Business trip to Perth

Half of my job is being a retail pharmacist at the chemist in town, the other chunk of my work life is taken up with being a hospital pharmacist.  Twice a year all of us Regional Hospital Pharmacists are flown to Perth for a meeting to discuss issues in pharmacy, policies, etc.  There are only seven of us there (WA is divided into 7 different regions) and being a smaller meeting it seems that lots can be achieved in one day! I had to chair a few of the discussion topics along with the Regional Pharmacist from Port Hedland (a predominantly mining town about 800km North of us)
Travelling on my own has never really bothered me...a good book and an iPod and I can be amused for hours. The flight from Carnarvon to Perth takes about two hours and from the Perth airport I got  taxi to my hotel in the Perth CBD.  I got in pretty late on the first night but room service and the mini-bar make it bearable!



The meeting is normally held on a Friday but this time the head offices didn't have a meeting room free for use so the meeting was held on a Wednesday.  The next flight back to Carnarvon however wasn't departing until 4pm on Thursday so I had a whole 24 hours in Perth to wile away!



The western streets of the CBD have undergone a face lift since I used to work in the area.  King St now has Gucci, Louis Vutton and a Tiffany & Co.  I am not a big fan of Tiffany's jewelery but it is a nice spot for a bit of window shopping!

Having not lived or worked in Perth now for almost ten years I can begin to enjoy it! I used to work in the mall parallel to this one in a pharmacy as an assistant.  It wasn't the best place for job satisfaction and I had to commute a 2 hour round trip each day and understandably the 'fun' of going to the city to shop was lost.  Coming back now for a quick trip a couple of times a year I really like to wander around the malls (looking like a real tourist I'm sure).  Both big department stores already had their Christmas decorations out... the older I get the more I like Christmas, the cooking required in the lead up, the decorating, the small traditions that are starting to become familiar... but more about that in a few months!

Flying out of Perth in daylight it really makes you realise what they mean by the words urban sprawl.  While the city is a pitiful collection of a dozen or so tall buildings when viewed from the air; the back to back quarter acre (and less!) blocks with homes are smashed  together for miles.  I understand that the 'suburbs' of Perth spread about 50km either direction.  Flying away always makes me happy to be getting out of there and back out into the country

Ahhh now THAT'S more like it! And that's all there is of Carnarvon.  And it suits me fine.

Home. <3

comfort food

Soooooooooo yesterday. The house is feral and needs a good clean.  The thing I'm waiting for in the post hasn't come.  Staff are sick and so we were already totaly short staffed.  And there are still so many tourists in town.  So the shop is really busy AND you have to navigate around lost tourists going slow/the wrong way on the drive to work.  Then at work before I can put my handbag down there are rapid fire questions from a couple of different doctors about uncommon medications involving complicated calculations you hope you aren't going to have to do once you are out of university. And I have not one but two students that I am teaching looking up expectantly at me....
Big deep breaths..... YOU CAN DO IT!!! (Insert picture of Jessie with superwoman cape flapping in the breeze)
So my point is - coming home from work and cooking THIS fixes everything.  I don't know how food can do that but it does.

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2008/04/simple-hearty-chicken-rice-soup-itll-keep-ya-honest/

Probably a little too much butter is used in this to classify it into the healthy dinner section (but then who ever thought the words 'healthy' and 'comfort food' could ever both be used to describe the same meal....) Certainly simple, inexpensive, soothing and falls into my favourite category - 'Bowl food'.

Oh and I didn't have yellow food colouring.... I had pink and blue but I just didn't think that would be right.

roadtrip

Mom and I drove to Geraldton last weekend.  We had such a good time! It is a four and a half hour drive down an isolated highway.  We have both done the drive so many times before but this was the FIRST TIME I have ever seen an echidna in the wild! I was so excited - I was driving and I shouted and pulled the car over and spun around to whiz back and go look at it.... unfortunately the poor guy had been made into road kill a few hours ago... But I'm still claiming that as 'seeing an echidna in the wild'. Fair enough right? Another first for that trip was a sighting of a red tailed black cockatoo - they are as big as a crow but fly with the movements of an eagle and have an intense red tail. Very cool.  On that drive it is always a given that you will see goats, pink & grey galahs, cows, roos (alive or roadkill), sometimes foxes and wild cats (usually road kill) and hopefully they stay on the side of the road... but more often than not, especially the cows decide to wander across just as you are driving by... Its best to watch their heads - if the head is down and eating grass then you are probably alright.... if the head is up and looking around your best bet is to drop your speed by half and keep a watchful eye on them..... Hitting a roo is not so bad, their main weight is at the base so they don't normally flick up and do much damage to the car, but cows are much more bulky and dangerous!
The rest of the weekend was full of shopping, eating, talking and beer drinking - all good things.

And of course we had to dress up a little to take ourselves out to dinner - beautiful salmon the first night and a lovely Italian meal on the last night. A really nice weekend away!