Newsround

This from my brother - this guy was not someone I ever liked at school.

This from the looney-tunes news archive.

We came joint 4th in the company quiz last night, out of 12 teams. One reason for our downfall : "A smack or smock is the collective noun for which group of water-dwelling animals?" Our answer - hippopotamus. Really.

Other questions, for which we were glad the team was half-local, included "Name 5 of the 7 golf courses in Melbourne that begin with the letter K?", "In the children's story The Magic Pudding, which two animals stole the pudding : possum and koala, koala and wombat or wombat and possum?" and "Who won 4 of the first 5 Iron Man championships, and for a bonus point, what type of vegetable did he farm?"

Seen on a T-shirt

Haikus are easy,
but sometimes they don't make sense.
Refrigerator.

Laughter Tracks

It's Melbourne's Comedy Festival this month, and I think this morning's tram driver was trying to drum up support for himself to be part of it. This came on the speaker as we were going past the hospital this morning :

"As you're exiting the tram, please watch out for all the crazy drivers who are in a mad rush to get to work. In the event that you fail to avoid a crazy driver, you may win a free stay at the lovely hotel you'll see to your left. Alternatively, you might win a trip to the coroner's office in a black zip-up bag."

Subtle difference #1749 - my local supermarket has 2 ways into the shopping area.

Two Englishmen Abroad

Yes, it's true. I was joined for my weekend by another Englishman, who goes by the name of Psycho Hamster when he's not in real life.

We have had an absolutely excellent weekend. The weather's been perfect for all 4 days (including not a single cloud all day Saturday, and just one very small one that followed us for most of Sunday), and it's been in the late twenties the whole time. Great weather for walking in the windy Grampians. This is the autumn everyone's been promising me for months.

First and foremost, I should definitely give special mention to the car. I got a staff discount on the car rental, so went for a slightly higher-end car than I would normally have done, and we ended up with a Mitsubishi 380. Aka the sun mobile, the brightest car in the sky, or the monstrosity. It was a vivid metallic yellow. Not gold, yellow. We think one of the wild wallabies we saw was so confused at seeing the sun come round the corner towards it and brake sharply that it froze to stare.

That wasn't all, though. An insistent beeping was to be heard once we reached the freeway and I could put my foot down. I thought it was my phone saying no signal, but after turning that off, the beeping still occurred, and at somewhat irregular intervals. I finally noticed that it was a speed alarm, on the car! Going over 120 kmh (which has nothing to do with any Australian speed limits - they're all 110 or lower) set off the beeping, and a little indicator on the dashboard. An urgent flick through the manual, and we had that turned off. Back to breaking the law in relative silence.

But there was still more to come from the car. We'd been going about 2 hours, and I was starting to get a little tired, and we'd suggested swapping over shortly when there was a scenic route off through the hills. As if it had heard, the car told me to have a cup of coffee. Seriously. It had a warning alarm to stop you from driving for too long without a break. As I didn't really believe it, I took a photo :



We followed this up a bit later by inventing a tongue twister based on an Australian road sign - "Due to disdaining his doze, Dave the drowsy driver died a dreadful death." It's not very easy to say...

Friday and Saturday were spent walking in the Grampians. There are dozens of walks in the area, of varying degrees of difficulty and length, but a large number are closed at the moment because of recent bushfires. Still, all of the ones in the north of the park are open, so we visited Mackenzie Falls, Mount Stapylton, Silent Street and the Pinnacle. Good Friday came to a particularly good end with an accidental viewing of the Princess Bride and then to a Mexican restaurant in Horsham where they allowed me to pick the hotness of my chilli on a scale of 1 to 10. That was a good restaurant...

