Shyzer’s new Christmas themed layout is up and by “Christmas themed layout,” I simply mean I grabbed a carton of egg nog, took a photo of it, and photoshopped a Santa hat on me.
Don’t even let it be said I forgot about Shyzer during the holidays!
You might have noticed that Shyzer’s been acting funny lately. Then again, maybe you haven’t been here in a few months and are thinking to yourself, “why the hell do I even come back to this place?” Either way, I know it’s been weird for some people and hopefully it’ll be settled out by tomorrow. I switched Shyzer’s IP to a new one and it basically just took a few days for the Internet to cycle through and notice the changes.
Sometime soon, I’m gonna clean some space off of Shyzer to make room for some new videos I’ve recorded lately. So, if you have any favorite movies or anything, you might want to DL them just in case I take them off Shyzer soon. They’ll always be available by request though.
Sorry for the short entry, but I’m tired and I’ve had a bit too much egg nog & rum. God I love the holidays. My rum & cokes are replaced with a seasonal beverage, Christmas music literally fills the house all day as my mom plays the same 6 CDs repeatedly, and Christmas decorations blanket the house. You can’t ask for more.
I know it seems like the last trillion words I’ve posted here on Shyzer have been recapping trips I’ve been making, but this past weekend I flew down to Columbia for the Carolina-Clemson game and to see Fellner and The Fellas. This trip was actually mandatory for me. Some of you may remember a little thing called “The Goob Experience“ which Fellner “won.” Well, for his potpourri option, he had stipulated that I must attend one Carolina football game this year and seeing as how I’d yet to go to one and this was the last game of the season (minus our kickass bowl bid that we’ll get thanks to our surprising record!), I figured I should fulfill my duties. Fellner actually used this as his wish in an attempt to make sure I came home from Australia, since he was worried I might have stayed there past my allotted four months my first time around. Looks like he was onto something there.
I didn’t come home until Monday afternoon and was supposed to be flying right back down to South Carolina today for Thanksgiving, but the flights were full and there was no way I was cramming Clay, Julianne, Colton, and myself in a two seat pickup truck for an 8 hour drive over the Thanksgiving holidays. So looks like the four of us will be spending Thanksgiving here in Virginia together.
But all these flights I’ve taken lately remind me of something. So far in 2005, I’ve taken 11 plane trips, with a few more planned in December as well. As I’ve boarded each plane, but especially during the four trans-Pacific flights I took, the same exact thought has run through my head.
Let’s see here…if we were to crash like on LOST, I wonder if this group of yahoos would make it…
Let’s just say each time I’ve been less than thrilled with our chances. First off, there aren’t enough hot chicks on the planes, plain and simple. How am I supposed to survive without a Kate or Sun or dear God, even without a Claire to help me through my recent trauma? I travel with extra jars of peanut butter in my luggage just in case there’s a Claire on board. But hell, there aren’t even enough young people on the planes these days. It seems like each time the ratio of people under the age of 25 is about 5%. I’m not gonna be able to defeat the Others single handedly here, folks, especially if the rest of my crash mates are geriatrics or lying on the beach because lifting anything heavier than a coconut tires them out.
But what about jobs? I’m no doctor, so I can’t be Jack. I’ve got no hunting skills beyond the fact that I can point a gun and shoot fairly accurately, so Locke’s out of the question. I haven’t been in the army before and I can’t repair electronics unless I have Google to walk me through it, so sayonara Sayid. I’m not a con artist, I’m not a lady’s man, I can’t play a guitar and sweep an Aussie chick off her feet, I’m not worth $140 million dollars, and I can speak English. So Sawyer, Charlie, Hurley, and Jin are crossed out. Oh, and I’m not black, so I can’t be the token black guy. That leaves Boone…great, I get to be the one sacrificed to the island. Son of a bitch…
But what about my crash mates? Maybe they can help me pick up the slack, right? Well, in recent flights I’ve sat next to a businessman, a preacher, a businessman, a guy who drooled while he slept the whole way, a businessman, a guy who had the Federal Marshal come up and threaten to arrest him if he didn’t stop bitching about not having a cold beer on board, and another businessman. Seriously, are companies still doing meetings and crap like this nowadays to where so many businessmen have to fly around? Haven’t they ever heard of conference calls and the Internet and VOIP and the high prices of traveling? I don’t think I want to be stranded with some pencil pusher who just sits around in meetings all day and tries to sell Xerox machines or dog food packaging or whatever the hell it is these guys are actually doing.
