Being quite serious for a brief time, which is no effort, I'm happy to be leaving my current employer, and to be leaving Cairns. I've been 3 and 1/2 years with my employer, which, for me, is a reasonable enough time to do one particular thing well enough, and this time leaving without creating too much destructive trouble for the status quo. Long may they quo, as is their wont. I've been in Cairns, apart from about 8 years in Asia, for the last 25 years, or maybe more, and it has been...what can I say....very hot and tropical. My fondest memories of Cairns are when I was asleep once sitting naked in a deck chair in the shallow sea just north of Buchan's Point...asleep for 8 hours in that chair and in that shallow warm salty Coral Sea as the tides changed back and forth, and turned all around me. Blissful indolence and sensory perfection within the soft murmur of the Great Sea. You can only have that once, I think, and that was years ago. So I believe it is a good time to go from here... in this getting-near hottest wettest time of the Tropical Doldrum months, with cyclones yet to come. Yeecch! Cyclones are okay, really, but if you depend on them for entertainment of the mind and heart, then they are far too few and far between. And then to arrive in Old Melbourne Town in it's hottest dry time, as unforeseen bushfires grip the rim of the city as they do every unforeseen and unprepared year...and then to gradual equip for the first cold winter I will have experienced in 30 years. Street noise, trams, 4 million people...what the fuck? I have had enough joy and sadness in Cairns to fill me up equally...and now it is just too fucking hot. So, happy to have been here, and equally happy to go...the life before going, so full of wonder, of babies, of children, of families, of creativity, and of despair, and then creativity again, and then, family again. We have the apartment here, but somehow, I doubt we will be back. Maybe one day for a tropical holiday, in 30 or 40 years time. Til then, we welcome your visits to us in the Great South of this ancient yet still unmade undefined country for some reason still called Australia...whatever that was. In the Human Heart and Mind, we are tricked for awhile for it is not really the seasons that change at all, it is the Meaning that is always changing. In this way we are all travellers in one way or another.

Being quite serious for a brief time, which is no effort, I'm happy to be leaving my current employer, and to be leaving Cairns. 
I've been 3 and 1/2 years with my employer, which, for me, is a reasonable enough time to do one particular thing well enough, and this time leaving without creating too much destructive trouble for the status quo. Long may they quo, as is their wont. 
I've been in Cairns, apart from about 8 years in Asia, for the last 25 years, or maybe more, and it has been...what can I say....very hot and tropical.
My fondest memories of Cairns are when I was asleep once sitting naked in a deck chair in the shallow sea just north of Buchan's Point...asleep for 8 hours in that chair and in that shallow warm salty Coral Sea as the tides changed back and forth, and turned all around me. Blissful indolence and sensory perfection within the soft murmur of the Great Sea. You can only have that once, I think, and that was years ago.
So I believe it is a good time to go from here... in this getting-near hottest wettest time of the Tropical Doldrum months, with cyclones yet to come. Yeecch! Cyclones are okay, really, but if you depend on them for entertainment of the mind and heart, then they are far too few and far between.
And then to arrive in Old Melbourne Town in it's hottest dry time, as unforeseen bushfires grip the rim of the city as they do every unforeseen and unprepared year...and then to gradual equip for the first cold winter I will have experienced in 30 years. Street noise, trams, 4 million people...what the fuck?
I have had enough joy and sadness in Cairns to fill me up equally...and now it is just too fucking hot.
So, happy to have been here, and equally happy to go...the life before going, so full of wonder, of babies, of children, of families, of creativity, and of despair, and then creativity again, and then, family again. We have the apartment here, but somehow, I doubt we will be back.
Maybe one day for a tropical holiday, in 30 or 40 years time. Til then, we welcome your visits to us in the Great South of this ancient yet still unmade undefined country for some reason still called Australia...whatever that was.
In the Human Heart and Mind, we are tricked for awhile for it is not really the seasons that change at all, it is the Meaning that is always changing. In this way we are all travellers in one way or another.