Honest reflections on becoming who I am today. Stories about transitioning from nomadic life to raising my daughter in Australia, lessons learned from volunteering and cultural immersion, and the ongoing journey of building roots after years of wandering.
Sometimes I feel caught between being an AI engineer and a gardener. A champion for sustainability. An artist who values what is made by hand. And then — for 40 (or let’s be real, more) hours a week — I am a software engineer.
And yet… here we are.
More and more, I’ve started to see myself not as divided, but as a bridge. A translator between two worlds. Someone fluent in both languages.
I’m the kind of person who automates seed sowing and handwrites software architecture.
Who raises a little girl among sage, nasturtium, and yarrow; teaching her to pattern-match leaves and stamens, to mix potions and ferment small treasures in glass jars; while I build systems that pattern-match embeddings and navigate vector databases.
At first, this duality felt new.
But when I look closer, I’ve always been this person.
Someone who treasures naturopathy and herbal remedies, yet deeply respects modern medicine. Who has studied emergency care with one hand, and sought out acupuncture, ecstatic dance, and meditation with the other.
I engineer software. I write stories. I plant seeds — both literally and metaphorically.
I could sit in a Silicon Valley boardroom just as easily as I could disappear into a rural commune.
I believe AI can transform our lives and support our work… all of it.
But I also believe we must tread carefully, so it never replaces our spark. We can’t allow it to overwrite our creativity.
So this is how I try to walk the line.
I use AI as a collaborator, not a substitute. A thought partner, not a ghostwriter of my life.
I still plant things from seed. I still write in notebooks. I still let boredom exist long enough for imagination to wake up.
I want my daughter to grow up fluent in both ecosystems — the biological and the digital — and to know that neither should consume the other.
I don’t think the future belongs to the people who choose one side.
I think it belongs to the translators. The bridge-builders. The ones who can sit with both a seedling and a neural net and see continuity instead of contradiction.
We’re going to need technologists who understand soil. Artists who understand systems. Parents who teach their children both how to grow food and how to question algorithms.
Maybe you’re a bridge too.
Maybe you code all day and knit at night. Or work in finance but dream in poetry. Maybe you’ve felt the same pressure to choose a lane.
You don’t have to.
The future needs people who can hold more than one world at once.
I was washing dishes last night, tuning out the day to a podcast while I scrubbed and loaded up the dishwasher. Joe Hudson’s voice through my headphones as part of my Connection Course homework. He was talking about wonder, not as some abstract concept, but as a way of being that I’ve carried my whole life without ever really examining it.
“Wonder is like curiosity without looking for an answer,” he said. “When you’re looking for an answer, you can just feel in your system that your system constricts a little bit. But if you’re just like, ‘Oh my gosh, what is happening here?’ and there’s no pressure to find an answer… the physical state remains expansive.“
This was something I knew intimately but had never called out or thought about specifically.
I’ve always admired children’s sense of wonder, and ever since becoming a mother, I’ve wanted to be someone who engages Emily’s sense of wonder rather than getting frustrated when she asks endless “whys.” I love to understand things, ask questions about everything (I think this is my natural curiosity and wonder coming through).
Wonder doesn’t require an answer. You can just wonder about what something is or why or how, without needing the answer. In our Google-driven world, answers are easy to find. The wondering itself is what matters.
Joe also talked about how wonder with a motive can feel creepy, and that got me thinking about something I’d never connected before. Sometimes when people ask me lots of questions, it feels exciting, like they genuinely want to know me. But other times, the exact same behaviour feels invasive or prodding. The difference, I realised, isn’t in the questions themselves but in the quality of curiosity behind them.
Authentic wonder is like genuine enthusiasm in presentations. It comes across as real because it is real. Someone giving a presentation about something they don’t care about has a lot of parallels to somebody asking questions when they’re not actually in wonder, but instead have a goal they’re trying to reach. This connects to something I wrote about before, the infectious enthusiasm of those chocolate frog professors who genuinely care about their subject matter. If you’re really in wonder, that comes across as genuine. It’s the difference between curiosity that seeks connection and questioning that serves an agenda.
I know exactly where wonder lives most naturally in my life. When I watch Emily discover the world, the way she stops to examine every interesting rock, how her eyes light up when she spots a magpie in the garden, I’m reminded of what unguarded curiosity looks like. She doesn’t need answers to everything. She’s content to point and marvel.