See, this is how my brain works folks. I don’t worry about crashing and dieing instantly in a giant fireball. I don’t worry about being stranded alone on an island like Tom Hanks in Castaway. I worry about crashing on a deserted island and being stranded for an indefinite period of time with a group of idiots whom I don’t like.
So to recap. We need more hot, young, females who can take care of me by hunting food and fixing my wounds and all that jazz to start flying more often. Preferably the flights from Washington DC to South Carolina and Sydney, since that’s what I fly most often. Yeah, I’m liking the sound of this plane wreck the more I think about it…
We last left off with Goob drifting off happily into dream land during his first night in Australia. Let’s tune back in and see just what kind of shenanigans he ended up getting himself into.
I woke up Friday morning revived and ready to roll. Which is a damn good thing, because that also happened to be Oktoberfest and even though the closest to Germany most of my mates have ever been is eating a German sausage, I knew they were going to celebrate the day in full fashion. So I drug myself out of bed, performed the ritual known as “daily hygiene,” and by noon was heading over to Bar on the Hill with Hannah and Keeley to meet up with everybody.
After sculling my first beer of the day, I spent the rest of it slowly getting Socially Happy and catching up with people that I hadn’t had a chance to talk to the day before. I wasn’t planning on going out since I wasn’t too keen on getting hammered my first functional night in Aussie, but around 2200, Emma came by and asked if I wanted to come out with a few folks. Something told me it’d be a damn fun time, so I decided what the hell and accompanied Em, Rach, Matty, and company out to Customs. Final verdict = excellent decision. The Spitfire didn’t make an appearance (more on that later), but I still managed to have a freaking blast.
It’s weird, during the four months I was in Australia, I didn’t really hang out excessively with Emma. I guess it wasn’t so much that we didn’t hang out, but that we didn’t really have any crazy adventures together. The first one I can remember having with her is on Josh’s Farewell in June as she chased me around campus as I drunkenly blazed past everyone. Now that I think about it, that isn’t so much an adventure as her being kind and making sure I didn’t end up passed out in a ditch. See, even that wasn’t fun for her! Anyways, like I said in my last post that was read three times by Waynus and Jaime each, Emma actually cried tear of joy when I showed up unannounced, so I knew we’d have to do some fun things together while I was visiting in order to make those tears well deserved. And did we ever.
Friday nights were my nights of craziness. I was there for three Fridays and each and every one of them was a blast. The first Friday (Day 2) was amazingly fun mainly due to the fact that I hung out with people I didn’t hang out with nearly enough my first time here. Of course, by the end of the night, thanks to all the Oktoberfest drinking I had done earlier in the day, I was drunk. Luckily, so was Emma, and we had quite a time making it back to Teds. I’m not really sure how I ended up on the train with everybody, but as we were getting off, Emma came up with the brilliant idea to hide in the bushes and scare everybody as they walked past. I thought it was such a fantastic idea, that I immediately agreed to it and we dashed into the nearest pile of bushes we could find and prepared ourselves to give everybody the fright of their life.
Only problem was that we were the last two people to get off the train.
After sitting confused in the bushes for a few minutes, it finally dawned on us that we weren’t gonna be scaring anybody that evening except for the spiders around us. We stumbled out and began to walk back to Teds when we were struck with our second brilliant idea of the evening - to go lie on the oval and stare at the stars! We detoured to the nearest oval, plopped ourselves down in the middle, and gazed upwards at the clouded sky for quite a while before we realized that most of the starts were obscured. It was also at this time that I realized I was lying in a giant mud puddle and spent the rest of our journey back to Teds saying, “I’m all muddy…I think we were lying in mud!” Needless to say, when we finally made it back to the dorms an hour after everybody else, we were giggling uncontrollably and congratulating each other on a job well done.
