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Archive Category: Work
- Our four year old guest from Rosebank caught her first fish and ate it
- Her mother caught one too…
- Ian didn’t catch a fish
- Jen and M share the same birthday - March 29!
- We had a divine dual birthday breakfast at Muddy Waters Cafe
- Ian and I got the feeling that our proferred birthday gifts left something to be desired
- M got four Eric C. Hiscock books and Jen received a pink milky glass art deco ceiling light shade
- I’m sure they could both sell them on ebay
- The next day I left for a meeting in Canberra
- I like motel rooms
- I flew back to Queensland on Friday. Naturally there were no trains back to Hervey Bay that night
- I paid $25 and dossed down in a 12 bed dorm at the Tinbilly Backpackers. I could write reams about it, but have no time
- The next morning (Saturday) I got on the Sunlander - a vastly superior travelling experience when compared to the clinical sardiney Tilt Train
- Got home and merged with the couch
Bed Early & Tiny Cat
Wednesday, 20 November 2002
Oh, must concetrate on getting to bed early. First night of no commitments (do not misunderstand me, a social life is Good) but it’s nice to come home and only have to think of all the stuff you have to do in between the walls of your house rather than knowing you’re going out and won’t be home til late…. Today I went to the Bureau of Meteorology and sat surrounded by….meteorologists (what a
suprise!) I did make a good contact for the stuff I’m researching at the moment, so that was good…I spent the rest of my time propping open my eyelids and being baffled by probability data….eeek! David Jackson, you owe me lunch!! The house of David & Ellise has a tiny cat!
Garbo Good Friday
Friday, 18 April 2003
Ah, I vant to be alone. Actually, I have no choice. I am alone. As far as I can ascertain I am the only one in this whole university. I don’t usually ‘dress for work’ mostly I just wear trousers and boots - I suppose it’s no different today, but I am wearing my new boots (not Doc-style, more girly girl style with zips up the sides and heels). They make me feel work-like. So I only got here an hour and a half late rather than not getting here at all. If I haven’t explained before, the reason that I am all alone in here on Good Friday (and next Monday and Tuesday also) is because I am employed as a casual. This is my choice - as a casual I don’t get holidays or sick leave but I do get paid double what I’d get if I was made permanent with the aforementioned perks. And as a girl that’s in the middle of buying a house and planning on moving over 1000 kilometres away, I need all the cash I can get - they can keep their sick leave!
So I whine about my office fairly often, and as no one is in it at the moment except for me I brought in my new camera!! Now I can show my grey brick view to the world, my dodgy desk (and after I took a photo of it I realised it still looks like it belongs to the last person who sat at it…) and my ventilation customisation…
OK, get ready for this one. As someone who has had their eyes lasered and who’s skin seems to dry out on command, having an air vent pumping in someone’s idea of ‘fresh air’ at temperatures that seem to vary as wildly as this university’s financial management doesn’t really make my time in the office as enjoyable as it could be. So after experimenting with vast amounts of cardboard and gaffer tape and pulling off the vent altogether….I ended up with this…
The Office
Thursday, 8 May 2003
The only other person in this room just left for lunch.
I. Am. Alone.
Go here. It’s funny.
Made It!
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
We made it! Left a very cold Melbourne on Thursday morning and arrived on Saturday night at about 8pm. It was quite a surreal journey - the first night we camped in West Wyalong in New South Wales and were so tired that we went to bed when it got dark at about 7:30pm.
M woke me up and said it was 6:30am and we should get going, so I bounded into action, packed up the tent and 15 minutes later we were on the road. It was when it didn’t seem to be getting light that I looked at the time on my mobile phone. It was 1:45am! I sent M a rather terse SMS message (he was in the van ahead of me) telling him to check the time - I saw the van swerve. Once we knew what the time was it was hard to keep our energy up, so after doing about 100km we pulled over at a truckstop and both slept in the front seats of our respective vehicles. Yes. I am still tormenting him about it.
