Day one at View Street

I'm always prepared. And I'm always on time. I'm very highly strung. My good friend Josh is none of the above.
I woke at 6am and put away Chris' dishes accumulated from another productive night of baking. In a bowl I mixed together some olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. Then I grated in two carrots and spooned the resulting salad mix into an empty Nutella jar. In our walk-in-pantry, as I was filling up a small pot with nuts and sultanas, an almond escaped and it took a minutes to found it among my housemates bags and open packets of food which for some reason are strewn across the floor and not on the shelves. Then porridge for brekky with chia seeds, honey and cinnamon and an anti-inflammatory tablet. I checked Facebook for updates on Writers in Action. I checked LMS which finally showed WIA in my subject list, so I read all the news and comments from earlier in the week. I'd had a shower last night and packed my bag so that I'd have more time this morning. So you might be getting the idea of how organised I am.
At 9am I called Josh who said that he was on the train from Castlemaine, just passed Kangaroo Flat, and would be at my house soon. Good, then we would walk to Ulumbarra Theater together and make it there hopefully before class at 10am to play some hacky sack- spot the outdoor edder..
Josh turned up at 9:30am, my bag was over my shoulder, my foot out the door. He dumped his bag on the living room floor and started to unpack his sleepingbag and the other essentials that he would need while he stayed at my house for the next 5 days.
"We should get going" I said.
"I've just got to go to the toilet quickly."
6 minutes later Josh exited the toilet.
"We've got to be there in 20 minutes, we should leave" I coaxed.
Josh noticed my pouch of tobacco on the table and alerted me of this.
"I don't smoke during the day" I said, standing half inside and half out.
"Do you mind if I do?"
I said "that's fine", but I wanted to leave five minutes ago.
"Do you mind if I take one of yours?'
I looked at the time on my phone. I said that I don't. So he rolled one. And with 15 minutes to get there we headed out the door.
On foot we made our way to Ulumbarra  Theatre while I told him a witty story about the most recent prospective new housemate that Chris and I had met with.
Google maps on my phone told me that we had arrived, but because of construction work obstructing our mission, we blundered around the old Victorian building and through its' cafe, wasting precious minutes, before asking for directions to the theater which was concealed somewhere within the confusion of architecture. We made it in the nick of time, just to be told that we were in the wrong place, and that we should actually be at the Visual Arts Centre.
15 minutes later, we walked into the classroom, sneaking passed the intently listening students to the dark seats left at the back of the room.

When I decided to do this class (Writers in Action), it was because I was injured, again, and could not participate in 2nd year White Water. In case you are wondering what on earth I am talking about, I am enrolled in the coolest Bachelor in the world; Outdoor Education. This left me with a total of two subjects which is not considered full-time study by Centerlink resulting in the discontinuation of my darling Austudy payments. Luckily, Sandra Wardle (you know of her if you're a La Trobe Uni student) sent around an email advertising the Writers in Action class that runs for 5 days. I mean, this could possibly have been the easiest way to accumulate a third subject, right? And, I've always wanted to be a published writer, well that as well as a detective, a veterinarian, an anthropologist, an archeologist, a horse whisperer and a vampire slayer. So I think we can safely say that fiction is a viable avenue of literature I could pursue. Our teacher Sue armed us with festival programs, timetables, assessment tasks, social media expertise (she started Twittering 10 minutes ago), and ideas for how to approach the festival including this research assignment titled 'What makes a writers festival?' I will admit, I'm drawing a blank for the research assignment, but I'm so excited about the program for the upcoming days.

Classes were over at 5pm. Josh and I had decided not to attend the welcome dinner where we could have met the children's' authors because it cost $45 and we're broke-ass uni students. Instead, we attended the free Fringe Festival Launch in the town library. The Fringe Festival will be running coincide the Bendigo Writers Festival, and at the launch the mayor talked about Bendigo being Indigenous Country, about the new Mosque, the gold mining history and this exhibitions displays from new and upcoming poets and artists. I really enjoyed some of the poems, and what was equally as awesome was the free finger food and wine. While I read all the poems and looked at all the pictures, Josh sought out the artists themselves and conducted interviews with them for his research assignment. I had still not come up with any ideas for my own assignment, so I poured another glass of wine and called Ariel to tell him that Chris and I had decided that he could be our new housemate if he wanted to, and he did.

We stopped by the bottolo on the way home. I made a beeline for the $3.50 cleanskins and picked up a bottle. Josh did too.
"Don't you think one bottle will be enough" I asked.
Josh didn't think that one bottle would be enough, so we bought two and went home to start blogging about our day. At home we sat outside and drank wine, smoked cigarettes and talked, often about how in a minute we'd go inside and start blogging. Chris got home from work and was so happy to see Josh that he hugged him. Then he offered us slices of pizza.
"There's a cat" Chris pointed to the back of the garden.
It was the orange cat that is always yowling for Angie-the-cat's attention. Sadly, Angie will be moving out soon, so a few days ago I thought it would be a good idea to befriend this orange cat so that I'd have someone to pat once she's gone. I'd coaxed the cat into the house. He had walked in confidently, headed to the kitchen where Angie was having her breakfast, and pissed on the wall.
"There's this character Syrio from Game of Thrones who trained to be fast by chasing cats" Chris told us.
"So sometimes, when I'm delivering pizzas and I see a cat, I'll chase it."
"WHAT?"
"But I never catch them because they go down drains and it's annoying. One time this drunk guy came out of his house and he thought that I'd come out of his garage and he said; 'hey, what are you doing in my garage?' And I said: 'I wasn't in your garage, I was just chasing a cat man.'"
And I knew that I should have started writing about Chris as soon as I met him, he's a goldmine.
"Do you know what kimchi is?" Chris asked Josh.

On Friday morning I woke up at 6am, tired, hungover and with a sore throat. I left Chris' pile of dishes in the drying rack and made my lunch. In the pantry an almond escaped as I filled up the little pot. I didn't bother to look for it. When I opened the fridge the fermented smell of pickled cabbage assaulted my nostrils and I dry retched. I ate bacon for breakfast.