The next day (Day 3) happened to also be Garden Party, which was the last dorm function of the year. It’s basically a Hawaiian themed event where everybody gets drunk and then the yearly awards are given out. This is also the only time where I refrained from drinking while everybody else got hammered, which is the only reason I mention it. I was quite proud of myself, as you all should be. See Mom, I’m not an alcoholic! Instead of drinking, I spent the night with Keeley and Simon chasing around a very drunk and a very loud Laura. Lesson learned from that experience? Never again be sober when everybody else is drinking! (Shut up Mom!)
The next few days were spent hanging out and just enjoying myself. I went to the computer lab every four days or so since my only source of income right now is helping people work on and update their websites. The rest of my afternoon / evenings were spent just hanging out in people’s rooms and talking. It honestly felt as if I hadn’t even left. I’d wake up around noon, make some lunch, and spend the next few hours wandering the corridors and knocking on people’s doors to hang and chill.
Eventually there was the Ben Lee concert (Day 7, I think) that was, simply put, un-fucking-believable. I had never heard of him before, but it seemed as if everybody and their cousin was going to his concert, so I bought a ticket and figured I’d put some faith in their music selection. And boy, was my faith ever rewarded. I instantly fell in love with his music, rushed back to the dorms to download every song of his I could find, and listened to them over and over and over and over…. You can find some of my favorite songs of his over on the right hand side of Shyzer in the revived Radio Blog, which I haven’t properly configured yet, but which is working nonetheless. My top three would be Ache For You, No Room to Bleed, and Cigarettes Will Kill You.
That Friday (Day 9) was Valedictory Dinner and also the night that would turn out to be the second crazy drunken night of my visit and possibly, the best night of all. The funny part is that I hadn’t even planned on going out or drinking, it just kinda happened. Like I said, Valedictory Dinner was that night and so I borrowed a dress robe from somebody who wasn’t in town, put on some decent looking clothes, and snuck into the dinner even though I didn’t live at Teds anymore. The dinner was quite delicious, the wine, which was served with it, was actually not half bad, and most importantly, I wasn’t caught or kicked out. After dinner, everyone began to make their way back to the dorm and I noticed that a few people had drunk their fair share of wine. One such person was Neri and before I knew it, we were looking for somebody to drive us to town so that we could buy cake mix and mix it with vodka. Random? Of course.
Yeah, needless to say, I ended up going out with her, Emma, and Matty that night and man oh man did it turn into one of the best nights in recent memory. We never did find our cake mix to combine with vodka, but we did manage to get amazingly drunk. Well, let me rephrase. I managed to get amazingly drunk and it’s completely Mexico’s fault. See, the Toohey’s Old that I love and enjoy so much just wasn’t doing the trick. I kid you not when I say I drank 6 or 7 of them within two hours and wasn’t even buzzing. I was baffled as to how I could be drinking so much and not even feeling it and so I began to complain that I couldn’t get drunk off the beer. I wasn’t bragging, oh no, I was complaining. You see, I wanted to get drunk that night and so I asked if anybody knew of something that might help me solve my problem. That’s when Emma piped up with the now classic line of, “TEQUILA SHOTS!!” Yeah, that did the trick.
Within minutes, we had done a few tequila shots and I was well on my way to Drunkville, population: Me. As we switched to another bar, Emma and I ran off to look at the Harbour Angel and truth be told, that’s the point where my memory became fuzzy. I vaguely remember Casey buying me another beer, dancing in the Brewery, and finally seeing some Germans to shoot down in my Spitfire.