The second night we stayed in Narrabri, which is about 100km from Moree where the radio had been saying that there were quite a few lightning cells. So Narrabri was just bizarre, the sky was black and the thunder very ominous. Thus I booked a cabin, as the thought of sleeping wetly in a tent did not appeal to someone like myself who had got her last sleep in the front seat of the car. So we felt rather special in the cabin, particularly when it started raining fat cats and dogs at about three in the morning. We were back on the road at 7am and then made it to Kingaroy by about 5pm, where we tracked down M’s mother (who was in hospital again) and told her we’d be in town that night. The next three hours were the longest of the whole trip - the Kilkivan road in between Wondai and Maryborough was just hideous - unsealed and very narrow (not to mention unlit). I felt like I was about to crush native wildlife with every rotation of my wheels :o(
Finally made it to Maryborough and hit the bottle shop. Bought three longnecks of VB from a somewhat inebriated man and then drove the final 30km to M’s mother’s house. Then crashed out. I have sooo much more to write, and pictures too, but my laptop battery is running out and we don’t have any electricity on yet (or water, for that matter) but hopefully will have power by tonight. Will write more then. Have survived the first site of the house and am feeling both positive and broke. Maybe busking is an option.
Out Googled
Wednesday, 8 October 2003
I have just been searching and searching for a page that I know exists and I know a few keywords that would help me find it, but could Google pull it from the ether? No, it could not. So I defected (I haven’t decided whether my treachery will be permanent) to alltheweb.com and it found it in one second flat. Me no understandy. Another positive. When I do a search for Bidston Moss it comes up with ‘Bidston Moss are a supersonic power-pop foursome’ unlike Google’s effort, which reads; ‘Twinks Free Thumnails 15 13 Twinks Piss Skater Twink Boys 13 YEAR OLD TWINK BOYS Free Naked Gay Boys Men Twinks Boy Twinks Gallery 156 137 Gay Twink Pics’ blah blah blah and so on. I know which search engine’s furnace I’m going to be stoking…..
Tulip
Thursday, 30 October 2003
Am up in Mt Macedon and it’s like stepping back into Winter. There are amazing red and yellow tulips out everywhere and the air has a mountainy chill to it. Wish I’d brought my camera - I’d forgotten how pretty it is up here.
Tadpole Hole
Wednesday, 12 November 2003
Spent another day at Mt Macedon yesterday and the weather was divine. Because I was there for work I couldn’t while away the last few dregs of my hangover in the sunshine, but I did take this shot on the way to lunch - lots of ‘almost-frogs’ having a lovely time.
Stinky Tram
Thursday, 13 November 2003
I ride the train to work, and I am kind of thankful that I get on one station from the end of the line - that way I get a seat all the way into the city. The problem is, then I have to get a tram up to the State Library tramstop - I try to avoid those new trams, because, frankly, they reek. I’m not sure how to describe the reek, but it’s a mixture of plasticky newness combined with an ingrained stale kind of odour, and first thing in the morning, it doesn’t do a lot for my state of mind. Thank god I didn’t get on one last Monday (hungover) morning. It would have been the end of me.
So now I’m trying to figure out how quickly to get across to Yarraville in my lunchbreak, and the VicTrip site is so incredibly, craply, non-user friendly, that it makes me want to take huge chunks out of my monitor whenever I look it up. It’s Trip Planner (that used to work perfectly well until they ‘upgraded’ the site i.e made it unusable, unnavigable…) spacks out with an error every time I try to use it. Argh. It makes me want to kill. But valiantly witholding my homicidal urges, instead I went to the M>Train page. I was not stunned to discover that this didn’t help much. In fact, obviously it’s just indicative of the way my day is going to pan out, but the two trains that I can catch are the particular ones that the timetable says:
North Melbourne 12.46 12.56
Flagstaff 1.03 1.11
Melbourne Central 1.01 1.09
Parliament 12.59 1.07
Spencer Street 12.49 12.59
Flinders Street Arr. 12.53 1.03
So these Werribee line trains actually jump forward in time and then snap quickly backward before they are sucked down a convienient vortex. I just know I”m not going to make it there on time.
Don’t Bother Reading
Thursday, 20 November 2003
My work is not happening. I am so strung out with horror at my complete lack of productivity. I have no inkling of how to put the ‘framework’ of this ‘project’ together. Not knowing what the project is, is really not helping me either. Nor is the guilt that I have sitting in the bottom of my stomach all day as I sit here flicking from bushfire to ebay, from bushfire to ebay - while all the time I can hear M out the back, working his arse off like a mad bastard. I’m supposed to be in here making the $$$ to keep this thing happening and even if I had someone standing over me about to hack off one of my fingers I couldn’t string together three coherent sentences.
