(diaryland) January 14, 2009 - 1:45 p.m.

I'm back at work, mon.

I can't handle it. I've TRIED to pick the most interesting careers, but it's not working. I thought it would help if I did three careers at the same time but it's still not interesting. Just forty years till retirement. Can I do it? I've only just done one measly year.

Hey, anyway, I went on a holiday with Roland. We stayed at Milawa. That's a winery style town. We went to a cheese factory, went on a ghost tour in an ex-lunatic asylum where someone got a blood nose, and we went and looked at Ned Kelly stuff. We sort of tried to find ghost towns, and we went to one town that wikipedia says is a ghost town but in reality there were a bunch of houses that were clearly being lived in. It still had a really sad and lonely vibe about it, though. The town is called Eldorado. It had a huge decommissioned gold dredge lying around in a big puddle I guess it had made. A sign said that when it was on, you could hear it from 10km away.

I think that the best part of the town was the cemetery, however. Cemeteries in the middle of nowhere are different to cemeteries that are somewhere. It was down a dirt road and people were still being buried there. Some of the graves were very low-budget. They could be decorated with painted rocks and that was about all, or those letters from the hardware shop you get to stick on your letterbox. The best grave was of a guy who died in his early forties in about 2004. There were knick knacks all over it and the word "DAD" was written with little pebbles. There was one of those tiny music box things lying near the headstone and Roland turned its handle. It played a wonky version of Unchained Melody. It made me cry.

I love our holidays.