James O'Brien

Even though it’s Monday, the fourth day of a long weekend, I’m still doing some of my Sunday “ritual”, such as catching up on my homework for Swedish class, and doing my clothes washing for the week ahead.

I remembwer vividly, when I first moved to Sydney, I had a fairly aged washing machine. It was one of those machines which got into a bit a frenzy on the spin mode. It would literally “walk across the floor”. Though it didn’t seem to cause me much concern, it obviously disturbed the neighbours. A few months after living in my first apartment block in Sydney, I remember walking down the stairs late one night to put out the garbage, only to overhear the neighours say “it’s that fucking washing machine again”. A week or so later I went out and bought a new washing machine. I also vowed never to do late night washing again.

Over twenty years later, the guy who lives upstairs is in the same position. There’s lots of late night washing (several loads) and he has a washing machine that almost shakes the apartment block to its foundations. Twenty years ago I might have been concerned; now I just go “meh”. I’m not going to lose sleep over it!

The other “oh yeah, I’ve been there” moment happened on Friday night, having a beer at my local pub, “The Crown”. Recently, I’ve got to chatting with an Irish bloke called Darren or Derryn (I’m not sure of his name, due to his accent).

“Why does the pub close at 10 o’clock?”, he asked me, and “Where can I go after this?”, he added. When I told him about the pub closing hours in NSW, and that his only option on Good Friday after 10 was probably, “Star Casino”, he said, “This is a fookin disaster”.

I remember all too vividly the lessons of Good Friday closing about 25 years ago in Wagga, and having a dinner party that was almost completely “dry”, as very few of us had bothered to go to the bottle shop the day before.

Even though I’ve had four days off (albeit with a few bits of work here and there) I haven’t done all that much this Easter, despite my best intentions.

The only thing I planned to do that I actually did was visit the Bald Archy Exhibition. It’s an awesome exhibition I’ve been attending since it was first held at Coolac in Southern NSW. Lots of fun at the expense of our politicians and other public figures.

The rest of the weekend has spent binge-watching TV (including the new Chris Lilley series), listening to the radio, and quite a few “afternoon naps”. Though I did get up early this morning to enjoy the sunrise.

Nonetheless, it’s been a terrific weekend. And with the sound of the washing machine in the background, there’s even been some time to do a blog catch-up also. Sorry, nothing too exciting. Just life right now.