The garden brings the same quality. Spending time with plants, whether it’s planning companion plantings or just watching the way morning light hits the leaves, it’s impossible not to feel wonder at the natural world. There’s no performance pressure there. Emily doesn’t need me to be an expert on entomology when I point out an interesting insect. The plants don’t evaluate my credentials, they just respond to attention and care.
These spaces feel safe for wondering because they’re genuinely reciprocal relationships. I learn from Emily as much as I share with her. The garden teaches me as much as I tend to it.
But something different happens when I try to bring that same wonder into my technical work. I start out beautifully. New technology, workflows, and tools light me up. I get really into thinking about how they could be used, what they’re similar to or different from, how they might work in unexpected ways. That’s pure wonder in action.
But then I almost always shift quickly from wonder into answer-finding mode. And then, here’s the strange part, I stall when it comes to sharing my discoveries with others.
I think there’s a perfect storm happening here. First, perfectionism kicks in: “This insight isn’t complete enough yet.” Then imposter syndrome: “Who am I to share this discovery?” Then the cultural programming I grew up with, that tall poppy syndrome reminder not to stand out or claim too much expertise.
The AI field makes this worse. There’s pressure to constantly consume and adopt, to have hot takes on every new framework, to keep up with a pace that’s frankly exhausting. It’s like trying to observe fireflies while someone keeps shining a flashlight and demanding I categorise each species immediately.
Sometimes I feel frustrated at how quickly the industry moves. It requires too much constant adoption to pause and be in genuine exploration. The wonder gets squeezed out by urgency.
If I’m honest, some of this pressure is self-imposed. My ADHD brain wants to chase every shiny new development in AI. I find myself trying to follow the industry’s pace rather than my natural exploration rhythm, the same rhythm that creates my best insights when I give it space.
What if the real constraint isn’t time for wondering, but permission to wonder at my own pace? What if instead of trying to blog about every new AI development, I could be the one who finds unexpected connections by sitting with fewer things longer?
But then reality hits. I’m giving two presentations on MCP architecture in eight weeks. I can’t slow down, I need to move forward with it. The timeline is set, and I need to deepen my expertise quickly enough to deliver credible talks.
Here’s where something shifted for me. What if this deadline could actually work with my wonder patterns rather than against them?
Instead of “I must become even more of an expert, fast enough not to embarrass myself,” what if it becomes “I get to explore this fascinating technology deeply and share what I discover along the way”? The same intensive timeline, but reframed as an exploration opportunity rather than a performance demand.
The presentations become a vehicle for sharing my exploration rather than a test of my expertise. Audiences connect more with someone sharing their genuine curiosity than someone trying to prove they know everything. And honestly, approaching it with wonder rather than expertise anxiety will probably make for much better presentations anyway.
There’s something Joe said in the podcast that keeps coming back to me. He talked about being “in the question” for ten years, not trying to answer it, but living in it. “What am I?” was his question, and every answer he came up with was just based on some context. The power wasn’t in finding the answer; it was in being in the question.
I think about this when I’m in the garden with Emily, watching her examine a snail shell. She’s not trying to solve the mystery of the snail. She’s content to exist in the wondering with it. There’s something to learn from that, about allowing curiosity to be enough, about not rushing to conclusions or solutions.
Maybe living in wonderment isn’t about having more time for pure exploration. Maybe it’s about bringing that garden-quality attention to whatever constraints I’m already working within. Even with presentation deadlines and industry pressures, I can choose curiosity over performance anxiety.
The real practice isn’t carving out separate time for wondering, but protecting that quality of attention wherever it wants to emerge. Following the trail of genuine fascination rather than the urgency of trending topics. Letting myself be genuinely curious about MCP architecture because it’s interesting, not because I need to position myself as an expert.
In the end, wonder might be less about changing what I do and more about remembering why I started doing it in the first place. That spark of “I wonder how this works?” that drew me to coding, to AI, to building things that didn’t exist before.
Emily points at butterflies not because she needs to catalogue them, but because they’re beautiful and surprising. The garden grows not because I’ve mastered botany, but because I pay attention to what each plant needs.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe wonder isn’t something to optimise or systematise, but something to protect and follow wherever it leads, even if that happens to be toward a conference stage, sharing discoveries that are still unfolding.
I remember nothing from that biology class at Otago University eighteen years ago – not the curriculum, not my classmates, not even what grade I got. But I remember his frogs.
