I got my eyebrows waxed yesterday. Since they're quite light in colour I tend to neglect them until one morning I'll peer close in the mirror and notice they've gone feral beyond the reaches of plucking. Anyway, yesterday I was attended to by a perky lass named Lynette, and I knew instinctively I shouldn't trust someone so perky. Now my eyebrows are ridiculously thin and arched like a cartoon villian. I turned to my husband for reassurance.

SHAUNA:  Do my eyebrows look funny to you?

GARETH:  Whoa!

S:  I knew it! She butchered me!

G:  You look like the Mercedes!

S:  What?

G:  Jeremey Clarkson said on Top Gear that the headlights of the new Mercedes look like a woman whose had a banana shoved up her arse.

S:  Just GREAT! I look permanently surprised!

G:  Don't worry. People will just see you walking round and think you're REALLY AMAZED by Australia!

What if everyone laughs at how white my legs are?

What if I spend so much time catching up on Aussie foods I've missed that I'm busting out of my clothes by the end of the trip?

What if I am so overcome with joy by the familiar sight of a plasticky Australian $5 note that I start licking it?

What if Gareth meets all my family and realises I've only been PRETENDING to be a bright, cheery, confident person; but realises he's actually married a sullen, bitchy, neurotic freak?

What if I accidentally keep starting sentences with "This one time, in Latvia/Iceland/Spain" and people rolls their eyes and think, OH GREAT another one of those wankers coming home from their precious travels and boring the CRAP out of us all!

What if I need to do a really big fart on the plane?

What if I am so out of touch with Australia after 2.5 years that real Aussies will scoff at me like I'm one of those awful expats who doesn't know a damn thing about Australia anymore like Germaine Greer or something? I mean, since when do the Sydney Swans make the AFL Grand Final?

What if Harry Potter isn't reporting for Ten News anymore?

What if I get there and realise I want to be in Scotland?

What if I get there and realise I never want to leave?

As the Australian leg of the wedding odyssey rapidly approaches, it's The Mothership's turn to get the Wedding Fever. While she has a more relaxed approach than the Motherinlawship for the Scottish one, she's still a stickler for details. Because weddings are all about details. She came up with the idea of decorating the cake with some wattle and a thistle to symbolise the union of the Aussie and the Jock. I scrounged up a thistle and assumed we'd just yank a sprig of wattle off a tree on the way to the party, but I received this memo instead:

FROM:  Mothership
SUBJECT:  Photo and Size of Thistle

Good evening to you both

Could you email photo of thistle (put something next to it that I would know for size comparison) and write the dimensions of thistle in the Email - we need to get the wattle the same size to represent your partnership with Gareth.

Luv ya
Ma

(Don't kill me Ma! Couldn't resist this one!)

If you can see this message then my domain thingy has been transferred. Huzzah! I have switched hosts and have been upgraded to Movable Type 3.2.

Thanks to Pavel at LivingDot hosting for all your help shifting this clunky old mess. I've been pissfarting around for six weeks cleaning out my archives - deleting spam comments, fixing broken links, sorting images and even re-publishing some stuff I'd taken offline in moments of angst and panic. Anyway, with over 10,000 comments the normal Export Entries thing kept shitting itself, so Pavel kindly moved my database and got the blog running again. I have asked about ten gazillion stupid questions throughout this process and always received prompt replies. Cheers mate!

Hopefully now you should be able to comment freely, without fear of rejection and 500 Server Errors! Woohoo.

You can't talk to anyone lately without them bringing up all the bringing up they've been doing. There's a violent vomiting/diarrhea bug going round, and noone hesitates to give you vivid details of their intestinal turmoil. One guy at work today said his wee son has been ill, and has become so skilled that he managed to spew right into the bucket for hours without taking his eyes off Lord of the Rings on the telly for one moment.

I am surrounded by vomit in Scotland. The most spectacular incident was the time that old guy let fly in the restaurant. But every morning en route to the train station there is, without fail, at least one pool of crusty vom on the footpath. And it's never a dainty wee puddle; it's always an epic, chunky lake. With seagulls splashing round, searching for chips.

Everyone I know has at least one hilarious That Time I Chucked Up story, usually involving drunken shennanigans. Personally I haven't produced the goods since 1992 and it's a dull tale. A baked egg custard came back to haunt me. I'd always hated baked custard, all that pale wobble with crusty dusty cinammon on top, so I'd only eaten it to be polite to the hostess. I thanked her by hogging her toilet all night til my throat was raw.

When did you last throw up? Or what was your most memorable one?

"SHORRRRRNA! SHORNA! Is that you?"

"Yes it's me!"

"My GAWD, I can hear you so well! Can you believe this LINE? It's so clear!"

My aunt is awed by the miracle of international telephony. I think she still believes there are ladies with headsets and twinsets plugging away at switchboards.

"And you still sound the same! I thought you'd have gone all Scottish by now! But you're still just fair dinkum Aussie."

"Yep!"

"So you're coming home. Nothing's changed since you left. Except everything's more expensive."

"It is? I was looking forward to everything being cheaper!"

"Well I bought some lamb cutlets the other day and they were $2 each. TWO. DOLLARS. EACH! Two dollars for a scrawny bit of meat."

"And half of it's just bone and fat, really."

"Exactly! You're almost better off buying a bloody lobster than beef these days, I tell you."

So we leave for Australia NEXT WEEK. I love being able to say that. I keep interrupting conversations to say, "Australia! Next week!". Gareth keeps joking that I'll refuse to get back on the plane at the end of the trip, but I can't help wonder what I'll make of it all.

