An e-mail I received today :
Over the years, Allied Pickfords has built a reputation for quality by listening and responding to the needs and expectations of our customers. We understand that the days and weeks following an international move are busy for our customers as they settle into their new homes, but we ask that you take a few minutes out of your busy day to provide us with feedback following your move.
The drivers, packers, sales, and office staffs that planned, packed, transported, and delivered your move are proud of the work they do and are interested to hear your comments. We will pass on praise and investigate criticism in order to help us continue to make enhancements to the overall quality of our international moving services.
Thank you in advance for your comments and thanks again for using Allied Pickfords for your international move.
I might spread the reply to this one over a few days - don't want to have too much fun all at once.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Out and About
400 kilometres I've driven today! I'm a little bit sleepy now. It's been a really good day, despite the usual few near-fiascos. Weather was perfect - very sunny, but with a strong cool wind, so it's only been early twenties all day, which is far better for being outdoors than the last few weekends. Of course, it does mean all the Aussies wear heavy coats, which is still quite funny to see (although I'm sure I look like someone from Newcastle out on the town to them!)
First fiasco was not getting to Hanging Rock yesterday (which, as I shall soon relate, actually turned into a separate fiasco of its own). The computer desk I bought in Ikea on Friday was just a little too big to fit into the car, no matter how many ways I tried to angle it. So I had to get it delivered. I wasn't too fussed about that, as I'd managed to get into the 8-12 time slot. At 2.20, they turned up unapologetically and dropped my stuff off. I could probably have gone out at that point, but I was feeling tired from having been woken up by the leafblowing man across the street at 7.45.
So, today began more successfully, and after a couple of wrong turns in Melbourne itself and parking up to look at the Melways, first real stop was Hanging Rock. This appears to be turning into a new Top Gun for me (was 2003 before I finally saw the film, despite having tried several times in the 15 or so intervening years since its release). I hope it's not going to be as much of a let-down as that was! Today was the day The Age, the Melbourne newspaper, had decided to hold its annual Picnic at Hanging Rock celebratory picnic, it being almost (but not quite!) the nearest Sunday to the date on which the schoolgirls purportedly disappeared. That meant about somewhere between 5 and 10 thousand other people converging on the same spot, and them charging $18 just to get in (normally $5) and the cafe was closed so I wouldn't even have been able to eat anything. Back to the car...
So then to the Organ Pipes National Park. An unfortunate position barely half a kilometre from the freeway, and less than a kilometre from a drag-racing track, means the park isn't quite the idyll of peace and tranquillity you get from the average UK national park, but it's still very pretty - kind of a dry-land Giant's Causeway, with the same underlying geological cause. Here's my take on the pipes themselves :
And finally, Portsea. Unfortunately, I didn't get to Point Nepean, overlooking the Rip, as it was closed by the time I arrived. However, there are two strongly contrasting beaches to enjoy - Back Beach and Bay Beach. The Bay Beach is utterly calm, barely a ripple, and the 100m jetty out into Port Phillip Bay allows you to see how clear the water is - you can see right to the bottom. Back Beach is a little different. Facing out onto Bass Strait, it's filled with powerful currents, big rollers and spray everywhere (mmmm, salty beard) - not a place to go swimming (and it was only a mile or so away that Harold Holt, whom I mentioned the other day, lost his life). Pretty exclusive place (as the Wikipedia shows, average house prices are around £400K, and it's the most affluent postcode in the whole country). There were 5 houses just along the main street with tennis courts in the gardens, and one house that's one of the most fascinating I've ever seen - it was laid out rising up a gently-sloping hill, and all glass, with a staircase running inside along the whole length of the house - being glass, you could see the whole staircase. Looked like a fairly novelly-designed house.
Aussieisms I've picked up today. Provincial doesn't have any negative connotations here - it's a commonly-used food adjective, and means something similar to the way we'd use "country," like "country vegetable soup". Then there's the marketing-spin-inspired sale justification "carbon-damaged" - i.e. fire damage. Also saw a sign warning me that tiredness can kill, so I should stop and have a 15-minute powernap.
So now I'm going to finish off my road trip by having 30 or so consecutive powernaps.
First fiasco was not getting to Hanging Rock yesterday (which, as I shall soon relate, actually turned into a separate fiasco of its own). The computer desk I bought in Ikea on Friday was just a little too big to fit into the car, no matter how many ways I tried to angle it. So I had to get it delivered. I wasn't too fussed about that, as I'd managed to get into the 8-12 time slot. At 2.20, they turned up unapologetically and dropped my stuff off. I could probably have gone out at that point, but I was feeling tired from having been woken up by the leafblowing man across the street at 7.45.