Saturday evening involved a spotlighting tour, not something I've ever done before. You go out into the bush with a torch and 10 of your closest (and hopefully quietest) friends, and hope desperately that you see some animal's eyes reflecting back at you out of the dark. It was, somewhat bemusingly, preceded by a Powerpoint presentation showing various animals and the sounds they make, in order to assist with our future recognition of said animals. However, it was not a good night - firstly, we discovered that Orion is called the Saucepan here. Secondly, our tally of animals spotted was :

1 ring-tailed possum

2 bats

5 golden orb spiders

1 wolf spider

I would have preferred to see none at all than the last one! Golden orb spiders are tiny. Wolf spiders are not.

Amazing view of the Milky Way on the way home, though.

Sunday started with us being undercharged for the hotel - $130 (about £55) for two nights. (This made it approximately 1/4 the price of Sunday's motel!) Then a good drive south to the coast via several one- and, in some cases, even no-horse towns. This is what driving in Australia is supposed to be like - perfectly straight roads that take you from where you are to where you want to go without anything else to worry about, like turning your wheel, or other cars.

We arrived at Warrnambool about lunchtime, stopped for a quick pizza, and then headed on to the road again. The rest of the afternoon, driving along the Great Ocean Road on what turned out to be the 75th anniversary of its opening, was a little strange. I've been there before, and 2 years ago, I would never have seriously expected that one day it'd be a 2 hour drive away, rather than a 24-hour flight. I also kept getting reminders of the previous trip, including seeing the same drivers of the bus company I went with 2 years ago, and accidentally eating tea in the same place I'd had lunch in last time. It was as good as I remember it, if an awful lot more busy in places (12 Apostles being a case in point). I'm going to put together a Flickr "Before and After" photo gallery, as the two days are quite a contrast in terms of sea and lighting conditions.

On the way back yesterday, we stopped at Kennet River, a place I'd seen koalas here in 2005. Sure enough, they were still here - 10 or 12 of them that we saw. Then to Erskine Falls ("best after rain" - they weren't wrong. Since it hasn't really rained here for about 3 months ... well, "Falls" was probably false advertising.) Aireys Inlet was a random stop, which became much more rewarding when we found out the lighthouse we'd decided to visit there was where they filmed Round the Twist. We also tried to go and see the surfing championships at Bells Beach, but as it was such a calm day, there was nothing happening.

And then back home, for about 5 pm, leaving Psycho Hamster to drive the monstrosity back to the airport and thence catch his plane home to Sydney.

The Art of Conversation Lives On

Mark "Hello, Western Exposure, this is Mark speaking."
Chris "Hello, I'm calling about a booking I made at the weekend for one of your Broome-Darwin tours. I mistyped the e-mail address, so I'm ringing to find out what's going on with the booking."
Mark "Oh, hi, it's Chris isn't it? Yeah, I've booked that for you already."
Chris [surprised pause] "Yes, that's me. That's good news, but I haven't actually had an e-mail about it yet, though."
Mark "Oh, have you not? Hmmm. I thought I'd sent you one - I remember doing something with it on Sunday morning, but I had had a few beers the night before. Or maybe it was Monday. I'd had a few beers that night too."
Chris [suppressing giggles] "Oh, OK. I'll have another look for it.... No, I've had nothing."
Mark "Ah well, I remember sending the e-mail off to your wrong address, then opening the next one in our inbox and that was from you with the right address - you'd swapped a G for an E, hadn't you? Maybe I didn't send the second one - sorry about that."
Chris "You have a pretty good memory considering you'd had a few beers!"
Mark "Ah cheers mate. I also charged your credit card a bit early - we're only supposed to do that 4 weeks before. I probably shouldn't have done that."
Chris "Well, that's all right - it's only a week or so early."
Mark "The PC that stuff all lives on has been put to sleep for the night so I'll get on to sending you another e-mail out first thing tomorrow."
Chris "Excellent, thanks - hope tonight's beers are great for you."
Mark "Sure they will be, mate!"

That's not quite verbatim, but it isn't too far off! I put the phone down and collapsed in fits of laughter.