There was this professor who would hand out chocolate frogs when we answered bonus questions correctly. He’d share a frog fact of the day during breaks, and his face would light up talking about the incredible healing compounds found in various frog venoms and skin secretions. The potential locked away in these tiny creatures to cure human diseases, to solve problems we hadn’t even discovered yet.
I was 21, studying Health Sciences, and I remember being absolutely captivated – not by biology particularly, but by how much he cared about frogs. His enthusiasm was infectious, ringing out through one of those big old 1970s Archway lecture theatres. Students would lean forward despite themselves when he started talking about his research trips to South America, and into the Amazon rainforest.
Recently, I was preparing for an upcoming speaking engagement, feeling nervous about how to share technical concepts effectively. Someone recommended I watch Damian Conway’s talk on instantly better presentations. I clicked play, coffee in hand, hoping for some practical tips.
“Seeing someone excited, is exciting.”
He went on to talk about David Attenborough being the best technical presenter in the world (in his opinion) – not because of perfect delivery or comprehensive knowledge, but because you can see his passion for the natural world in everything he does, everything he says. He really, really cares.
And suddenly, I was back in that lecture hall at Otago University. That professor whose name I couldn’t even remember.
Watching Damian’s video, I realised what had made that class so memorable wasn’t the subject matter at all – it was witnessing someone who genuinely, deeply loved what they were sharing.
This reminded me of an instructor training course I took many years ago now. I had to deliver a short talk on anything, so I chose neuroscience and talked about alien hand syndrome – this fascinating condition where one hand acts independently of conscious control. I thought it was so incredibly interesting, and had recently been absorbed into The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. People in my class told me for years afterward how much they’d enjoyed that presentation.
There was something about the intersection of complex technical topics and authentic enthusiasm that kept showing up in my life. And as someone with ADHD who struggles to work on or focus on things I don’t find genuinely interesting, I’d been seeing this need as a constraint I had to work around.
But I began to see it differently – as a superpower I should be leaning into more intentionally.
Curious about that long-ago frog professor, I did some research. His name was Phil Bishop – Professor Phil Bishop from the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago.
Phil began his frog fascination very young and devoted over 30 years of his career to studying them in depth. He made amazing discoveries – including that New Zealand frogs communicate chemically – and authored over 80 scientific papers. He was integral to the native frog recovery plan, a compelling communicator who earned national recognition for his teaching and outreach.
And here I am, eighteen years later, still carrying something he planted in that lecture hall. Not facts about amphibians, but something much more valuable – the understanding that genuine passion is what makes knowledge come alive.
When Damian Conway praised David Attenborough, he was describing exactly what Professor Bishop had: that rare ability to make others care about something through the sheer force of your own caring. Whether it’s frogs or the natural world or frontend development tools – you have to find a way to be excited, moved, enthralled by what you’re sharing.
I think about other speakers and writers I admire most deeply, and the pattern holds. It’s never about perfect delivery or comprehensive expertise. It’s about authentic enthusiasm for ideas that matter to them.
As I prepare for an upcoming speaking engagement, I’m no longer thinking about becoming an expert in something new or delivering dry technical content. Instead, I’m thinking about sharing what genuinely excites me most. I’m thinking about how to tell that story with the same infectious care that made chocolate frogs memorable in a lecture hall two decades ago.
Professor Bishop taught me something I didn’t realise I was learning: that genuine passion isn’t something to manage or work around, but the very thing that makes technical communication powerful and lasting. He probably never knew that his chocolate frogs would still be working their magic eighteen years later, inspiring someone in a completely different industry to approach technical presentations differently.
A storm, a lightning strike, an earthquake, and a dying father’s prophecy (yes, really!). This is the story of how grief, adventure, and a bit of fate carried me from a nomadic life to a role at Automattic, where I’ve spent almost eight years helping build and contribute to WordPress (and WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce and other Automattic products). Now, as Automattic celebrates its 20th birthday, I’ve been reflecting on that wild, beautiful path; and how it all somehow led me exactly where I was meant to be.
I’m a little late to the party writing this reflection on Automattic’s 20th anniversary. Not because I forgot, or because I don’t care, but because I’ve been sitting with how to piece together a story that feels both impossible and inevitable at the same time.
Almost eight years ago now, I was standing soaked to the bone in a hotel room in Oaxaca, Mexico, hanging wet clothes everywhere after lightning had literally struck in front of us during a massive storm. Hours later, an 8+ magnitude earthquake would shake the city. The next morning, I’d stuff my suitcase with damp, gross laundry and board the first of two overnight flights to Whistler, Canada, to start a job I was still convinced was too good to be true.
