Days 366-372! Hey! Sorry for the week break, but after posting my every day for the past year, I definitely needed it. As of right now, weekly posts are going to stick… especially with how this week went. It was a rollercoaster of a first week of 2025 (still crazy to say)! But without spoiling anything, let’s jump into the week!

Today’s January 2nd. It’s the start of a new year but… I was still exhausted. A very late and busy work shift on New Year’s Eve into a late and busy work shift on New Year’s Day was getting to me (on top of a busy work week before that).

Thankfully today I didn’t start work until 4pm, but it was going to be another late one. I spent my morning doing something I’ve been working the past few weeks to accomplish, I finished Oathbringer! I’ve been reading this book nonstop and I finally crushed the 1200+ pages to finish the 3rd book of the Stormlight series.

I of course immediately checked to see if the library had the 4th, and it did! So I reserved it in hopes to get it ASAP! It’s currently in the Grafton library so I’ll need to wait a few days to get my hands on it.

I then made my way to another late work shift. A fun part of Yamba being a holiday town, is the holiday goers are here! So there’s a new crew of people hanging around town for a bit that I’m starting to get to know the more they come to the bar.

January 3rd rolled around and this brought with it some great news! My friend and coworker, Sam, was willing to take me down to Grafton for my long awaited checkup at the fracture clinic (Will, my usual driver, had to cover a shift for someone at his work). We had a nice hour drive to chat and listen to music. Sam and I have very similar music taste so it’s always fun sharing music with him!

He dropped me off at 10am at the clinic. I was hoping it’d be another quick in and out, but I was a way wrong. It took almost 40 minutes to get in for my X-ray! I felt bad making Sam wait so long, but I offered to buy him lunch to make up for driving me to and from today.

Eventually I got my X-ray and got to see a doctor. Again, my experience with the doctor felt rushed and a little bit with a lack of care/emotion towards the situation. But this might just be one of the flaws of the universal healthcare idea. He has so many people he has to see and is probably underpaid! Either way, he gave me GREAT news!

My fracture had fully healed!

I was told to slowly ease out of my moon boot, do some at home exercises to assist with building up the muscles in my foot and toe, and I’ll be good to go!

Sam came back and picked me up and we headed to Maclean, the town in between Grafton and Yamba, for lunch. There was a Banh Mi place Sam wanted to go to and I was of course down!

By this point in the day, I was tired and starting to not feel 100%. I think the lack of sleep was catching up to me… also a number of my coworkers were getting sick. But before we got back to Yamba, Sam needed some groceries and I did too! So we stopped at Cole’s for a few things.

Sam dropped me back at home and I put my groceries away. I only got things for breakfast and lunch… which would’ve been fine if my week went as planned. I usually don’t need to have many dinner groceries because of work.

(A little bit of foreshadowing…)

I took a nap and then decided to test out my foot without my moon boot on a walk to the library. It was time to return my monster of a book.

I was trying to decide if I was going to wear my moon boot at work or not. I had already been walking around the house without it the past couple of days leading up to the appointment. And after the walk to and from the library, I determined I was going to do the shift without it, but just take it slow!

That actually went fine and everyone was happy to see me walking on two feet. But as the shift went on, I started to feel sicker and sicker. I worked from 5pm to close and was ready to go home and go to sleep… This shift was also tough one because two people didn’t show up! One no showed and the other called in sick… so we were severely understaffed and getting pummeled by the demand for drinks.

We made it through, somehow, and as we were packing up my manager asked me to work tomorrow, which was originally a day off this week for me. I guess they were down someone again and I told him I really didn’t feel great, but I’d try.

When I woke up on Saturday January 4th, I felt like absolute sh*t. I mustered up the courage to shower and get out of bed and told myself I’d help work the lunch rush and then go home.

Thankfully, my manager was okay with this… and he was ALSO sick with the same thing. He also gave me some meds since I didn’t have any at home. So after only a couple hours of work and a little bit of misery, I went back home.