The aforementioned trip is this one, and I'm going in the middle of May, when I'm not likely to get myself either roasted alive or drowned in a flash flood. As far as I'm concerned, the two main highlights are visiting the Bungle Bungles, something I can remember wanting to do since Helen Daniels went there in Neighbours, and driving through a town called Humpty Doo. After this, I'll only have one state left that I haven't yet visited - Tasmania. That one I need to save for next summer, though, as it has a decidedly British climate for most of the rest of the year.

On a holiday theme with this post, Colm and I are going to do a bit of a grand tour of Victoria over the Easter weekend. We're off to the Grampians, to do plenty of walking and animal-spotting (although I've just discovered that due to bushfires in the area last year, many of the walks I'd most wanted to do are closed - can't go here or here (main photo) for example). Then we'll drive back to Melbourne along the coast, taking in the Great Ocean Road and a couple of state parks along the way. Likely exhausting (it'll be somewhere around 1000 km of driving) but fun!

If You Can't Beat 'Em

Australian - English "Business Speak" Dictionary

(with Australian on the left)

"All over" (syn. "all across") (adj) = "Up to speed on"
"Catch up with" (v) = "Have a meeting with"
"Present" (v) = "Tell", "Say", "Discuss", "Communicate" (NB - "present" is frequently used as an intransitive verb ... e.g. "Richard's not here for next month's meeting, so I'll have to present instead.")
"would quite like" (v) = "must not fail to provide, upon pain of sacking" (NB - for added emphasis, "would really like" can be used)
"war story" (n) = "past example to illustrate discussion point"
"extrenuous" (adj) = "extraneous" (this might be just one particular person saying this one - it's starting to be on a par with "Where are the model points?" for me)
"objective criteria" (n) = "whoever shouts loudest / has most influence / asks most politely"
"solved problem" (n) = "problem which has been looked at in a cursory manner and a possible solution has been suggested, but which will take many months to actually implement and requires significant further work before a complete answer can be given" (Personal gripe here. A quote from Friday : "Chris has solved problem X." Chris's version : "Chris has identified a problem exists, and has been able to find one thing which explains around 25% of the error, but has many disagreeing sources of data to reconcile (5 - all different but purporting to be the same!) before he can progress any further towards deciding which one, if any, is actually right." Fine if this means I get credit for doing a fraction of the work needed, but there's an obvious catch to that if the problem occurs again.)

Some other things I've found odd or difficult to get to grips with.

It's dark when I get up in the morning now! (I know this happens in England too, but because of when I came here, and the fact I used to get up later in the UK, it's been about a year since it last happened to me.)

The heat. It's not nearly as bad as it was in Jan and Feb, but now it's more the way it builds throughout the day. Many times I've noticed that it's hotter when I'm leaving the office in the early evening than it was at lunchtime, and once or twice, it's been hotter still at sunset.

Personal space. Hadn't really noticed this one till the last few weeks, but Australians, while their "default" personal space is of a similar size to that in Britain, they're relatively uncaring if that does get invaded. Several times people have brushed against my hand in a way that would probably have led to a criminal investigation if I'd initiated it. One guy appeared not to even see me until he banged his head on my chin when the tram braked sharply. And tonight's jam-packed tram, where the driver had to ask some people to get off and take the next tram because he couldn't close the doors, was quite unbelievable.

Spiders. Saw my first significantly-sized one in the house on Saturday, and was surprisingly unmoved by it. Would have been a different story if it had been this one however! (Jumping?!)

And finally...I think I'm safe from being evicted if the landlord sells the house, as is his current intention. He showed some people round today (which gave me a good incentive to finally unpack everything and give the place a good tidy!) and gave me the impression there are several others on the way. According to my reading of the tenancy agreement and of the stuff I was given when I moved in, I don't think the agreement can be ended before its official end date unless I'm a bad tenant.

Post Script

People in Australia say nice things about you when you've had a haircut. They don't point and say "Haircut! Haircut!" like they do in the UK.

