Oh, me aching head

Ugh. Since I work from home and don't really have any set hours (technically I'm on-call 24/7), I often tend to wake up whenever a client calls me. Which could be at 6am or at 10am, with a tendency towards the later. And that's what I was banking on when I got home in the wee hours of the morning.

Unfortunately it did not work out that way, and I got a call from one of my clients down South at about 7am. It was a complicated problem that took a while to solve, not aided by the fact that I still felt half-drunk. And since their phone lines are all still out down there (more on that tomorrow), she kept having to run outside with her cell phone & climb up on a pile of dirt every time she wanted to call me. But it eventually got fixed.

Now on to last night.

Last night was supposed to just be Happy Hour drinks, celebrating the departure of a visiting Australian. But I should've known better - "Happy Hour drinks" turned into "Staying until the bar closed" drinks. But give me a break - I was with two really nice boys who always speak to me in French and there was a cute bartender named Adam giving us free shots called....wait for it..... "le sexe d'Adam" or essentially "Adam's junk". Would you say no to that?? I had so much fun - it was almost like being with my guy friends back home, just hanging out in a bar, talking & laughing. It was nice for once to not have the sexual question mark that usually comes with talking to a French man. Platonic friendships don't often exist in France (though Alisa, I'm thinking of you here!), which means that guys can sometimes get the wrong idea when you try to talk to them. So last night was cool and much appreciated. And even though I am paying the price today, I am even more grateful that I don't have to get on a 36 hour flight back to Oz.

Which reminds me of my last point. I hope I don't piss any Australians off here, but I have to admit that up until last night, I didn't think "Australia Day" was a real bona fide holiday. I just thought it was an excuse to drink or maybe a joke, sort of like how in high school, my friend Todd declared October 13 "National Todd Day". In my defense, I'd never heard of Australia Day until a few weeks ago (how is that possible with all the Aussie blogs I read??) and my confusion was compounded by the fact that most of the Australians I talked to last night didn't even know the origins of it. Names like "James Cook" and then "Jacques Cartier" were thrown around, and then one guy said he thought they were celebrating the day the first boat-full of convicts landed in Australia - but that seems like an awfully odd thing to celebrate to me. Either way, happy belated Australia Day to all of the Australians out there. I will be attending an "Australia Day" party on Saturday, which gives me at least a few more days to find out its actual origins....