But let me back up.
The Prophecy
My father was a computing lecturer who did some contract software development on the side. He was the kind of dad who taught his daughter QBasic in the early 90s, when most kids didn’t even have home computers, let alone girls learning to code. We did logic puzzles together. He loaned me programming books as I grew up. We talked about code the way other families talked about sports.
I learned PHP in my teens and had hobby projects scattered everywhere, including local bbPress installs and eventually WordPress once it became a thing. (Fun fact: WordPress’s birthday, May 27th, is also my birthday – just a different year. Some signs are more obvious than others.)
But life took me in different directions. I became a chef, tried medical school, worked as a bartender, became a flight attendant. For years, I nomaded around the world, freelancing – writing, attempting graphic design (definitely not my thing!), building WordPress sites, and fixing WordPress problems. My dad had always thought I’d come back to computing eventually.
During the early days of those nomadic years, my father got cancer. I thought we had five years together, so I returned to New Zealand to spend whatever time he had left with him. Dad connected me with people who needed WordPress consulting work – fixing plugins, designing custom themes, the whole spectrum. He was building a bridge for me back to the world he’d always believed I belonged in.
Dad didn’t live five years. He didn’t even live two months past when I got back. Devastating for me.
Near the end, I told him maybe I should settle down and get a proper job. “How about a travel agent?” I suggested. “I’ve seen the world, my geography is excellent, I was a flight attendant – I know airports and airlines.”
He looked at me and said no, I would be so bored in an office. I would hate it. Don’t give up, he told me. He thought my future was WordPress. Not development, not computers, not even PHP specifically. WordPress. He didn’t know why, but he had a feeling.
The Journey
After Dad died, I had enough inheritance not to work for a while. Once we sorted his affairs, I set off across Asia by train – honoring his two greatest passions: trains and Asian travel. I started in Singapore and wound through Malaysia, Thailand, China, and Mongolia, then flew to Albania and traveled up through the Balkans to France. I blogged about the journey. Sometimes I wondered what I might do next, but there was no pressure. The money was holding out, and I was processing grief in motion.
Then, in some Facebook freelancers group, a job posting appeared.
It wasn’t just any job. It was THE WordPress job. At Automattic. The company behind WordPress.com, the very platform that had been part of my life for years. And the requirements? Customer support, but technical. People person, but code. WordPress experience. Remote work welcome.
It felt like a message from Dad.
The Impossible Interview
I applied, terrified and convinced it was too good to be true. Imposter syndrome was screaming in my ears, but in hindsight, I was such a perfect fit.
The entire interview process was conducted via text – no voice or video calls. I was impressed by this intentional approach to avoid bias based on how someone looks or speaks. Then came the trial: a month-long process that started with over 50 people and worked like Survivor, with eliminations each week until around 20 of us got hired.
The Grand Entrance
In 2017, Automattic’s Grand Meetup was in Whistler, Canada. It also happened to be my first day of work. And it came exactly one week after I had moved to Mexico.
The timing was absurd. I’d been in Oaxaca City less than a week. At Cancun airport, I’d gotten scammed by the taxi mafia (that’s a whole other blog post). I frantically searched for a six-month rental while staying in a hotel, finally found the perfect place, and signed the lease. As I left the apartment, that massive storm broke. Lightning struck directly in front of me. Water rushed rapids down the roads waist-high. I reached the hotel completely soaked.
That night: the earthquake. Coming from Christchurch, which had its own devastating earthquake, I had serious PTSD. The ground shaking in a foreign country, in a job that still felt like a dream, pushed every anxiety button I had.
The next morning, I stuffed wet laundry into my suitcase and began the long journey to Canada to start a job I was still half-convinced was fake.
All new hires had to give a flash talk at the Grand Meetup. I wrote mine on the plane, about the incredible journey that had brought me there – including the overland Asia trip after Dad’s death, the inheritance that gave me freedom, the Facebook post that felt like destiny. It’s been almost eight years since that day, and I can still feel the electricity of that moment.
In fact, with a little light digging, I was even able to find the recording of that very talk:
The Work
I started as a WordPress.com Happiness Engineer, which sounds like typical customer support but is so much more. It’s technical support with real responsibility – working in GitHub, debugging, writing CSS and JavaScript. In 2021, I transitioned to Code Wrangler, where I’ve been ever since.