After changing, I hopped over to the local grocer and grabbed some essentials and some night time meds as well… I could already tell I was going to struggle sleeping. I had a sore throat, lots of congestion, headache, and was starting to get shivers.

It had been a while since I’d been this sick, but I snagged the essentials.

I also, lucky me, had no appetite. So I struggled down a couple pieces of toast and ended up sleeping… for pretty much the next two and a half days.

January 5th and 6th I spent rotting away in bed. I asked my manager for the days off and he gave them to me so I was able to just recover.

I slept on and off, only getting out of bed to use the bathroom and try to eat things. Thankfully I was able to get down my usual breakfast and a light lunch and dinner… but since I didn’t get anything for dinner, I was eating a whole lot of tuna. It wasn’t the most fun two days of my life.

When I couldn’t sleep I watched some tv and then eventually would fall back asleep.

The sleep paid off and when I woke up on the 7th, I was feeling sooo much better. Still not 100%, but getting there.

I had had my boot off for just under a week and I hadn’t even had a chance to get into the ocean yet! It’d been since November 25th since I’ve had a swim and I was READY! I was also hoping breathing in the ocean air and being in the salty water would help me feel better.

My friend Will had the day off, so after I finished up cleaning my bed sheets and cleaning up my room after two days of lack of effort, we went to Pippi Beach!

I was too excited to get into the water so I neglected to take a picture prior, but here’s a smile! First one in a couple days. On our way to the beach, my manager asked if I could work from 6-11pm tonight. He had been checking in every day to ask how I was doing, so he knew I was feeling better.

Since I was going to the beach, I decided I should be able to go into work too. So I said yes.

But, I was at the beach! So it was time for a swim! Will and I body surfed waves and enjoyed the ocean for a while. It was a relatively flat day on the water, which made it perfect for relaxing.

We sat on the sand for a bit too enjoying the sun and chatting before a storm decided to roll in and dampen the fun.

I went to work a few hours later and thankfully got sent home early with how slow it was. I was definitely up to work, but I was very happy to go home to get more sleep.

January 8th rolled around, marking a week into 2025! I had a couple episodes left of My Hero Academia left, so I finished it up. Another incredible anime checked off my VERY long list of shows, from my cousin Ben, that I want to watch. I also filed my (hopefully) last insurance claim for my foot!

I was kind of in a funk today though. I think a mixture of being sick a little bit still and maybe a bit of homesickness thrown into the mix too. My foot’s getting better, but I’m pretty fed up of the annoyance of it and the annoyance of being sick. I feel like not being able to make use of my time the way I had hoped or wanted to is making me question what I’m doing! Which to be honest, I still don’t have any sort of answer to or have any expectations to having any answers to.

But nonetheless, still a little annoying.

I just want to be able to enjoy this time and I’ll be able to soon! Soon enough I’ll be surfing again, running around, AND getting to hug my parents in Sydney!! I’m very very very excited about that.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I tried to kick my funk by playing my guitar for a bit, which did work! I then further made my day better by sitting and listening to music at my favorite spot in Yamba.

A storm rolled in so I made my way home, had some lunch and finished off my day with another work shift to cap off my week!

For a Wednesday night, it was a pretty hectic shift! A crazily enough, I met someone from England who went to Western Illinois University and had been to Peoria! Very rare I meet anyone with a clue what Peoria is.

It’s pretty crazy I was having days of my travel experience that I was easily able to write 2-3,000 words. But for now, I think week by week will be a better reading experience! I really enjoyed writing this too. It was a lot of fun thinking about my week, even if it was not fun and pretty frustrating. But even so, a lot of good things happened!

I was able to catch up on some obviously much needed sleep. I got to swim!! And I’m on the road to recovery.

Now it’s time to count down the days till I get to see my parents, IN PERSON!!

See you next week,

– Elie

(If you made it to the end, let me know what you think of the weekly format and if there’s anything you liked and didn’t like about it! I’ll be refining it as I go!)