Weeks 86, 87 & 88: Parties and Starting Work

It seems like such a long time ago now, but in week 86 I got a job offer, the job was to do sand-blasting and painting. When I actually arrived there I found out the wages weren’t very good, and when the manager left me alone with some of the other workers, they told me that it was a terrible place to work. So I made some excuses and left. The rest of that week I applied for other jobs online. But that weekend was the birthday celebration of one of my house mates, his name is Tom, he is English and together with a few other people we went to camp at the beach and drive through the sand dunes in 4x4s. One of those days, we were walking along the beach when I noticed a huge bundle of ropes at the edge of the water. After closer inspection I found it was a huge net, like a cargo net, so I rolled it up and brought it home.

I spent most of week 87 applying for more jobs, but luckily one of my other housemates, Simon from Germany, told me that a friend of his was looking for someone to help her clear out her garage. So me and another housemate, Philip who is also German, went to the house and started clearing stuff out for her. While we were there I mentioned that I do IT work, so she asked me to look at her computer and help her with her websites. So I managed to earn some cash, I am actually still working weekends with her at the moment. Towards the end of the week I decided to walk through the city with CVs and hand them out to as many places as I could. One of those places was an IT job agency, that night they emailed me to suggest some changes I should make to my CV, I made them and they got back to me on Saturday, asking me to come in on Monday to talk through the different jobs they had available.

Over the weekend we had a huge party at the house, our place is great for parties. We have 5 sofas out in the back yard with a tarp stretched out above them to keep the sun off, plus we now have the net, which I found on the beach, tied up between two trees like a huge hammock. We managed to fit nine people in the net at one point late on Saturday night… Then on Sunday I got stung in the eye by one of our bees. There is a punching bag hung in one of the trees, this had become home to a bee hive, most of the time this was just a nice thing to have in the garden, but recently they have been stinging people. The sting to my eye was the forth bee sting I had got in the last 2 weeks.

Now we get to this last week, it started out with my visit to the job agency. I spoke to them for around 15 minutes before they said that they were putting me forward for a government contract, upgrading all the Department of Water offices from Windows XP to Windows 7, for just over 17 pounds per hour. My interview was later that day and my eye was starting to swell, I wasn’t sure that the interview had gone all that well, I am a little out of practice, but I decided not to worry about it too much. The next day I woke up and my eye had swollen shut, this wasn’t a huge problem as I had nothing to do, but I decided to go into town and register with Medicare, the Australian health service, being from the UK I get 12 months free cover from Medicare. That same day I got a call to let me know that I had got the government job and they wanted me to start on Wednesday (the next day). The job is great and I am finally earning money, which means that over the next few weeks I will be able to get my camera fixed, buy a kindle, a new mobile phone and a Mac book Pro. At the moment the work is in Perth, but over the next few weeks I will be moving all around Western Australia to the other Department of Water offices, upgrading their computers too.

I also managed to get some work writing about some of my travel experiences, I submitted around a thousand words at the end of the week and they will pay me a hundred pounds for it. The have already asked me to write more for them, next time I will earn a hundred and fifty pounds. The money is nice, but I am looking at it more like a chance to develop my writing so that my books will be better, when I actually get around to working on them, hopefully I can do that once I get this new laptop.