The nomadic lifestyle continued for years. I worked from a jungle house in Costa Rica, poolside in Nicaragua, all over Mexico from coast to coast and mountains in between, Portugal, back home in New Zealand during COVID. Forty-two countries in total, many of them while at Automattic.
Since meeting my Mexican partner and having a baby born in Mexico, we’ve settled in Australia where I bought a house and work from my home office. But those years of nomading while building code that powers WordPress sites around the world? That was living the dream in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
The Circle
Now I contribute directly to the ecosystem of a product that has been important to me for so long. When I attend events and tell people I work for Automattic, that I write code that helps power WordPress, I feel a pride that connects back to those early days learning QBasic with my dad.
He would be so proud. I’m absolutely sure of it.
There’s something beautiful about working for a company that believes in the democratisation of publishing, in giving everyone a voice on the web. Dad believed in me when not many girls were learning to code. Automattic believes in potential in all its forms – remote workers, nomads, people with unconventional paths.
Twenty Years
Happy 20th birthday to Automattic. Thank you for building something that honors the web as a place where everyone belongs. Thank you for taking a chance on a nomadic WordPress consultant who saw a job posting that felt like a message from beyond. Thank you for almost eight years of growth, adventure, challenge, and the deep satisfaction of contributing to something bigger than myself.
And Dad? You were right. My future was WordPress. I just had to trust the signs along the way.
I originally wrote this three years ago on the anniversary of my father’s 67th birthday. Today would be his 70th, so I’ve decided now is a fine time to move it off facebook and onto my blog instead. So, here we go:
It feels stilted and uncomfortable to try and celebrate the fact you were born, when I’m still grappling with the idea that you ever left
I’ve thought through the morning how to rustle through the grief for a thread of celebration, to put aside the two missed birthdays behind us and instead focus on the time that you were here before that. Focusing on the idea that celebrating somebodies life and birth need not require their presence.
For your birthday I cannot get you gifts or take you for dinner, even though I have since discovered surely no less than five thousand new places I think you’d love to go.
We can’t go away together on a trip, and you have no pockets to hold your passport.
I can’t cook for you any longer, but I can spend my life scouring the tiny corners of the planet for the kinds of foods you would love to try.
I can only bring you with me in memory for the railway journeys and street food excursions, the adventures in mistranslation and the most bizarre of travel stories I know that you, and only you, would appreciate. I can carry you with me in my thoughts, and more importantly through my words and in my stories, and for that experience I am grateful.
I think you’d be happy this year. Happy for our annual birthday check-in – where we talk about our lives and our goals, where we’ve been and where we are going in this crazy life. I’d get to tell you all about the life I’m living, you’d listen with great interest as I told you about how I finally visited the Amazon. You’d immediately ask if I saw any Anacondas, and tell me some hilariously inappropriate story about lost adventurers being eaten alive, knowing full well it would do nothing but fuel my sense of adventure.
We’d talk about my job, and how incredible it is that everything you taught me, all you encouraged me in from the moment I could use a keyboard had brought me to where I am. I’m living my dreams, I’d say. I have a great life and a wonderful job, I make good choices in my life and relationships and I know how to stand on my own two feet.
You’d be so proud.
What are you reading today? you’d ask.. scoping me out for new book recommendations as you made a large handful of your own. Exchanging books became a bit of a birthday tradition, didn’t it? I’ve read so many of your books since we last spoke. I’ve kept them all and as I make my way through page-by-page I take tiny pieces of you from every character I meet. I don’t keep things, I don’t own stuff, but I kept every single one of your books.
If it were your birthday today, in person and for real, I would be looking forward to hearing about the latest addition to your miniature railroad. That land that exists as a magical other world spilling out from your spare bedroom. I’d await eagerly the latest news of the tiny locomotive making its way in a missing package from Germany, we’d joke about the world tour it was taking as we spied on the tracking number in anticipation of its arrival. Prodding you to let it expand and take over your house, tiny tracks making trails across all the walls and out into the world.
But instead, you’re not here.
And for your birthday I’m left with a million happy memories and a series of questions. Where will I next find your memory? I find you in the strangest of places – I find you in the comforting clack-clacking of late night rail journeys, and I meet you again in every geranium, I remember you in anteaters and in thistles, Thai food and mistranslated English signs. I find you in Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux, Paulo Coelho. I find you when I finally discover where the missing semicolon was hiding amongst ten thousand lines of code and I laugh, I laugh out of frustration and relief and because I remember how it would make you laugh just the same.
