I like where I live. I like the people I have met and am settling into step with.

Same little group of women growing stronger together in the gym way too early in the cold mornings; the old Kuarna bloke who sits outside the coffee shop every morning and tells me the best places to spot dolphins; the other jetty-walkers, rugged up, purposeful and surprisingly regular – the same people turning up within a few minutes each day. Workmates, and students, and neighbours, and I am making a couple of friends slowly.

Every so often, though, I am reminded how different this interstate move is to anything I could have imagined a couple of years ago. That anyone could have imagined.

I caught up with Andrew this morning for coffee in a cafe at work, after he flew in last night. Lovely to chitter and chatter, to try to work out when we had last caught up in person, have an idea of some of each others’ back story. Reminded me of catch-ups past…in St Kilda with cake and my little kids in tow while on a family holiday just before I started a new job, seeing some random Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows one night when I was there facilitating a library Master Class, and discovered that being from a time zone 3 hours behind gave me a superpower when it came to attending really late shows without flagging.

[ Oh Good Grief! I found this pic on Flickr, and realised that not only does Andrew know my backstory, he had even met the coat that I wore today … I think I had had it for just one day in the photo, but it was obviously a keeper]

Driving home, I realised that Andrew was the fourth person I had seen in the last six months, who I had met before December.

Two of those people live here and we caught up again since I moved. One was another interstate visitor at coffee at work. But, otherwise, the move has been a rather blunt and extreme relocation.

Even this afternoon, planes coming in to the Adelaide airport just a few hours after Andrew’s landed are full of people who will now need to quarantine. South Australia has shut its border with NSW. New Zealand has paused travel with Sydney again.

I had my eye on what looks like a wonderful GLAMR community event Lake Mac GLAM 2021 , in a few weeks, but had decided I would be too busy in the middle of Study Period to attend. In previous years my curiousity and sociability would have overruled prudence, and I know I would have ended up buying a last minute ticket and somehow shuffling things about to make it work.

But now, the risk of getting stuck somewhere and not being able to move freely stops me from even thinking about it. And I will not be fully-vaccinated by then – another consideration that really spins me out.

I get to catch up with my kids when we game together remotely each week, chat and email with people interstate I have known more than six months… but as for physically sitting with people, chatting… there is really no back story, every person I meet has not known me before I was this me, at this age, in these circumstances.

Bringing beanies back into it (because it always comes back to beanies for me in the last couple of weeks), I told somebody from “back home” that I had decided I would wear beanies until August to stay warm, and I shouldn’t get any stares or feel self-conscious, because for all anyone here knows, I have been doing this since I was five years old.

There is quite a gap to totally re-make myself, or conversely, to be truer to myself as layers of other peoples’ daily expectations have been ripped away.

Whatever it is, it certainly is a far wider and more significant gap between my new life and my old one, compared to what I would have expected, or experienced, if I did this a couple of years ago.