Ok, about the Spitfire. I’ve got no idea where it came from, but whenever I get blindly drunk, my brain starts to think my body is a World War II era Spitfire fighter jet and that everything around me is a German enemy plane. The Spitfire first came to fruition on a camping trip with Dave, Jeremy, and Nhan back in July of 2004. We all stayed up late talking and drinking and sometime during the night, I began to run up and down the camp strip making airplane noises, pretending I was shooting down Germans, and screaming “Take THAT Hitler! Eat that Nazi scum! BWEAR!!!!!!!!” It was one of those things where you wake up the next morning, spend a few hours going, “Hey, do you remember what I did last night” before finally moving on. But when I went to Australia, the Spitfire began to make a comeback and basically, whenever I transform into a Spitfire, all my mates in Australia know that I’m officially gone for the evening and that it’s gonna be a long night of chasing me around as I personally turn the tide of the war for Britain and for the rest of mankind in general.
Eventually, we made it to the bus stop and by “we made it,” I really mean “Matty and Emma managed to corral me.” I don’t remember this, but I was told the next day that while waiting for the bus, Matty kept whispering in my ear, “You know, Emma’s really a German. So is the bus!” and I kept freaking out and running away. Once the bus finally came, Emma said it took every ounce of persuasion in her to get me to board the “German” bus and that she was hitting Matty the entire time for making me scared of it. Once we finally boarded, though, I took the seat directly behind the bus driver. Emma sat across from me, Matty sat behind her, and Neri sat behind me.
There was actually a seat between Neri and myself and somewhere along the ride home, a guy sat between us and started talking on his cell phone. Now, I don’t remember leaving the bar or getting on the bus. I hardly even remember running around town as a Spitfire. But one thing I do remember is some guy threatening to kick my ass and telling me that I was a wanker.
You see, as Matty, Emma, and Neri explained it to me, the guy who was talking on his cell phone was talking loudly. He also had his back to me. So, being drunk and the natural smart ass that I already am, I began to mock him. I started mimicking talking on a cell phone and for most of the ride, I simply made an ass of myself. Matty and Emma said they were literally in stitches laughing at me and I’m told Neri did her absolute best trying not to laugh so that she didn’t give it away to the guy on his phone that I was making him look like a dick. However, all of the other bus patrons could clearly see me and apparently I ticked off some guy who simply saw me as a drunk American who didn’t belong in Newcastle. So, as his stop was nearing, he stood up and walked towards me angrily and began to ask where I was from. Being drunk and knowing deep down in my brain that I was in no condition to fight, I cowered in the seat and told him I didn’t want any trouble. He just kept talking shit, threatening to do this and that, and I just kept nodding before he finally got off the bus. I then spent the rest of night recapping how I almost got beat up. In fact, Emma recorded some of my reenactment in this video.
The best part of the whole bus event was that as I was getting off, the bus driver stopped me and thanked / praised / congratulated me for doing the right thing. I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of myself while being drunk than at that moment. Matty summed it up best when he said later on:
“You were being a complete dick to the guy behind you and yet somehow you were congratulated by the bus driver! I’ve never experienced two completely different emotions on a bus than I did last night. I went from being in stitches by laughing at you to wondering if something serious was about to happen.”
Good thing somebody had my back, because had that guy decided to start punching me, I doubt I would have been able to even lift my arms in defense, much less get a single punch off. Anyways, the night’s events were far from over. Being praised by the bus driver was the absolute last moment of the night I remember. The hour or two that followed are still a haze to me and the only recollection I have of them are from the photos I have and stories I’ve been told. If you couldn’t tell from the first video, we went swimming in the pool that night. It was actually myself who was hell-bent on swimming and now that I think about it, I’m trying to figure out if anybody else actually went swimming with me or if they all just stood around staring and laughing at me. Oh well, it doesn’t really matter now, but Hannah managed to record a video of me begging people to swim and of me reenacting the praise I was given by the bus driver.
Like I said, I managed to go swimming in my boxers that night and luckily found a towel to dry off with. Matty helped my climb over the fence and as the night was winding down, I decided it was time for me to sleep and start my journey towards the massive hangover that was soon to come. Laura was gone for the weekend and I had been staying in her room, which was on the middle floor of West Wing. Emma, Matty, and Neri all went to bed and I ventured off to do the same in Laura’s room. At least, that’s what I thought I was doing. My memory picks back up around 0530 that morning as I was woken up by two people wondering just who in the hell I was.