I find you when I look at the person I’ve become, the jokes that I find funny and the ways I’ve grown to see the world. It’s in all these places that I find you that I get to celebrate your birthday. Happy birthday. Thank you for never quite leaving me, and for all the places you turn up.
Two years ago today my father died. I hope today by focusing my thoughts away from grief and loss and instead into sharing gratitude and love with the world around me I can shine some happiness into an otherwise difficult day I’m grateful for … inheriting your sense of adventure and braveness for visiting places for their culture and people, not tourist sites for encouraging me always to pursue what I’m interested in passionate about and not letting me settle for less than that for being my source of unwavering rational advice and practical solutions, peacekeeper and careers advisor.. over and over and over again for having me, rent free in your home all the times I chose paths of volunteering, or when I was simply just lost in life for a brief moment fish and chip Fridays your amazing model trainsets your wonderful sense of humour for keeping your shelves always stocked with new books for me to devour for a childhood worth of weekend swimming pool & hydroslide adventures for introducing me to Thai food and my first ever green curry sparking a lifelong obsession for all the quiet nights in watching trivia gameshows on the tv with you for always telling me how proud you were, even when the choices I made probably terrified you for teaching me how to use a computer from when I was about as small as the picture here, and not much later on teaching me how to code .. skills that have led to where I am today for every time you got up at 5am to drive me to an ambulance shift when I was a grown adult and probably should’ve worked it out for myself for bailing me out of so many things, so many times For always sharing my writing and telling anyone who’d listen about me and my work for introducing me to the wider world through stories, books and conversations for the endless hours spent in logic puzzle books with you for taking a morning out of each and every day to go out for coffee with me before work in the weeks before your cancer properly took hold For telling me in those last few days to keep traveling, keep pursuing my dreams, keep focusing on this life I’ve built once you’re gone
At the beginning of 2021, I set myself a goal to read 50 books. I almost slid just in there, although I didn’t quite finish book number 50 before the end of the 31st! So whether I completed the challenge or not is up to intepretation, but I think it’s close enough to count.
It will come as no surprise when I say that 2021 was an unusual year. In pre-pandemic times I would read a lot of difficult books, memoirs non-fiction, and literary fiction. But I’ve noticed over the past two years, since the world got a little more complicated, most of my books have been beach reads, romance, and escapism. It’s been a nice shift, and I’ve enjoyed stepping outside of my usual genres and getting lost in some light and fluffy love stories.
Highlights from 2021: Piranesi (favourite fiction), Molecules of Emotion (favourite non fiction), One Last Stop (favourite romance), and Eat Pray Love (favourite re-read)
Moleculesof Emotion by Candace B. Pert
The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton
The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Until Next Weekend by Rachel Marks
Saturdays at Noon by Rachel
The Spark by Jules Wake
The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary
Sunrise by the Sea by Jenny Colgan
Beach Read by Emily Henry
While We Were Dating by Jasmine Guillory
SEX/LIFE by B.B. Easton
I Owe You One by Sophie Kinsella
Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy
Love Your Life by Sophie Kinsella
The Regulars by Georgia Clark
Fiber Fueled by Will Bulsiewicz
The Bucket List by Georgia Clark
It Had to Be You by Georgia Clark
I’ve Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella
Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella
Remember Me? by Sophie Kinsella
Life’s A Beach by Portia MacIntosh
The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
My Great Ex-Scape by Portia MacIntosh
The Time of Our Lives by Portia MacIntosh
My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella
Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella
Stuck On You by Portia MacIntosh
Grown Ups by Marian Keyes
Paris is Always a Good Idea by Jenn McKinlay
Dreaming of Verona by T.A. Williams
Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Sofia Khan is Not Obliged by Ayisha Malik
The Dating Charade by Melissa Ferguson
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes
The Mystery of Mercy Close by Marian Keyes
How to Make a French Family by Samantha Verant
Angels by Marian Keyes
The Woman Who Stole My Life by Marian Keyes
Watermelon by Marian Keyes
Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married by Marian Keyes
Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes
Gone Viking by Helen Russell
Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center
You and Me on Vacation by Emily Henry
Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir by Ruth Reichl
Despite the year being utterly bizarre, it seems to be over about as quickly as it began! It’s hard to imagine a year ago I was in Martinique, planning for a North American Christmas visit then onto Tokyo for New Years!
