Australia Entry #19 - June 29th, 2025 - August 31st, 2025

Two Months Passed Already?!

Jeez! It feels like only a couple of days ago I was ready to start writing my next post, and then it turns out that it has been almost two months since I made a blog post here. While not too much exciting happened, looking back at my pictures there was a ton of little weekends here and there, and the more I looked back the more I realized, oh yeah, that’s what I did that weekend, and that the other weekend. A weekend here, and a weekend there, and oh look two months have passed! I’ve growth a little more content with not staying on the bleeding edge of new releases for video games, books, and tv shows and movies, instead choosing to spend that time with either planning some trips or just putting it to things like cooking, which I have been getting a little better at doing over the weekend ahead of the busy weeks ahead. I personally feel a little sad about just not being in the mental state after coming home from work to make progress in the video games that I am fully interested in playing from a story aspect, but just don’t have the willpower to hold the controller and play and not be in the right headspace to enjoy the game as it truly should be. Instead, I’ve seen that my time and energy these last two months pivoted to reading some more books, especially using audiobooks to be able to listen to the story progress while cooking or even just laying in bed, but not wanting to scroll through the e-book on my phone.

In the last two months I’ve read: The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway, Sabriel by Garth Nix, The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, Talking to my daughter about the economy by Yanis Varoufakis, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, and The Devils by Joe Abercrombie. Quite a list!

I’ve also watched a lot of shows and movies: Squid Game Season 3, Shutter Island, Kraven the Hunter, Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, Ironheart, The Residence, Adolescence, No Country for Old Men, Say Nothing, Common Side Effects, Eyes of Wakanda, The Count of Monte-Cristo, Flow, Mountainhead, The Eternaut, Foundation, Elio, Jurassic World: Rebirth, and How to Train Your Dragon.

Some other random things I’ve done over these last few weekends:

• Hiking in the Grampians with Nandi and going off trail and just exploring
• Seeing the Winter Firelight Festival with some large inflatable humanoids, great live music and performances
• Taking a walk in the CBD (Downtown) and checking out the Melbourne Public Library and some book and comic book stores.
• Dog sitting lovely Rippa for a full week while a coworker was out in Sydney
• Taking a train ride to see an old steam locomotive and just sit down and read out in nature
• Cooking pierogis with my coworker Matthew and hanging out playing board games
• I bought a guitar hero controller and installed Clone Hero to play some fun songs and get my fingers moving to a rhythym game I’ve always had an itch to play
• Hosting a movie night with some friends
• I went to the dentist and the doctor after a few years of not going at all because of moving to Wisconsin and then to Australia
• Planning for my trip to Poland and my trip to Japan

A Reflection on My Last Post

Last post I talked about how I needed to get better at focusing my time into the things I want to spend my time on. I’ve realized that it’s just inevitable that work will be busy, and that I am too nice to limit the amount of effort I put into it. I enjoy working with my coworkers and my customers and without a family or pet, my life is just more flexible to be the one to step up and make things easier for others. Though, I’ve realized that a few hours here and there, and the tired state I sometimes come back home feeling are hard to then get past to push myself to do more things. I find my mind competing with, “Hey you’re interested in this, what if you put some time into this”, with the realization that “If I put time into this now, I won’t actually get better in any way” unless I more rigidly create some goals. The best days in recent weeks have been when I was able to go home close to 5 PM and I knew what I wanted to do that day, even if that was just putting on a specific movie or dedicate time to reading.

Last post I also wrote about how I want to do certain things, but not having the perfect conditions to be able to do it, and looking back at it two months later, my mindset has definitely shifted. I have since stopped complaining to myself that things are more difficult to do or more expensive to do and just being honest with myself whether this is something I am interested in doing. I bought myself a new rain jacket and some hiking pants because I think I will always be interested and willing to wake up early and go for cool hikes. I also, disregarding the price, decided to book a Christmas trip to go do a bucket list hike in New Zealand and even though the price is probably higher than I would have been comfortable with paying two months ago, now I am just pushing through to have the experiences I want to have. It’s mental suicide to try to juggle optimizing every little thing, and I have been known to skimp out on certain things because of trying to optimize price, or time, or effort. I put the time and energy into planning this, so I’m happy with dialing back on the lens of looking at it from a financial perspective. As long as there is an eventual balance, I deserve to not have to keep checking for cheaper tickets or hotels to stay at.

I’m writing this blog post this week because the next couple of months are going to be busy. I’ll be flying back to Poland to see family I haven’t seen in almost 10 years in two weeks. Then October is going to heavily surrounding planning my trip to Japan and saving some money back up from this recent splurge of purchases.

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