They also do odd things like knock on your door on a Sunday morning, and ask if you'd like to sub-let your garage to a friend.

Long weekend again this weekend, only this time it's a freebie - Monday is a public holiday, Labour Day. (For some reason, despite the fact that Australians spell all the -out words correctly, you also see Labor as a valid spelling a lot - one of the two main political parties (currently in opposition) is the Labor Party, who have somehow lost their U.) Each of the states has one or more unique public holidays - this one is technically an Australia-wide one, but it's on different days in different states. Tassie and Victoria have it next week (although Tassie calls it, somewhat inaccurately, Eight Hours Day), Western Australia had it this week, Queensland and Northern Territory have it in May, and it's in October for the other three states, NSW, ACT and South Australia.

Educational!

Break of Day

A brief celebratory post - I have just watched the final episode of the excellent, well-written and involving mini-series Day Break. This confirms one of the reasons I don't bother to have a TV - this, one of the few series I really enjoy watching, gets cancelled halfway through its run. Thank goodness they'd filmed the whole thing before it was canned, and for once an American media company thought it was a good idea to release a program on the Web.

Watch it as soon as you can.

A Load Off My Mind

My first ever haircut abroad. As has now become usual over the last 4 months, it's the little differences that stand out.

I've only ever had my hair cut in four different places (no, not fringe, top, back and sides, the other kind of places) - a barber in Burscough, one in Ormskirk and two in York. Even when I was at Uni, I used to go back to the same place in Burscough to get it done - always easier when you don't have to describe what you want doing, and can just say "The usual, please."

Firstly, the barber (and, I assume, his wife, who was also cutting hair in the place) was foreign. And not just foreign like me, really foreign (I'd guess Polish or Czech from the language and how they looked). This reminded me vaguely of the first of the two places I went to in York, namely the Mediterranean Barber's on Goodramgate. Given this guy had a beard, I didn't expect to be offered a blowtorch-based shave like I was in York.

The conversation on sitting down in the chair began as normal. Didn't follow quite its usual path though :

"How do you want it?"
{describes desired haircut}
"You want it cut with scissors?"
{pause} "Yes please."

At this point, he pulled a few sheets off the toilet roll that was sat at the back of the chair, and wrapped them round my neck, then covered me with the usual tent-like thing to protect me from my own hair.

A significant plus point in his favour was that he didn't attempt to engage me in conversation. I'd prepared myself for the expected gregarious Aussie, with enough innocuous and inoffensive chatter to see me through 20 minutes or so of haircutting. Not needed for this dour Eastern European - he spoke only to clarify a few things in terms of how I wanted my hair doing.

Looking around, needing something to do with my eyes, I spotted the ultraviolet steriliser and the macassar hair oil. Yes, I had been transported back to the 1950s!

After I'd said I was happy with the cut, two odd things then ensued.

Firstly, he got a metal comb/brush contraption out and started to rub it quite hard through my hair while pointind a hairdryer at it. This was somewhat painful - he was pressing quite hard, and it was quite sharp - but I think it worked quite well. Very few bits of hair left over when I walked out - usually I'm still finding bits of hair around my clothes the following day.

The other piece of weirdness, something I still don't understand, was he put some powder onto a brush (shaped like a giant shaving brush attached to a milk bottle) and proceeded to rub it quite hard into the back and sides of my neck. Any ideas?

The prices were also somewhat 1950s - I think it's about 10 years since I paid that little for a haircut. $17! (That's less than £7.)

And last but not least - as a result of my haircut, temperatures have now fallen around Victoria to a pleasant (but not haircut-inducing) 22C. Autumn is nearly here.

The Red Rag

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.

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.

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.

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."

Miss Understandings

The last 2 weeks have been pretty awful. I'm vying with Iasonas for who can work more hours - I've worked at least 4 hours on every single day of 2007 so far. As usual, I'll get through things somehow, I'm just not sure exactly how, or what state my head will be in at that point. So apologies to several people I've been largely ignoring the last couple of weeks - Sunday is the day, I promise.