It’s not been the 2020 we wanted, but it’s the 2020 we’ve got – and although it’s been challenging, there’s been a lot of good too. This is what I’d like to focus on, all the good bits that managed to slip through the cracks of a chaotic and strange year.
I’ve been so thankful to spend a year back home with my family, rediscovering my fabulous home country and living a much less transitory existence than I am normally used to. Buying a car, renting an apartment, having a small garden – none of these were on the forecast for this year, yet I am enjoying the change of pace that comes with these things.
This blog has been on a bit of a hiatus – so much so, in fact, that I didn’t post a November update. That’s because life got real busy all of a sudden with university exams, relocating up to Auckland, and my first attempt at celebrating US thanksgiving!
But things haven’t been entirely static, you may notice a new design on the site that I’ve been working away on migrating to, and a new photo blog section to contain more short-form and image based updates, as well as a brand new newsletter design & content! So stay tuned, as things around here are gearing up for more travel writing and updates as we plough on ahead into a new year!
Not in a bad way, just in a back-at-work, finding a place to live, last week of semester at school kinda way and I haven’t been posting as frequently as I’d like to have been.
The road trip was a wonderful adventure, beginning in Christchurch (the South Island of New Zealand) winding up through the Marlborough wine region, sleeping in a renovated wine barrel cabin, then onwards to sunny Picton where we admired the gorgeous Marlborough sounds and crossed to the North Island by the way of the InterIslander ferry.
Rural New Zealand is beautiful, and possibly exactly how you’d expect. We explored rolling Hobbiton-esque hillside, took a boat ride through the magnificent Waitomo glow worm caves, drove past ‘Mount Doom’, admired the otherworldly bubbling mudpools and steaming geysers of Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland, and stayed in a luxurious treehouse chalet in the Coromandel coast.
As we settle into a new apartment here in Auckland, and as my semester comes to a close for the year, I will soon have a lot more time to dedicate to personal projects, writing, and blogging.
Spring is beginning to show here in New Zealand, with blossoms blooming and daffodil sprouts coming up. I’m so grateful to see more blue skies and sunny afternoons. After spending a very unexpected winter back in my home country, I’m super appreciate of the promise of spring & summer to come.
When I set out on my nomad journey, I had planned to chase the sun. Other than the occasional dip into wintery climates, for the most part, I’d succeeded for six years! So all this cold and darkness came as a bit of a shock to the system.
But it’s not all bad, of course! I am very lucky to be where I am during the current state of the world, and I am enjoying feeling the anticipation of spring coming on all around and focusing on gratitude for this month.
Anna the flight attendant? Yeah, right! Aviation was not an industry I had ever imagined myself involved in. Unlike many who spend their whole lives dreaming of working in the skies, I had always had other plans for my life. So many, in fact, that I almost had a new career plan for each day of the year.
Doctor, Skydive Instructor and Radio DJ topped the wish-list at various points in my life. Chef, med school dropout, volunteer ambulance officer and graphic designer had made it onto the ‘been there, done that’ pile. Flight attendant was one of the few job titles that had never really caught my eye. So you can imagine it came as quite the surprise to find myself vacuum backed into that tight red dress, slathered in a cocktail of lipstick and hairspray, learning the ropes of emergency evacuations over water.
Truth be told, I was a little lost. I had wanted out of the city I had spent most of my life living in, and I felt a passion for travel. Other than that I had absolutely no clue, or any savings to leave with. That was, of course, until I saw the job listing. Within 6 months of applying, I had my wings and was a fully-fledged short-haul international flight attendant.
Suddenly the world opened up to me, I was living in a bigger city and spending my life traveling. A normal Saturday night for me might be spent going out for dinner in Sydney followed by a lazy Sunday afternoon poolside in Fiji.
My flight attendant career spanned about four years – which is quite a long time in my world of relentless retraining and career hopping. By the time I handed in my wings I was ready to move onto other adventures, but I picked up a few & memories notes along the way
1. Don’t eat the crew meals. Number one rule! It’s hard enough to eat properly when your always on the road, but crew meals are designed to have added salt and sugar. (Check out this article from the BBC on why food tastes bad at altitude, and how catering companies add extra salt and flavouring to make up for it)
2. Diet coke is the most time consuming, foamy, mess of a drink to pour into a cup at altitude thanks to the artificial sweeteners, and to top it all off – it tastes a little odd up there too thanks to our altered ability to taste.