Remember how I said Laura’s room was in West Wing on the middle floor? Well, when I was climbing the stairs to her room, I didn’t count correctly and I ended up on the top floor. In my defense, I went to the correct room location. I just ended up in the room directly above where I should have been. The door was unlocked and the lights were off and I guess I just figured the floor looked like a wonderful place to sleep, so I collapsed down on it and dozed off. The problem was that a guy named Steve and his girlfriend named AJ were naked and sleeping in the bed right next to me. Judging from the time we left the pool until the time campus security was called for an intruder, I was asleep on their floor for a good two hours or so. But eventually AJ’s leg dangled off the bed and as luck would have it, hit my face. While sleeping, my hand grabbed her foot, which woke her up, which freaked her out, which woke up Steve, which made him get up to investigate, which caused all hell to break loose since some drunk guy was caressing his girlfriend’s leg.
They woke up to me, soaking wet and in my boxers, wrapped in a towel, sleeping on his floor. Kinda like I look in the picture above. He flipped the lights on and asked who the hell I was and as my brain slowly began to wake up, I wanted to know the same damn question! Who were these two people in Laura’s room when I was supposed to be the one staying there! And why the fuck were they in the bed that Laura had been letting me use? As we both continued to yell at each other, I noticed something odd. Laura didn’t have clothes all over her floor. Laura also had stuff on her walls and I could have sworn she had a laptop and not a desktop computer. After about 90 seconds, it finally dawned on me and I sprinted out of the room without a word, raced downstairs, and collapsed into Laura’s bed.
The next afternoon around 1730, I woke up to Hannah crash tackling me and Keeley laughing drunkenly into the mirror. They had just gotten back from the races, which I had skipped in favor of sleep, and soon I began to remember the events of the previous night. All the while, people were walking by Laura’s room congratulating me on freaking out Steve and AJ and it suddenly all came rushing back to me. I finally tracked them down, apologized, and was relieved to find out that they thought it was hilarious once they were told that the half-naked drunken guy in their room, “was just Goob.” We all agreed that it made a great story and I then went back to Laura’s room to spend the rest of the evening cursing whoever invented hangovers.
The rest of the week was filled with more chilling, hanging out, and your basic college dorm activities. I knew the end of my stay was nearing, so I tried to spend as much time just talking with people and enjoying their company. Before I knew it, my last Friday had arrived (Day 16) and it was great. I won’t really get into it, but after hanging at Customs with just about every single one of my mates, I decided to walk to the beach alone and spend some time figuring things out. I’m not really sure how many hours I spent there and I ended up symbolically tossing some things into the ocean, a la Top Gun (coughmywatchcough), but it was one of the most therapeutic night I’ve had in years.
The next few days and nights I began to prepare for my departure. However, during my last night there (Day 20), Emma got a bit tipsy and wanted to walk to Warabrook, so Matty, Alina, and myself accompanied her during her journey. Again, hell of a night. No, it didn’t involve any drinking, but it involved what I love so much more about this place. We basically just sat out on the dock, looking at the stars, and talked. Plus, there were the two shooting stars that…well, I think I’ll just have to save that story for another post.
I know to some, it may seem like the only reason I love Australia is because of all the drinking and such I did there since that’s basically all I talk about here on Shyzer. But honestly if that’s what you believe, you couldn’t be farther from the truth. There’s so much more about that place that I love that doesn’t make it onto Shyzer. It’s more than Toohey’s Old Dark Beer or the now infamous wine in a box I drink. It’s the people that I love, the environment around Teds, and the attitudes of everybody. I can’t accurately express how loved that place makes me feel, so I don’t even bother. Pictures can’t capture the way I feel when I go back there. Words can’t portray the excitement and content and joy and everything else that mingles inside me while I’m just sitting on somebody’s bed chatting or looking up and down the table in the dining hall or going on walks in the middle of the night across campus. I know I can’t do justice to the way the people there make me feel, so instead I simply write about the only thing that I think people back home will enjoy reading about; my fun adventures I have while I’m there. I just want everybody reading this to make sure they get the right interpretation. It’s this and this and this that make me love Australia. Not this or this. I can’t stress that enough.
