Christmas crisis

Does it feel like Christmas Eve to you? It doesn’t feel like Christmas Eve to me.

I should be trilling about peace on earth and goodwill to all men (and women), but I am waaaaay too tired and cranky.

Yesterday was a VERY annoying day. I lost five hours of paid work to driving around and sitting in COVID-19 testing queues.

Remember how I said the Histopath website was broken? Well, at 8.45am yesterday I gave it one more twirl and it worked! So I paid to have three travel tests done at Sydney Airport, as I needed to drop the eldest’s partner to Marrickville to sign his new lease.

I got a nasty surprise when I arrived at the airport because the drive-through COVID testing centre has permanently closed due to the traffic chaos it was creating.

The guards on the barricade directed me to Level 2 of the parking station to have my COVID test done inside the airport instead. I decided to suck up the parking cost to get the palaver out of the way.

After driving around and around and around we finally found a parking spot and trudged into the Departure terminal.

What the guards didn’t tell me was that the rules had just changed: COVID travel tests are now only available at the airport 24 hours before your flight. Unfortunately we still had 48 hours to go. Dammit!

I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see that sign at the beginning of the enormous queue. So we got back in the car, paid for our pointless parking and drove to the nearby Arncliffe testing centre. We were feeling pretty pumped, as the queue wasn’t looking too terrible. Then a security bloke wandered up and put a “closed” sign in the boot of the car just in front of me and said the testing clinic was reopening at 1.30pm. It was about 11am at that point.

I did my nana. Not with him, as that would have been very entitled middle-aged woman of me. But I yelled at the youngest to turn farking Lime Cordiale down because I couldn’t bloody think with music playing.

Then it started pouring with rain and the streets were gridlocked as we edged towards the Harbour Tunnel to try our luck on the north side. We finally arrived at the Frenchs Forest drive through testing clinic at about noon and it looked suspiciously do-able – a big queue, but moving fairly well.

Still, I couldn’t relax until we were ushered to a testing bay. I kept expecting another one of those “closed” signs to go up in front of me.

But we got swabbed an hour after we arrived! And the people doing the swabbing were so lovely. Thank you lovely swabbing people!

Now we just need to not catch COVID in the next 24 hours.

And that’s me over and out. Well, you may hear from me next week, it depends on the quality of the wifi and how bad I am at switching off from the real world.

I hope your Christmas isn’t too shabby, despite the COVID obstacles in its way.

Song of the day: Band-Aid “Do they know its Christmas?”