaibee!!) but it would still be nice to have a social life of some sort. Poor me, boo hoo.

Anyway, some of the women from the pump class I go to meet for coffee after the gym so I invited myself along and they seemed fine with that. Then they invited me to come swimming with them on Wednesday morning (today). I was chuffed and was looking forward to it. Anyway, I got up this morning and thought "I don't have anything in common with those women, I don't really like swimming and chlorinated water makes me itchy". So I decided to go for a walk up Red Hill instead.
I studied the map, put my ipod, phone and water bottle in my bag, dropped the kid at pre-school and set off. I had been told there was a café at the top of the hill so my reward for slogging up the incline would be a fabulous view and a nice hot coffee to recharge me for the walk home. It was all good.
I got about ¾ of the way up when the path split in two different directions. Either way led to a summit, I didn't know which way to go but I saw other walkers going to the right so I went that way. After an arduous trudge up a very steep hill I got to the top and all that was there was a bored looking kangaroo - and it wasn't selling coffee. So now I was faced with a dilemma: go back the way I came, take the other track and try to find the café or just keep going. I have something of a mental block about going backwards so I continued on. I got to a part on the track which was seemingly in the middle of no-where when I realized I had absolutely no idea where I was, which direction to go, that the battery in my ipod was about to go flat, I needed a wee and it was starting to rain. I got really cranky. If I had a friend to go walking with I wouldn't need to guess which way to go and I wouldn't get lost. So I stood on the hill, tried to figure out where I was from the buildings I could see in the distance and took a path that seemed to go around the bottom of the hill. Fortunately it took me back to the golf course near home so I knew where I was. The husband rang to ask if I was lost and stranded on top of the hill. Smug bastard. I continued trudging along the edge of the golf course, wondering when a stray golf ball was going to hit me in the head and kill me, when I realized that when I was packing my bag I had neglected to pack my keys. The coffee, hot shower and lunch I had been looking forward to evaporated. So to top off an all round disappointing morning when I finally got home (exhausted) I had to scale a fence, convince the staffy I wasn't a burglar, then climb in through a window. Hideous.


The girl is currently planning her birthday party (for December) and is heart broken because she only likes one of the girls from pre-school and she can't invite her friends from Melbourne. She said to me in a small, sad and lonely voice "we only need to make one invitation". I hope that's not true. I'm sure we will both make some more friends eventually, we have only been here a few months and these things take time. When the girl goes to school next year she will meet heaps of kids and I will start getting out more, doing more things that involve other people, maybe even go swimming.