One thing which has helped is, after a rubbish 12-hour day at work, tracking this down - that certainly cheered me up this evening. As did her dress - I wasn't paying full visual attention to the TV when it was on, and I hadn't noticed the bottom third of it!

The other little grins that have got me through the last few days include :

Which kind of mustard? We've got Dijon or French.

What type of cheese? There's swiss, cheddar or tasty cheese.

Oh, is that what the meeeeeeeemo meant?

There's that annoying American counterintuitive phrase too, "I could care less," that I've started to notice quite a bit this week.

And finally, just over the road from work is one of the Australian Open practice grounds - haven't seen anyone I recognised yet. As it's mostly been populated by women, all either identikit Russians or identikit Chinese, I haven't much of a hope. We're also only about 200m from Lleyton Hewitt's house in Melbourne - no sleep lost over not seeing him around, though.

As I Mean To Go On?

I hope not. I've been into the office every single day of 2007 so far.

Much as with last year, January's going to be a bit of a hideous month, although with the following three saving graces :

(a) we're due to finish a very big chunk of work on 19/01, rather than 27/01 like last year.
(b) I can have the Net scoreboard for the Australian Open on while I'm working this year.
(c) one of the lead accountants has tickets for the tennis on 20/01 (as do I!) so she's all for making sure we're finished on 19/01!

I reached my 2-month anniversary yesterday. In many ways, it's been quite a hard 2 months (not least understanding the jarringly different regulatory rules here in Oz), but I'm enjoying myself, even if not quite as much as I'd like to be.

A Young Rascal (10 letters)

"Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Little shit."

Our family friends' neighbour Jo, demonstrating her skill with crosswords. She's a Kiwi. This concludes my explanation. (Except to say that I haven't yet got the real answer.)

We all finished work early on Thursday for another Christmas party (seems to be in keeping with Aussie style to have lots of parties) where we had to walk for 20 minutes in mid-30s heat, only to find that at the restaurant the aircon wasn't working! Not good. Peter and I had a pretty involved discussion about sunrises and sunsets that led me here via a roundabout route - I'd forgotten how

I managed to get all but one of my presents last Friday, but managed to swap that one with one my parents hadn't been able to get for someone else. Possibly my best ever for buying presents. Friday night was quite thundery, and, looking back, I think that might be the first time it's rained in more than just a shower in the 7 weeks since I got here. It was still raining when I went to bed, and, while it remained dry till I arrived in Sydney on Saturday afternoon, it started up heavily again on the drive down and didn't let up till Christmas Eve lunchtime.

I've then had a pretty relaxing 4 days in Kiama. A bit less hectic than my visit last year, despite the general Christmas rush. Christmas Day highlights included a barbecued turkey with homegrown roast potatoes (and non-barbecued shrimp), enjoying a warm, sunny but very windy 26C day (I was very glad to be away for Christmas - Melbourne reached just 14C, its coldest 25/12 ever, and some of the skiing resorts in Victoria had a white Christmas!), the most idiosyncratic playing of The Name Game I've ever been involved in (one name repeated 4 times, 4 others repeated at least once, and one of the names being a bottled beer rather than a person), and finding an adequate replacement for Fentiman's.

Other events included a walk over the cliffs on Boxing Day (photo below), an afternoon trip to Helen and Steve's to see their new pool, some of Christmas Eve afternoon spent fixing Steve and Jo's PC (10,000 miles from home and my reputation precedes me - first evening I was there Pauline started to ask me a question that I somehow knew was going to be PC-related!) without seeing any of their resident redbacks and generally enjoying being able to wear shorts the whole time.





