Freelance Brisbanite

Sorry I've been a bit quiet. It isn't really from lack of time, more from trying to decide what to write and not putting blogging as a priority.

Well, last Thursday I once again made my way to Brisbane. Fortunately this time the weather was good and I enjoyed walking around without stabbing my thumb on the mechanism in my umbrella and having to protect my camera from the elements. The irony is, of course, that I spent most of the time there indoors at the convention not taking photos of anything other than people in the lecture hall.

I stayed at Gla's property in Charlotte Towers in the heart of the city, a swish one-bedroom apartment overlooking Kangaroo Point. The only problem with it was that it was incredibly lonely staying there by myself!

On Friday, I bought enough breakfast food to last me my entire stay and then walked to Spring Hill for an appointment with Teresa, which was an interesting experience. I'm aware that I'm now becoming quite dependent on my roughly annual visits to clairvoyants (and other such new age people) but I figure I learn just as much from them in half and hour than I did in a $300 hour with a psychotherapist. For $300, I can get a return trip to Brisbane incl transfers and an hour with Teresa.

I then took a walk to Milton, which didn't look as far on the map as it ended up being. The reason for the trek was to go to high tea at Joseph Alexanders. The walk wouldn't have been as bad had I not worn the wrong shoes. I was forced to take a bus back to the city and ended up getting off at a shopping mall where I bought more appropriate shoes (which I never ended up wearing during my stay - what a waste).

After giving my feet a bit of TLC, I caught a bus to the Brisbane Powerhouse for the welcome drinks. I arrived just in time, just as the keynote speaker was being introduced. Afterwards I unfortunately found myself socially trapped by David, a member of the Sydney group, when all I wanted to do was mingle and talk to as many new people as possible.

Now David is very sweet old man in his 70s who helps out in the committee a lot but is prone to bouts of stereotypical old-manhood, which is basically insisting that what he says is the most important and needs to be said several times, very loudly, to make sure you understand it is the most important. Sometimes what he says is helpful but a lot of the time it's tedious opinion that invites no return conversation. So you see why it was particularly annoying for me to make eye contact. It was very difficult to break away.

Long story short, a bunch of us ended up going to dinner at Cafe San Marco (I don't recommend it), where I failed to request a receipt and thus unable to claim the meal as a business expense, dammit! Then we took a walk along the river and I showed them the Nepalese Teak House before leaving them to walk back to Charlotte.

The Freelance Convention sessions were interesting but I won't bore you with overviews. All I'll say is during the breaks I met a lot of freelancers from all different specialities and locations, which made up for Friday night. Oh yeah, and I sold four 'Palimpsest' books all because I wore an 'Ask me about my book' sticker on my sleeve for two days.

Saturday night I was supposed to have dinner with nine people at The Ottoman Cafe in West End. Unfortunately due to last minute piking, only five of them turned up (which sort of ended up being a good thing because we had a big table to put all the dishes on without crowding). Skippy was tired instead of her usual chatty self, though she did bring out some cattiness for the bellydancer for not enjoying herself enough.

We were going to hang out at my pad afterwards but it was difficult to find parking so I ended up spending the night reading 'The Cider House Rules' with a big pot of tea while the noise from St Patrick's Day revellers wafted up from the street. I thought about getting a pint of Guinness, then decided I couldn't face a drunken crowd. The way the night turned out, I sort of wished I went to the convention dinner instead but hindsight's always 20-20 as they say (in Australia, that would be 6-6 but I can't remember how to spell the unit of measurement).

And Monday? Well, seeing as I had THAT MUCH work to do, I really should have booked an earlier flight and only taken half a day off work but I'd saved it for high tea that I ended up cramming in on Friday. So I spent six hours and $35 in the Virgin Blue airport lounge trying to do some work. Then it was back to the grind.