So, today began more successfully, and after a couple of wrong turns in Melbourne itself and parking up to look at the Melways, first real stop was Hanging Rock. This appears to be turning into a new Top Gun for me (was 2003 before I finally saw the film, despite having tried several times in the 15 or so intervening years since its release). I hope it's not going to be as much of a let-down as that was! Today was the day The Age, the Melbourne newspaper, had decided to hold its annual Picnic at Hanging Rock celebratory picnic, it being almost (but not quite!) the nearest Sunday to the date on which the schoolgirls purportedly disappeared. That meant about somewhere between 5 and 10 thousand other people converging on the same spot, and them charging $18 just to get in (normally $5) and the cafe was closed so I wouldn't even have been able to eat anything. Back to the car...
So then to the Organ Pipes National Park. An unfortunate position barely half a kilometre from the freeway, and less than a kilometre from a drag-racing track, means the park isn't quite the idyll of peace and tranquillity you get from the average UK national park, but it's still very pretty - kind of a dry-land Giant's Causeway, with the same underlying geological cause. Here's my take on the pipes themselves :
And finally, Portsea. Unfortunately, I didn't get to Point Nepean, overlooking the Rip, as it was closed by the time I arrived. However, there are two strongly contrasting beaches to enjoy - Back Beach and Bay Beach. The Bay Beach is utterly calm, barely a ripple, and the 100m jetty out into Port Phillip Bay allows you to see how clear the water is - you can see right to the bottom. Back Beach is a little different. Facing out onto Bass Strait, it's filled with powerful currents, big rollers and spray everywhere (mmmm, salty beard) - not a place to go swimming (and it was only a mile or so away that Harold Holt, whom I mentioned the other day, lost his life). Pretty exclusive place (as the Wikipedia shows, average house prices are around £400K, and it's the most affluent postcode in the whole country). There were 5 houses just along the main street with tennis courts in the gardens, and one house that's one of the most fascinating I've ever seen - it was laid out rising up a gently-sloping hill, and all glass, with a staircase running inside along the whole length of the house - being glass, you could see the whole staircase. Looked like a fairly novelly-designed house.
Aussieisms I've picked up today. Provincial doesn't have any negative connotations here - it's a commonly-used food adjective, and means something similar to the way we'd use "country," like "country vegetable soup". Then there's the marketing-spin-inspired sale justification "carbon-damaged" - i.e. fire damage. Also saw a sign warning me that tiredness can kill, so I should stop and have a 15-minute powernap.
So now I'm going to finish off my road trip by having 30 or so consecutive powernaps.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Bright Ideas
The Blair UK government is well-known for its idiotic ideas. On-the-spot fines where you would be frogmarched to the nearest ATM. The A* grade in GCSEs. The Millennium Dome. Harriet Harman.
The Aussie government appears to be competing with them. From 2010, it will no longer be possible to buy the traditional incandescent light bulb. Only the fluorescent energy-saver bulbs will be on sale. This is expected to reduce the country's carbon emissions by, if I use the most optimistic estimate I could find, as much as 0.1%.
I'm somewhat torn over this one. While I do think we should be doing our best not to completely strip the planet of its resources before we've figured out where we can get refills, I would think that there are other things that could be encouraged to help with this. E.g. charging shops and offices high electricity rates after normal opening hours, so they're not encouraged to leave all their lights blazing because it might deter a burglar and it "doesn't cost much". The sooner economists come up with a sensible measure to replace GDP that factors in intangible costs the better.
(I also noticed this was in the news today, so it appears that they're also not averse to plagiarism.)
Plans for the long weekend - I'm using up one of my time-off-in-lieu days I got for working silly hours in January :
- Visit some gardening stores and buy a garden table and some local plants (local, hence drought-resistant ... I can only water my plants on Tuesday, Thursday and alternating Saturday nights, as I live in an even-numbered house. This is not a joke - see above re crazy Aussie ideas.)
- Visit furniture stores, to purchase a bed, a dining table and chairs and a sofa (which will largely complete my arrival, at least in a purely materialistic sense. Might think about getting a telly at some point in the future, but I'm really not missing having one)
- Visit Hanging Rock, something I failed to do a few weeks ago. (One of my colleagues told me a story which is probably only amusing if you've seen the film or are at least vaguely aware of the legend. She and some of her friends once went there dressed as Victorian schoolgirls, didn't realise the park closed at 5 so happily carried on walking, and the rangers found them after a major search 2 hours later. Well, I laughed!)
