I'll give you the gist of the day. I was driving to work thinking of the events that lead me to this bustling, busy, bright lit city and also thinking how drastically different this was to what I had planned for my life. I had every stepped planned out...College on the East Coast... check, Medical School (hopefully on the West Coast).... check, Residency in Oklahoma... check....and then in my junior year of College as I trudged through the knee deep snow of Connecticut to my Biology class I thought how amazing it would be to live in a place where I did not have to envelope myself in four layers of clothing in an attempt to exit my dorm room. And that is the tiny moment that lead me to Australia on a study abroad program. Shortly after that tiny little moment I of course called my Peanut to run my master plan by her in which she decided she could not miss out on this little adventure. And so we both packed up our enormous suit cases and headed South for the winter.

Peanut has been with me through all of the pivotal moments in my life up until recently. She was there with me as a little girl as we danced to the Mary Poppins record in our green play room, we toughed it out together through those strange awkward moments of our teenage years always fighting over clothes and the bathroom, and she was with me that first night in Australia when I met my Aussie/Italian man. And now for the first time in my life she is not there in the same way that I am used to.
I realized that life really doesn't have a roadmap once you head into adulthood, it's a great unknown, and there's no way to prepare yourself for any of it. Your support systems get stripped away to the bare bones, and while they're still there they don't exist in the same way they did before. And it has nothing to do with living on the other side of the world and everything to do with Adulthood.

And right now my life is on the southern hemisphere where it is always one day ahead of the American side of the world and where driving on the left hand side of the road is a whole new wonderful adventure on its own (by the way its going to take a whole blog to get through the perils of learning how to drive on the left hand side of the road).

I still remember the day I came back to Oklahoma and told my mom I'd met an Australian who was also Italian. She said "What is an Italian doing down in Australia?" And then I turned to my dad who said "And I was worried you would marry a Yankee and move to Connecticut or New York permanently"

But even though I'm far away I can always come home to my Italian/Australian man and he can whip up a Chilli, or we can mix up some Guacamole or some biscuits and I am instantly sitting around our round old wooden table back home in Oklahoma.