Recently I’ve been flat out like a lizard drinking. After having used this colloquial phrase a few times, I started wondering about its origins, and found these definition on the Urban Dictionary website:

Flat out like a lizard drinking
1. Verb/simile. To be working really hard, or so under the pump that you’ve found yourself dehydrated.
2. Adj. Simile. To be extremely busy to the point of running “flat out,” a play on words involving the image of a lizard that physically stretches itself thin to literally drink water from a pond etc.
3. To be, or have been, hard at work. Originating in Australia.

I have indeed been rather busy lately, which is why I haven’t updated this blog (or the rest of this website) for a long time. My readers may know I’ve been studying and working for some time now, which accounts for my flat-out-ness and reduction in spare time.

In April I reduced my studies to half of full time, and with a job also amounting to half of full time, I thought things would be more balanced. Not so! My assignments became more time consuming, which apparently is normal in the end stages of the course I’m studying (but they didn’t tell us that at the beginning). Then I acquired another job doing casual relief work in a number of libraries, with the amount of work so far exceeding my expectations. Between the two jobs I’m now working more than full time, while my home computer sits unemployed and neglected on most days.

It’s a good sort of busyness, though. With all the economic gloom we hear on the news, I feel blessed to have as much work as I can fit in. Also my two jobs are very different and provide balance and variety, while both being close to home and in my field of study.

I do hope to fit in some writing occasionally, because I find it therapeutic … but if I don’t it’s because I’m like a lizard drinking: flat out.