So tired . . .

I'm enjoying my holidays so far, but I'm so exhausted!

12yo sister is staying with me at the moment, while Mum takes 10yo brother to visit our aunt in Sydney and Canberra and the mountains (so that he can see snow). 12yo sis went on the same trip without Mum when she was 10 but 10yo brother isn't able to go alone so Mum is with him, and as Stepdad works full-time, 12yo sis needed to stay somewhere, and I've gladly taken her in.

I picked her up on Sunday and it's been pretty full-on since then. We went shopping in Big Country Town on Monday, drove for 1.5 hours in each direction on Tuesday to go see a very old farm with Clydesdale horses (sis is horse-obsessed), and today we went to an archery park for a round of archery, and an emu farm to look at emus. Now it's mid-afternoon and we're both completely whacked. In a minute I need to go tackle the kitchen so that 12yo sis can bake a cake, and I really don't want to!

It doesn't help that we had disturbed sleep this morning - the town's emergency volunteer call-in siren went off at 5am and woke us both up, and sis was quite upset about it and needed to be comforted. We saw the police and fire engine take off but there was clearly no danger in our immediate area so I got her back to sleep but took a long time to doze off myself (sadly we later found out that there had been a road fatality 14km south of town - a car hit a tree and burst into flames, and the male driver died before emergency services could help. No one I knew and not someone from our town, but still unpleasant for everyone).

After that, I had a very weird dream that I'm still trying to figure out. At first it was to do with the emergency siren - it was daytime and "everyone" was out and about helping with some emergency, I think it involved flooding. My 24yo brother was there for some reason. I went into the shop, which in the dream was even smaller than it currently is, and only contained tinned vegetables and Christmas chocolates, and then was trying to find my brother, who told me that he'd found us an apartment in Washington DC so we could move house soon. There are no words to describe how much WTF? is associated with that lol. Anyway, then we flew to Washington DC and were met there by an online aquaintance of mine who doesn't actually live there but has spoken about it a lot. She took us for a cruise on a river and we saw what we thought were dolphins but then they turned out to be killer whales, leaping and diving around the boats like dolphins do. I remarked that of course our Australian rivers aren't deep enough for killer whales (*giggle*). Then for some reason the boat kind of disappeared temporarily so we had to touch the whale as it went underneath us, even though we weren't supposed to. It was slimy.

At that point I woke up. And felt completely bamboozled.