I had told people I was gonna leave in the middle of the night without saying anything. I didn’t want to have to go through another round of tears and farewells, so I figured the best course of action would be to leave in the middle of the night without anybody knowing. Of course, telling people this defeated the whole purpose, but I couldn’t simply avoid the question of when I was leaving all together. But, on Wednesday night (Day 20), I basically wandered the corridors late at night going from room to room and talking to as many people as I could find. Around 0245, I finally discovered that everybody had fallen asleep and I knew what had to be done. A few days earlier, I had hidden my bags throughout the dorm and so I went and collected them all, got ready to go, and wrote a few letters that needed to be written. I slipped them under their owner’s respective doors, quietly thanked everybody for a kick ass time, and slipped out under the cover of darkness to catch a train into Sydney.
I’m not even sure how I made it back to the states. I must have stood in the Sydney Central train station for a good 30 minutes contemplating just saying, “fuck it” and going back to Newcastle. I wanted nothing more than to not come home, run back to my second home, and stay there forever. But I finally willed my legs to carry me over to the train, which was headed towards the airport, and board it. A few hours later I was sitting on a plane, staring out the window with tears streaming down my face, wanting nothing more than to be back at Teds. But I knew I had to return home and so 38 hours later, I was greeted by Colton saying, “RYAN! YOU CAME BACK!” and spent the next few hours hugging and playing with my siblings.
Virginia is where I am now. Its where the people who love me most in this world live (besides those two oafs down in South Carolina!) and its where I need to be right now. Make no mistake about it, I love my family more than life itself. I love every day I get to spend with my siblings. I love reading A Pigeon Finds A Hot Dog with Colton every night or the look on Jules’ face when I tell her she can sleep in my bed with me on the weekend or having Clay ask me if I know of any good books. I love kidding with my mom about drinking rum and cokes at 10 in the morning, and talking to my dad about his days with the band, or having Tommy call me to ask which side Norway was actually on in World War II. This family I was placed with is perfect for me, so when I call the people in Newcastle my “Second Family,” don’t think I’m turning my back on the one I already have.
But at the same time, don’t even think about kidding yourself. Australia is where I belong at this stage of my life and I simply can’t wait until the next phase of my plan is executed 
Come on, did you really think I wasn’t planning on going back sometime soon?
Where do I even start? Seriously, how am I supposed to try and fit three weeks of amazing fun into one post? The basic answer is there’s no way I can, so instead I’m gonna break it up over a few different posts.
This whole trip actually started back in July. I’d only been home for a month with my family and friends, but had already been to Minnesota, Charleston, Spartanburg, and Seattle. Graduation was on the immediate horizon and yet after all the amazing fun I’d had since being home, I still couldn’t get my mind off Australia. Right at the end of July, I went to Seattle, as you all know. One day, my bro Chong and I were sitting outside enjoying an adult beverage in the crisp Seattle afternoon and the topic of choice was of our long friendship. We’ve been friends for almost 14 years now and as you can imagine, I consider him one of my closest friends. But as the topic quickly shifted to my recent excursion to Australia, he picked up on something that I knew was there, but that I couldn’t explain. In only four months, I had grown amazingly close to my newfound friends. As we sat there sipping our brews and laughing at the crazy guy on the street corner, I told him I wished I could go back, if for nothing else, just a visit. When he asked what the hell was stopping me, I was speechless. There wasn’t a single thing holding me back. In fact, my future, my chances, and my life had never been in better condition for me to simply go off and do whatever I wanted to do. School was over and done with, a job was non-existent, my mom had a few free international passes saved up, and my desire had never been stronger. As all this quickly ran through my head, I couldn’t believe it. Why didn’t I realize it before? Hell if I know, but as I thanked Chong for pointing out the obvious to me, my mind was racing with new plans. It was settled; I was going back to Australia.
