In which Dan begins counting down from seventy seven.

Straight away I knew I was back in AUS, the horns beeping, the engines revving, the bad parking and the dented cars. It all made me feel... confused :S

I'd been sitting on a rig up north for eleven days and then I mostly flew straight to summery Japan with all its humidity and now here I was coming back into a cold wintery Perth... and yet, during the day the temperature reaches to 20 and in the sun you are forced to get back to shorts weather. Not to say it doesn't get cold. Due to the intense heat most of the year and day, the houses in AUS are thin walled and with open spaced rooms. This leaves houses with the same temperature in as outside in the air, the only thing a house does is shelter from the wind. So sitting in a room with digits below 10C and with only a fleece for warmth I was feeling the chill. Plus its so cold that I wear that fleece all the time and it starts to smell a bit. Something else that bugs me is that I always wore shorts, everyday without fail when it was summer and autumn and now I can't wear them at all, it makes me sad.

There are a few things that I need to focus on now though, now that I am back. On the plane to Japan I realised that and came to a conclusion. I decided that I needed to come back home early September. I'm just not single and my thoughts lie with being back home with Lucy. If I was a young go get kind of single bloke who wasn't looking for a long term girlfriend then I would just bash out the AUS like, keep looking for that elusive awesome rock smashing mumbo jumbo but the truth is my adventure lies elsewhere and not alone. So I decided to take that return flight that I booked way back in November which I always thought I would change. I thought that I would change the day I came back in order to get as much out of the year as possible, but now I've decided to take what I've achieved as enough and start living a life back home, oh deer the fun of getting a job in Britain. But a few things I need to do, one of them is do something about my car. It broke over a month ago and since then its just been sitting outside the office where I stay looking like those old bangers in falling apart houses, the kind where you wonder if anyone lives there. Steven phoned a mechanic about the car and he told us that it would be better just to look to get rid of it, but in order to do that I needed to take my things out of it and since I've been back I've been busy: I still haven't been able to fix my bike.

During the week I was back I met up with Matt. Matt, who I met in the first week of Perth travels, from Liverpool had returned to Perth after a massive car journey basically all over the place. If asked whether I'm jealous of his travels I must say that if I was going to do that I wouldn't have tripped acid in the middle of the desert and then walked so far from the car that I couldn't see it any more, just saying. He came back to Perth in order to try and get his job back at a bottle warehouse. He'd just spent the previous three months working in a potato factory while I'd been delivering pamphlets and getting my awesome rock washing job (it's not awesome >.<). Something else about Matt is that his girlfriend and him are getting back together, but that's not really anything but gossip so I'll stop :P

Things had happened since I was last in Perth. Steven had decided he was bored and so had started a paper delivery service for the local free papers and they had also started renting the house next door, as you do. So while I was back, for which was about a week although I had expected it to be longer, I delivered newspapers. The exciting difference between newspapers and pamphlets is that more people are actually interested in papers so appearing with them gives a different reaction. The areas we deliver to are Subiaco Centro, literally that's its name, Daglish, Gwelup and Innaloo. To start with there weren't that many and with Steven rushing around on his scooter we were able to finish in good time. My mind was sitting elsewhere as I saw how long ten and actually eleven weeks is. After a little paper delivery and getting back in sync with AUS life I went back to the rig. When I left before I had seen no drilling in 11 days and at the end they had pulled the BOP due to a fault. This meant that we still had one more section to drill for JZ1-1C which we did over eight days on the rig. After this time which didn't go quickly but it felt quick when I left, we were sent back and travelled via helicopter to Barrow Island, it was the super puma so that's different and they we boarded a propeller aircraft which took us over to Karatha in half an hour and that was especially special. At Karratha we boarded a domestic flight and flew down to Perth, but I think because it was domestic it took a different route and flew wide out inland over the hill country to the back of Perth. This area is full of single houses and farms and a few villages and living there is like living in satellite suburbs which people call 'living in the hills'.

Something interesting I've heard about the east of Perth which I still haven't checked out is that the suburbs there are much more lower middle class, unlike the west of Perth which has those massive houses that scare me when I deliver there.

Something I did in the down time I had in between the completion of the JZ1-1C well and heading back was to grab some pizza. There are two things that I miss while on the rig even though there is free food and what not. 1. Pizza and 2. Chocolate. Sweets are ma ma seeing as fruit juice is probably enough, ice cream and dessert. Due to a lack of payment by a particular pizza place we had been handed some free pizza vouchers and now seemed like a good a time as any to head on over and take advantage. Some interesting things happened on that trip though, we parked on a steep hill in a space that I'm not sure if we were allowed to be in, and also down at the bottom of the hill was Scarborough beach road where on one side there was a Yoga centre and the other there was an internet cafe. I couldn't help but see that it appeared to me to be two different types of people in each, jocks and geeks but I digress.

The room that I'd been staying in for the past two or so weeks was not really mine, it was a temporary hold in between rig being on. As the Pamphlteers have grown bigger and expanded into the house next door and into a whole new business there were going to hire a guy to manage something and he was going to have that room up there. In order to prepare the bare room for this I was asked to get a chair a desk and a bed... without spending money o_o. Ok so its not as scary as some intense task from 'The Apprentice' but its still something far removed from life back home. Here in Perth the city is sprawled about and the houses have large areas of grass before the road. This is sometimes used to park cars or for a pavement or a tree but during collection when the council comes round and collects up all the rubbish people have collected instead of letting them take it to a skip there are many a pile of stuffs outside peoples houses. This stuffs is then up for grabs, seeing as its waste anyway people have a kind of balance with the world in which you can grab it if you fancy it. Seeing as people love to have the latest stuffs the things they leave outside tend to be in perfect working order but older and used.

So as I deliver newspapers I had to be on the hunt for random junk beside the road. During this period the area soon to be collected for was Karrinyup which is none too far away at all from the house. I was sceptical but on going for a purpose mooch for shizzle I did find some things and it got me excited about this aspect of AUS life. I saw a little push pedal go kart I wanted to nab and roll down a high, but over the hill I then saw a nice desk, in fact three desks. Like something out of Goldilocks they sat there being perfect and I took the middle one. Although I couldn't do it alone so I asked Sun to help me, and while we were there he grabbed a chair also and a man rolled a very new looking chair down as well and we got a hold of that too. The desk was so long that it stuck out of the rear of the car and we couldn't close the door. It was my first time driving a car with any kind of odd thing going on in the back. There is a chance that I could drive the car with a trailer on the back, either way I was being careful and there were some odd noises.