3.Carry dry bags. Having to stash your wet swimsuit in your suitcase on the second day of a five day trip does not to nice things to your clean clothes. Or, for that matter, the overall atmosphere of your suitcase. Same deal with anything that gets muddy, wet, damp, or smelly. Drybags are a lifesaver for frequent travellers, and although it’s been many years since I was working onboard an aircraft, it’s still an essential item I pack on every trip.
4. Sleep is completely underrated. When I first set out into the flight attendant life, the lure & sometimes pressure of meeting up at the bar was a bit too much. I went too hard and lost out on a lot of sleep. I’m older, and hopefully wiser now and I say – catch up on sleep whenever you can – no matter how tempting all the outings, dinners, and drinks will be. Everyone will be meeting down at the bar again tomorrow night for another round, I promise!
Fancy lounging poolside as part of your work week? Look no further.
5. Invest in the most comfortable shoes you can find. Although high heels are often required when walking about the airport, usually after takeoff the cabin crew get to switch into flat cabin shoes. I would recommend upgrading both as much as the company will allow – when the shin splints and numb toes catch up, often a lot of the damage is done and it can take a long time to recover.
6. Keep hydrated. The cabin is a really low humidity place to spend a lot of time, so chugging down the waters is always a priority. When I was training, they recommended 500mls per hour, but personally I think more than that is better. Normally I aim for 2 litres of water a day, but I’d increase that even further on flying days!
7. There will always be passengers who are unhappy about something. No matter how glamorous aviation may sound to those not working in it, it is still a customer service role. You will always get difficult customers, and you can’t please everyone. Don’t let it get to you.
8. Even when it feels like everything is going wrong, there will always be one person (passenger or crew) who thinks your doing just great – make it your mission to find that person & connect with them to boost your confidence.
9. Keep the essentials in your cabin bag(underwear, phone charger, wallet), it’s only a matter of time until somebody looses your check-in for the night and it’s nice to be prepared for anything! I also liked to keep a dress in there that rolls small, wrinkle free as an emergency backup change of clothes.
10. Smile. Always. Not because you have to (although mileage may vary depending on who you work for) – do it because it’ll make you feel better, I promise. (read this article on smiling)
11. Keep a gratitude diary. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how amazing this job actually is! (also, daily gratitude = amazing thing to get in the habit of) and later on, you will be able to look back even more fondly on this time spent in a great job.
12. Take the time to learn a new language. You don’t need to be fluent, just being able to communicate a few words is enough to turn an awkward flight of non-english speakers into something fun & that you learn from. (They really appreciate the effort, too)
13. Keep earplugs and eye masks with you, they always come in handy for those times when you want to catch a few moments rest wherever you are.
14. Learn more about posture. I’ve strained myself from incorrect lifting and sitting twisted in the back galley with my legs crossed far too many times. Practicing good posture, doing yoga, wearing well fitting shoes – these things all help enormously.
15. Pack snacks. Things like nuts, seeds, crackers and tinned tuna seem to make it through most country arrival quarantines un-confiscated. Be wary of fresh produce, meats, dairy and honey if you are travelling somewhere with strict biosecurity such as Australia and New Zealand though.
16. Don’t give buddy passes to people unless it’s an emergency or they understand standby very well. It can get very stressful!
17. Speaking of staff travel, try not to book yourself on a busy flight home the night before your next duty with no backup plan. It generally ends in an expensive disaster.
18. One (more) word: Sunscreen.
19. Passengers will never, ever learn to remain seated until the seatbelt light comes off. It’s an unfortunate, universal truth.
20. Toiletries with screw on lids are a great investment (there’s only so many times a person can forgive an exploded shampoo bottle amongst their things)
21. Keep hydration interesting and carry a selection of herbal tea bags with you. Fruit flavoured ones added to a bottle of cold water make a delicious alternative to plain water.
22. Protein powder/meal replacement sachets can be a great breakfast, especially at 3am when you know you SHOULD eat, but your stomach has different feelings on the matter.
23. Don’t become bitter, and never forget to see passengers as people – no matter how obnoxious they become.
Working as a flight attendant was a truly awesome career, I’m so thankful for all the experiences I was lucky enough to have during this time.
I met some excellent people and have collected memories I will treasure for a lifetime.
It’s me, many years back now!
Ultimately, it wasn’t my forever job. None of them have been so far – but I sure had a great time doing it & it opened up the world of travel and possibilities to me in a way I am eternally grateful.