In Sydney airport today, I decided that, just in case, I wouldn't repeat last year's mistake of taking a photo of the city centre from the airport. Yes, the risk of being stopped by US Customs on arrival at Tullamarine is probably a bit lower than at LAX, but once bitten, twice shy. I think the cabin crew may have been at an office party the previous night, as they were still in quite high spirits, including the announcers calling each other names during inflight announcements, one stewardess swearing at her lifejacket when the whistle got caught in her belt and the final "Thanks for flying with us etc." speech being rounded off with "Last one off's a rotten egg."

TODO : find a copy of "Your Grace Amazes Me" as sung at the Melbourne Christmas Carol Concert on Christmas Eve. That was a spine-tingling performance, but I can't find anywhere who it was who sang it.

On Top of Old Smokey

I played rooftop tennis this lunchtime. It was great fun. Pretty warm, but not scorching, and a pretty decent wind to make directing the ball fun (not to mention the odd sanded astroturf surface we were playing on that behaved like a clay court). It was all going swimmingly well till Jenny shanked a ball over the fence and down into the neighbouring park. We were 7 floors up. I hope it didn't hit anyone...

What wasn't so much fun was the smoke. I could smell it as I woke up this morning (and given the quality of my sense of smell, I'd hate to be someone who can actually use their nose) and the sun was a deep and cold red till about 10 am. Our office is about 3km south of the city centre, and we couldn't see it at all at lunchtime. Even over as short a distance as the height of the atrium within the office (7 storeys, perhaps 40m) you could see a faint haze hanging around the roof.

I'm starting to get a bit of a reputation at work. I keep finding other people's problems, and they're usually difficult ones (both to understand and to fix). I managed to find one on Monday that took 2 hours on Monday and 1.5 hours on Tuesday to sort out, and at one point on Monday involved everyone who was in the department at the time (6 of us) crowded round my PC with heads in hands.

I'm not sure that's quite what they hired me for!

Forty Days and Forty Nights

So, what's been good and bad about the last 960 hours?

The Good

Sushi.

Melbourne itself. I really like it.

The Queen Vic market.

The heat.

The free lunches (I'm on at least 6, possibly 7.)

My new house.

The Bad

My stuff going via Brisbane.

The heat.

Not being able to get anything back home sorted properly when you can't easily speak to people, and all you've got is a dodgy internet connection that you have to stand on the stairs with the laptop resting on the window ledge to get it to function.

Still not being able to get things sorted back home when you do have a working Net connection.

The silence.

The spreadsheets.

The flies and the spiders.

Last week's Christmas party (which deserved a post of its own, but I'll probably end up rolling it in with another one on misunderstandings in the near future).

That does make things sound a lot more negative than I really feel about them. Yes, it's not been fun on quite a few occasions, but I wasn't expecting plain sailing, and there've been lots of things that have gone more easily than I'd thought they would (e.g. place to live - I was expecting to be moving in about now, and instead my second month's rent was due today). I am looking forward to all the stress being over, or at least back to a normal background level, at some point though.

As a fitting conclusion, this is my 40th post.

Back In The World

13th is lucky for some. It shouldn't feel like this, but it is a bit like having had my arm sewn back on, or suddenly being able to hear again after being deaf for a while.

I've finally got a Net connection at home. Time to start catching up on oh so many many things now!

Doctor Dancer Cancer Feet

I had a few other titles for this post, including


Not Just Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Was It A "Special" Tram Or Something?

Some background to the day. Victoria is currently facing bushfires as bad as any in the last 30 years, and today's predicted to get to 37C in Melbourne (36C on the thermometer on one of the buildings I went past on the train about half an hour ago - I'm not designed for this kind of weather!), and possibly a few degrees hotter up north nearer the firefronts.

I woke up this morning and looked out of the curtains and thought it was foggy. Oh no. Smoke. You can actually smell the burning on the air, and I'm several hundred kilometres south of the main fire areas. The sun was hazed out till about 10 am, and was shining noticeably pinky-orange through the smoke, rather than the usual yellow.