- Visit some other local tourist spot, which I haven't decided on yet. Might be The Rip - the entrance to Port Phillip Bay, on which Melbourne stands, one of the most dangerous stretches of coast in the country, and also where an Aussie prime minister named Harold vanished while swimming. (The disappearance of Harold Bishop was definitely a case of art imitating life, though, as the real Harold, Harold Holt, disappeared in 1967.)
My stuff did arrive on 7th Feb. Mostly, anyway. There were 3 mishaps. In increasing order of irritation - first, my stereo had been slightly dented on the top but remained perfectly functional, second, a corner about 2 inches long broke off my coffee table and third, they lost one of my packages altogether. Of the 24 packages they shipped, it was definitely the "best" one they could have lost - all it was was a sheet of plywood which formed the back of my flat-pack bookcase, and fortunately they sell wood over here, I've seen it advertised.
Stupid newspaper statistics misuse #1379845 - see the 22 Feb item here. Will people ever understand probability?
And to finish, a last memory of Venezuela - my tentmate Mark, a photographer and travel journalist by night (by day he works as tech support for a major insurance company), wrote this article on the trip. If you look carefully, you can see me swimming in one of the photos (if I'm honest, you really need to know that it's me there in the first place!) Note also the scary three-armed fruit-seller.
The Aussie government appears to be competing with them. From 2010, it will no longer be possible to buy the traditional incandescent light bulb. Only the fluorescent energy-saver bulbs will be on sale. This is expected to reduce the country's carbon emissions by, if I use the most optimistic estimate I could find, as much as 0.1%.
I'm somewhat torn over this one. While I do think we should be doing our best not to completely strip the planet of its resources before we've figured out where we can get refills, I would think that there are other things that could be encouraged to help with this. E.g. charging shops and offices high electricity rates after normal opening hours, so they're not encouraged to leave all their lights blazing because it might deter a burglar and it "doesn't cost much". The sooner economists come up with a sensible measure to replace GDP that factors in intangible costs the better.
(I also noticed this was in the news today, so it appears that they're also not averse to plagiarism.)
Plans for the long weekend - I'm using up one of my time-off-in-lieu days I got for working silly hours in January :
- Visit some gardening stores and buy a garden table and some local plants (local, hence drought-resistant ... I can only water my plants on Tuesday, Thursday and alternating Saturday nights, as I live in an even-numbered house. This is not a joke - see above re crazy Aussie ideas.)
- Visit furniture stores, to purchase a bed, a dining table and chairs and a sofa (which will largely complete my arrival, at least in a purely materialistic sense. Might think about getting a telly at some point in the future, but I'm really not missing having one)
- Visit Hanging Rock, something I failed to do a few weeks ago. (One of my colleagues told me a story which is probably only amusing if you've seen the film or are at least vaguely aware of the legend. She and some of her friends once went there dressed as Victorian schoolgirls, didn't realise the park closed at 5 so happily carried on walking, and the rangers found them after a major search 2 hours later. Well, I laughed!)
- Visit some other local tourist spot, which I haven't decided on yet. Might be The Rip - the entrance to Port Phillip Bay, on which Melbourne stands, one of the most dangerous stretches of coast in the country, and also where an Aussie prime minister named Harold vanished while swimming. (The disappearance of Harold Bishop was definitely a case of art imitating life, though, as the real Harold, Harold Holt, disappeared in 1967.)
My stuff did arrive on 7th Feb. Mostly, anyway. There were 3 mishaps. In increasing order of irritation - first, my stereo had been slightly dented on the top but remained perfectly functional, second, a corner about 2 inches long broke off my coffee table and third, they lost one of my packages altogether. Of the 24 packages they shipped, it was definitely the "best" one they could have lost - all it was was a sheet of plywood which formed the back of my flat-pack bookcase, and fortunately they sell wood over here, I've seen it advertised.
Stupid newspaper statistics misuse #1379845 - see the 22 Feb item here. Will people ever understand probability?
And to finish, a last memory of Venezuela - my tentmate Mark, a photographer and travel journalist by night (by day he works as tech support for a major insurance company), wrote this article on the trip. If you look carefully, you can see me swimming in one of the photos (if I'm honest, you really need to know that it's me there in the first place!) Note also the scary three-armed fruit-seller.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Four-figure Furniture
I hired a car at the weekend, and spent a 4-figure sum on furniture, food and other large not-easy-to-carry items. I was supposed to go to Hanging Rock which is about 100k north of Melbourne, but I was quite glad I spent over an hour on Skype talking about pie-shaped vegetables on Sunday morning (see picture below) - it gave the weather time to ramp up from a pleasant mid-20s to its peak of 38. It'd have been early 40s up at Hanging Rock if I'd gone when I'd been planning to!