The only person I told was Hannah. I wanted to be sure that when I got there, everybody would still be there. Thank God I did this, because my initial date of arrival was right smack in the middle of their holiday break. Would that have been charming. 48 hours of flying to my adoptive homeland only to find the dorm empty for another week. Talk about a depressing homecoming. About two weeks before my new arrival date, I got a message from Keeley screaming about how excited she was. Turns out Hannah had accidentally let the cat out of the bag and told her I was coming. Keeley told Alex, but other than that, my secret was safe. Only three people knew I was coming and the rest? Well the rest were in for a little treat.
To be honest, I began having doubts about coming back once I boarded the train from Sydney to Newcastle. What the fuck was I doing? I had just flown halfway around the world to come back to a place I had only been for four months. What if nobody really gave a shit I was back? What if I didn’t have fun? I feared I was holding on to something I should have been letting go of. Here I was, a twenty two year old college graduate and instead of going out and getting a job like most of my peers, I was gallivanting around the world to a place where in my head, I felt like I belonged. It’s not often I let societal expectations creep into my head, but for some reason during that train trip, they did. It was by far the worst three hours of my whole trip.
I walked off the train around 1230 and decided to wait a little. I knew Hannah was in class until 1300, so I freshened up and sat down to read a book. At 1315, I began the trek to Teds and after stashing my bags behind the coke machine, I walked around the dorm to see if anybody was in their rooms. As I passed by Keeley’s room, dual ear shattering screeches erupted from behind the glass and immediately all doubts were vanquished. For most people, this probably wasn’t the logical step to take. But since when have I ever been like most people? As Hannah and Keeley spilled from the front door and we all just mingled into one huge hug, I knew right then and there I had made the correct choice and that I was gonna enjoy every second of it.
As the screaming stopped, I looked up to see Matty walking up and laughing. He had seen me walk by his window with a cheeky grin and had to come see if his eyes had been deceiving him or not. And from there, the reactions only became greater. Casey did a double-take as I walked into his room. Aiden and Kaz hollered out my name in jubilee. Memma thought I was a cardboard cutout at first. Jordan and Sam laughed at how completely random it was that I came back. And Emma even cried tears of what I believe were joy. Within hours, a large group of us were over at the Bar on the Hill for happy hour. Let me tell you, that first glass of Toohey’s Old was by far one of the most delicious beers I’ve ever had. And as I learned coming home yesterday, while the States might not allow much alcohol to be sent via the postal service, they don’t give a shit about bringing it in via carry-on baggage. In fact, I think I might go have an Old right now with lunch. But that afternoon, I simply spent my time going around and seeing everyone and letting it be known that Goob was back in the country for a while.
My exhaustion finally slammed me around 2000 as we were getting back from Jesmond with pizza. I ate a little bit before being ushered into Hannah’s room and given her bed for the night to sleep. And as I drifted off to sleep that evening, I remember the great wave of warmth and pleasure that swept over me.
I was finally back home with my second family.
Yeah, I’m still in Australia, hence the total abandonment of Shyzer for the past two weeks. I’ll be returning back to Virginia within a few days with some good stories and photos. Plus I’m stocked up on Aussie food and beer….good God this stuff is delicious!
Just for a short preview of what’s to come, November will bring with it a trip to South Carolina for Thanksgiving, which means there should be at least a good post or two out of that. There’s also some other videos that I shot a few weeks back at home, including “Box Man”, but apparently our camcorder is malfunctioning ever since root beer was spilled on it on the trip out here to Aussie, so I’m gonna have to send that in to get it repaired first. Whoops. Let’s see, what else do we have here. Oh yes, there are some 11-month old prank phone calls that I hoep to get uploaded that now aren’t in the least bit funny to me, but since my brothers and I did them, I’m gonna upload them damnit!
Okay that’s it. Until next time.