After my fridge was delivered (at last!) I had to go into the city to pick up my suit for the Christmas ball this evening. (I've got a pretty good picture on my phone of the city centre covered in smoky haze - it was pretty eerie walking around town this morning.) And that's where the fun started. I've been chatting recently with one of my friends about how I've enjoyed the people-watching since I've been getting the trams to and from work. It appears the most ... interesting people save their tram tickets for the weekends...

Firstly, an old lady got on the tram just in front of me. She sat in the "reserved for disabled or elderly people" seat near the front, just next to another lady. I didn't really see either of them, but could overhear their conversation. It starts with the not-old lady.

NL : "Having a good day?"
OL : "Yes, but it's very hot."
NL : "I know. 37 it's supposed to get to."
OL : "And you can see the smoke in the sky."
NL : "Do you live round here?"
OL : "Yes, I do - for nearly 40 years."
NL : "Do you want the name of a good doctor?"
OL : "I already have one, thanks."
NL : "This one's really good though. Not a professional, but really good."
OL : "Oh, OK, thanks."
NL : " No problem. See you around."

...and she got off the tram. The abruptness of the departure made it sound like all she was doing was waiting until she'd "sold" this doctor's name to OL, and then her work there was done - off to find another victim!

So, with that distraction gone, I could turn my attention to another person - the hip-hopping semi-naked dancer man over the far side of the tram. He had one iPod earbud in and was bopping away like he was in a club and had had several too many Es - all the while sitting down! - and then he engaged someone sat near him in a very one-sided conversation. He sounded very very drunk (it was about 11.30am) to the extent that I couldn't understand most of what he was saying - the one clear bit was when he realised it was nearly his stop, leapt to his feet shouting "Driver, driver, let me off!," forgot to brace himself as the tram slowed down and hurtled to the front slamming into the wall behind the driver's seat. As we pulled away again, I could see him dancing his way across the street towards some poor unsuspecting pedestrians!

Then it was my turn to be accosted. "Don't mind me mate I'll try not to disturb you I'm going to the hospital I've got cancer you see all over you can tell just by looking at me can't you I've spent too long smoking and drinking and it's going to get me this time just look I'll take my cap off you can see the scars there can't you I don't think I'm going to last much longer..." (it appeared he said all this in one breath, hence the lack of punctuation!)

Wasn't really sure what to say. I was saved by someone else getting on and sitting down on the seat over the aisle - he moved on to her, "Merry Christmas love how's your day been mine's awful I'm on my way to the hospital I've got cancer you see and I think it's going to be my last visit..." She made the mistake of reacting - "Oh my father has cancer too. Do you know the way to Alexander Avenue?" Oops - this started another exhalation-slash-verbal-torrent where, as far as I could tell, the guy listed every tram line and every suburb in Melbourne as possible destinations for the next tram she should take. He then gave her his cap, and tried to offer her a T-shirt as well ("It's brand new you can tell look it's one from a school and it's got the graduation year on it look 2006 that's how you can tell it's brand new no-one's ever worn it and I'm never going to now...")

He got off at the next stop. Something I'd considered doing, but as it's the same stop as for work, I had some psychological misgivings about doing so!

The rest of the tram ride was pretty average - except for the unrelenting heat - until I got off at my stop in the city centre. "Ahhh, I've been dying to get here and off that bloody tram. My feet are burning up." {splashing sound} I turned around, to find a man sitting on the pavement taking his left shoe off (right one was already lying on the ground next to him) after which he proceeded to pour some of his bottled water over his left foot, clearly, by the puddle in which he was nearly sitting, something he'd already done with his other foot.

There are some odd people here.

In other news, I now own a pair of kangaroo-leather shoes, I was very pleased to learn that shoe sizes are one body measurement I don't have to carry round two versions of in my head (they use the UK size system here), and when buying the shoes, the salesman unexpectedly said "Oh bugger." Not that I mind, but I keep forgetting that swearing has a much lower impoliteness score over here!