So, tomorrow marks a few milestones for me.
7th Feb 2005 was "the longest day ever" - 41 hours for me, as I flew over the Date Line on my way from Sydney to Calgary (via an unwelcoming LA Customs department)
7th Feb 2002 was my first ever "real" job interview (I ended up having a pretty non-event interview for originally getting into the actuarial profession as I was the only applicant for the job who had a degree, let alone a relevant one!)
7th Feb 1992 was the day my best friend's mother died of cancer (and on the same day, the mother of some other friends, twin brothers, also died of cancer).
7th Feb 2007 was the day on which the stuff I had shipped to Oz finally came back to stay with me, after a detour via Brisbane (where I've never been - I'm jealous!) and a stay in Customs of suspicious duration - having arrived in Brissie on 28th December, they were finally released less than 2 hours after I shouted at someone at Pickfords about it.
I really hope I'm not jumping the gun on that last one!
6th Feb 2007 is also a little milestone of its own - I've been here 3 months today. And what a quarter of a year it's been.
It's reasonably indicative of how the three weeks following my last post have panned out that my blog's URL has disappeared from my browser's history. Must write more often. 2007 has definitely not been an enjoyable year so far. The first 19 days of it were solid work, and no time to do or even think about much else. Then my first day off was supposed to be spent at the tennis, but instead it rained, rained and then rained some more - the one day in 3 months that it rains for more than 15 minutes during the daytime (not exaggerating here either!) and it's the day I least want it to rain.
The following two weeks have spent with me getting ever more stressed out over the way things are done here, and feeling less and less able to do anything about it as I don't know enough about the business to know if things are being done that way because they need to be or whether it's just because. And several people are quite inimical (and that's the right word) to changing what they do.
I do need some positives to balance that all out, as it would be unfair to say I've not enjoyed some things here. My department contains mostly fun people, and I can have amusing, if inoffensive, conversations with most of them. The learning has been enjoyable - I didn't feel like I'd been getting much development out of my role the last year in York, whereas I think the last 3 months have covered off my CPD requirements till 2013 or thereabouts (and the next 21 months will probably set me up there for life). On the food front, accessible sushi and juice bars make up for a world of hurt (especially guava juice). Living in a big city is good - there's a shop somewhere that sells anything (e.g. this one! Shame they couldn't find a shop selling a web designer though...) I've skipped winter. I've played tennis on a rooftop court. My sense of humour translates well. The bushfire smoke days were amazing.
On the whole, though, the negatives have outweighed the positives.
It feels very materialistic to say that I hope things will turn around a little when my gear arrives tomorrow. I shouldn't really feel different as a result of "just stuff."
So, tomorrow marks a few milestones for me.
I really hope I'm not jumping the gun on that last one!
6th Feb 2007 is also a little milestone of its own - I've been here 3 months today. And what a quarter of a year it's been.
It's reasonably indicative of how the three weeks following my last post have panned out that my blog's URL has disappeared from my browser's history. Must write more often. 2007 has definitely not been an enjoyable year so far. The first 19 days of it were solid work, and no time to do or even think about much else. Then my first day off was supposed to be spent at the tennis, but instead it rained, rained and then rained some more - the one day in 3 months that it rains for more than 15 minutes during the daytime (not exaggerating here either!) and it's the day I least want it to rain.
The following two weeks have spent with me getting ever more stressed out over the way things are done here, and feeling less and less able to do anything about it as I don't know enough about the business to know if things are being done that way because they need to be or whether it's just because. And several people are quite inimical (and that's the right word) to changing what they do.
I do need some positives to balance that all out, as it would be unfair to say I've not enjoyed some things here. My department contains mostly fun people, and I can have amusing, if inoffensive, conversations with most of them. The learning has been enjoyable - I didn't feel like I'd been getting much development out of my role the last year in York, whereas I think the last 3 months have covered off my CPD requirements till 2013 or thereabouts (and the next 21 months will probably set me up there for life). On the food front, accessible sushi and juice bars make up for a world of hurt (especially guava juice). Living in a big city is good - there's a shop somewhere that sells anything (e.g. this one! Shame they couldn't find a shop selling a web designer though...) I've skipped winter. I've played tennis on a rooftop court. My sense of humour translates well. The bushfire smoke days were amazing.
On the whole, though, the negatives have outweighed the positives.
It feels very materialistic to say that I hope things will turn around a little when my gear arrives tomorrow. I shouldn't really feel different as a result of "just stuff."
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