Day 362! It appears summer is upon us in this lovely small town of Yamba. The tourists are here to relax and party… and the bar is welcoming them all! Today we had a super busy Sunday morning and afternoon. I’m curious to see if this stays throughout the entirety of the week OR if it’ll exclusively be for the weekend.

Countdown: 5 more days until I have my doctor’s appointment where I’ll hopefully find out that I can stop wearing the moon boot and get back to surfing! 3 more days until I’ve reached a full year of traveling!!

I went to bed at almost 2am this morning (last night?), but that didn’t mean I was going to get to sleep in. My current work schedule, pretty much every week, has been work close on Saturday and open on Sunday. Or as some of my hospitality friends from the US call it, “clopening.”

I very much like the ring of it!

I had my alarm set for 8:30am, which used to be my regular time to wake up! Once I get the green light to stop wearing my moon boot, I’ll hopefully get back into surfing in the morning.

I crawled out of bed and sleepily walked my way to take a shower. My morning shower is like most people’s morning coffee. It was effective today, but not nearly as much a I’d hoped. So I sat back on my bed and wrote my blog post for yesterday. After that, it was time to eat breakfast.

I scarfed down my regular breakfast of oats and avocado toast before lying back down in bed and opening my laptop. It was time to watch the final episode of Squid Game season 2. I finished 80% of it before it was time to head up the hill for work… I was really hoping I’d be able to finish it, but I was going to have to wait until after work to find out what happened.

I put on my work clothes and hobbled my way up the hill to the hotel. When I got into work at 11am, it was fairly quiet. I had a bit of time to start restocking the fridges, but people started showing up shortly after I started slowing down my progress. Eventually I had to stop restocking and just start pouring beers.

Thankfully, we had our new coworker helping us with the bar back responsibilities. These include, cutting limes, refilling items that have run out, getting ice, etc. Our lunch rush was pretty dang busy and it lasted all the way till the end of my shift!

For the last hour and a half, I pretty much cut limes for the night staff to have plenty on hand for their shift. I cut… a lot of limes. My guess would be a hundred or more. And they’ll still probably run out tonight, vodka lime sodas are a VERY popular drink. My finger tips were wrinkly from all the lime juice, I feel like I’ve heard it does good things for your skin… I might just be telling myself that though.

For my 30 min break, I had fish and chips while sitting in the AC of the office at the hotel. It was another piping hot day and I was very happy to be sitting in the cool air.

Eventually. 6pm rolled around and I clocked off. I ended up staying around to have a knock off beer. I chatted with a couple of the regulars outside in the shade before heading home to shower and relax.

The sun was quickly setting on my walk home and I was ready to shower and lounge in my bed. The first order of business after cleaning up, was to finish Squid Game season 2.

I thought this season was good! It obviously couldn’t live up to season 1 since the wow factor was gone. But the show did a really good job of not just being a copy of season 1. My biggest critique is that most of the season was a setup for season 3. There were a lot of underdeveloped plots and characters which made some parts of the current season not make sense.

After finishing this, I decided to forgo my nap and press on. Originally, I was hoping to go back up the hill to have some drinks with friends, since today is technically the start of my small weekend. But my friends were all busy, so I started watching more tv shows.

I watched the latest episodes of MrBeasts new game show, Beast Game. I may not be the biggest MrBeast fan anymore, but it’s incredible seeing a content creator come out with his own GINORMOUS reality game show. It’s a big win for the creator economy.

I then watched the latest episodes of Bleach (an anime I’ve been watching for quite some time now) and I watched a couple more episodes of My Hero Academia.

By this point, I was exhausted and ready for bed! I’m not sure what I’ll get up to tomorrow, but I have to assume reading outside and potentially a beach will be involved! Hopefully some of my friends will be around to hang out too!

– Elie