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."