I've never felt particularly homesick over the past 2.5 years. Emails and phone calls make it seem like your loved ones aren't that far away. I've become so absorbed in Scotland that I sometimes forget that I'm not from here. Last week I caught my old bus, the 22, and as always it was full of Aussies off to work in the call centres. It was the same old conversations - drunken nights, rent worries, travelling on the cheap, the shitty so-called summer. I found myself irritated by their broad and booming accents, and silently muttering, "Well if you think it's so crap, why don't ya GO BACK THEN!?"

Yet on the other hand, I'm glued to Neighbours and the cricket, grinning dopily at the sound of Aussie voices. I've being baking scones and lamingtons just to get in the mood. I got teary at my Body Pump class this morning when the Shoulder track was an AC/DC tune. I keep pouring over our intinerary, wriggling in my chair just thinking of all the places Gareth is going to see, all the cool friends he's finally going to meet.

Yep, I'm officially homesick. Woohoo! Plus I'm really busting for a hamburger with the lot.

I am really bloody sick of not enjoying this. All sorts of stupid stuff has been getting on my tits for months and months leading to this blog becoming a steaming pit of neglect. Examples:

• All the nasty weirdoes who came out of the woodwork post-Bloggie
• The server being pounded so hard by comment spammers that no real people could leave comments
• Templates and design that were slick and sweet in 2002 now bloated and buggy behind the scenes
• The discovery that a whole bunch of people read this site that I didn't realise read this site (hello Mothership and 5 billion of your friends!)
• My virtual life being totally outed at work via a large national newspaper and some unfortunate Googling
• Just being sick of the sound of my own typing, really.

My policy has always been never to blog about blogging and to only write if I have something to say, thus hopefully avoiding sounding like a wanker. But this has backfired on me, because now I worry so much about who and how many are reading and that what I want to say is too rubbish/unfunny/personal/Boring Married Person that I've reached the point where I am not writing anything at all.

And since I didn't want anyone to know I was worried about this, I've been sulking and skulking and letting the discontent grow. This blog is like that really messy spare room in your house, crammed with old magazines and boardgames and boxes of funny-smelling clothes that don't quite fit; the room you know you should do something about but you just shut the door and go watch telly instead.

At this point folk may be wondering, who cares? This is just a blog, you indulgent little twat, and there are people floating around in New Orleans who have real worries. But please just allow me this one moment of contemplation, I haven't done it much in the past five years.

Blogging for me has never been about Blogging in the traditional sense. Some people fuss over site stats and blogroll politics and inter-blog fights and Technorati rankings and awards. For me the blog just happens to be the medium that came along that let me write the stupid stories. Ever since I was a horrible ginger child I've been compelled to write down stuff that happens and share it with people. I grew up and decided the best way to pursue that was with a journalism degree, but of course got a rude shock when I discovered you had to use facts and talk to people and not make shit up when you're a journalist. So after three miserable years of that, the only writing I did was to invent jobs for my dole form. Then one day in 2000 I found Heather Champ's site, and wondered what that little Blogger logo was at the bottom of the page. So I signed up and discovered I could write something, press a button then POW, it was out there for the world to see! It was much easier publishing process than the old days, where I would have to write words on bits of paper and ask mum to borrow the stapler so I could staple it all into a book then harrass her, "Read my book! Read my book! Please please please!". So the whole blogging thing gave me such a rush I actually shivered.

That's what blogging is about for me, the rush. Yes I have been lucky to gather some readers and that bloody Bloggie and whatnot, but very selfishly I just did it because writing gives me the horn. I love being mid-entry, when there's just bunches of random sentences all over the page and I have to figure out how to string them all together. Sometimes it's all formed perfectly in my head and I'm purely transcribing; sometimes I wrestle with it for days, even weeks. Either way, once I hit publish and the little blob of text appears, I just grin to myself and go hee hee hee hee and feel like I've smoked something really good.

By now you're thinking I'm a complete wanker, or you may be disturbed knowing that some silly little story that takes you ten seconds to read is something that leaves me wildly excited like I just saw sexy Ed from Radiohead wearing nowt but a figleaf. But I just wanted to let you know why this blog is important to me so you can understand why I am so bummed that I feel bummed about it lately.

I'm not saying I am some brilliant precious writer type, just simply I like doing it and I feel lost when I'm not. I get frustrated and cranky and hump cushions. This blog is my treasured little place to store funny stuff that happens, so I can remember it or maybe use it for something later on. Yet for the reasons described earlier, I've just let it slide and it is making me batty.

Last week I read Rebecca's Blood interview with the most excellent Dooce. This here bit (my italics) was real a smack in the chops:

"Some days I feel my website writing itself, and those days are so much easier than the days when I sit there grasping for one word or one sentence that will not come out, and I'm like, BOTH ENDS ARE STOPPED UP. I find that the more I write the easier it is to write the next time, and the longer I wait in between posts the more stopped up I become.

Thanks Doctor Heather. The solution is clear, just bloody write. I'm tired of feeling self-conscious and apathetic. I'm tired of pretending I don't care, and most of all I'm tired of editing the life out of stories or being too afraid to write them in the first place.

To start with, this blog needs a spring clean. I might find it more inviting if the house is in order. I can't keep waiting for the Fairy Blogmother to come along so I'm getting off my arse and do the geeky crap I've been putting off for years. I am tidying up the archives. I am sorting five years of images into folders instead one giant puddle. I am moving to a new server. I am upgrading my Movable Type thingy. I hope to get this all done before we leave for Oz in two weeks time, though that may be a little optismistic.

But when I get back up from Down Under, I am going to try and forget about all the people watching and just learn to enjoy this shit again.