I’m drowning in self-pity self loathing (what? can’t you tell?) and right this very minute is supposed to be the end of my working week. However I’m going to have to just keep torturing myself, and the long-suffering M by continuing to try and string something together until our visitors arrive on Sunday afternoon. All because I’m just too fucking stupid to wrap my head around this stupifyingly boring crap. OK- well, it’s not that bad - some of it is even quite interesting - but as I have no idea how to begin to regurgitate all this information I’ve collected I am just dying a slow death. First of all I was told just to look at a e r i a l firefighting and the c o s t s involved (like - I’m an economist…righhhht) - now it seems to have expanded into economic l o s s assessment (I’m putting gaps in between the letters in the hope that they won’t turn up in a google by my boss), different philosophies to fire and a few other things that I can’t even summon into my aching, but under-used brain. I am so frustrated I could just about kick something.
Protect the Surge!
Saturday, 27 December 2003
I am listenning to some ominous rumbling from the sky and peering at the Bureau of Meteorology radar site. Which is why I’m about to turn off my luscious laptop right about now….I have got to buy a surge protector! Losing one laptop to lightening is acceptable, but two is just careless.
Click here
to see the rainstorms…
The All-Nighters
Sunday, 28 December 2003
I think I’m going to stay up late tonight and see how much crap I can churn out for this report I’m writing. Luckily I have brought a friend to help me ;o)
…also, I can’t remember if I mentioned that the ShutUpAndStopIts from next door organised for the neighbours to feed their stupid big dog and their scraggly chickens, but made no arrangements and left no food for their poor little cat. So we have fed it a few times, and it is a sweet little black thing. I have named it ‘The ShutUp Cat’ - it is affectionately meant.
Wakey Wakey
Tuesday, 30 December 2003
My allnighter the other night (so I made it to about 3.30am) wrecked me yesterday but I stayed valiantly awake until about half past nine, and then passed out. Now I’ve woken up at ten to seven in the morning, and instead of lying there ruminating I have prised myself out of bed (it’s easier when there’s no one else in it - M sleeps in spare room til his back is better) and have even opened my work files. I’m worried. Will I be able to live up to myself tomorrow? Surely.
My early rising is an attempt to get some work done before heading off to the cinema to see the third LOTR - that should wake me up! Haven’t ever been to the cinemas here before.
Trepidation
Tuesday, 6 January 2004
Just sent in the first draft of my report or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be. An overview. Or whatever. Haven’t even sagged with relief yet, am too scared I am going to be able to hear my boss’s sharp, horrified, intake of breath all the way from Melbourne. In between trying to pad it out finishing it off to the point where someone else can actually look at it I’ve been on call to M, who is hobbitlike, under the house. I help pull copper pipes through the floor without kinking them. Big cheers to M for putting up with my throughout my report nightmare - making me cups of tea and breakfast, ignoring my capacious eyebags and seat flattened bottom.
The reason that I don’t know whether to call the thing I’ve been working on a ‘project’ a ‘paper’ a ‘report’ or an ‘overview’ is that basically, I have had no instruction. My boss is vague to the point of meaninglessness - first he mutters about using aeroplanes to fight fires, then a few weeks later he mentions something about economics, then a few weeks after that (by which point I am grey and shaking) he lets loose with the terms ‘wildland urban interface’ and vulnerability. Which leaves me to translate that he wants me to read up on everything and then regurgitate it, catwalk model style, into something for him to read on cold nights. Is it any wonder they invented age-defying face cream?
So anyway, I was googling two nights ago in a desperate attempt (after typing blah blah blah for about 16 pages) to gain some final understanding of this thing, and…no kidding…I found an outline of my actual topic…well I mean, I found a definition of my actual topic, outlined by my boss, with his name at the bottom of it, on some whacko non-university connected website. Naturally most of what I’ve produced had no real relation to it at all, but after spraying the ceiling with bits of exploded brain, I have become zen. I no longer care. I have always wanted to work from home, but at this point I would welcome being a check-out chick - anything rather than live with this uncertainty of whether I’m doing the right thing. I can’t believe that I work for someone who is a specialist in uncertainty. No. Hang on. It’s all making sense….
I Am A Nobhead
Thursday, 8 January 2004
Payday didn’t eventuate today. Why? I wondered. Then went and checked how much I was paid on Christmas Eve - it didn’t seem enough to cover a whole month (i.e. two pay packets in one because the uni would be closed on the day I was supposed to put in my next timesheet) - so I assumed I’d been paid a little bit more than the usual amount, either due to Christmas bonhomie in the pay office, or the extra hours I’d tacked on for extra report work. Nope. Neither. I had actually submitted my projected hours due to no one being around over Christmas and New Year, but assumed I’d still get paid fortnightly. Wrong.
What happened (this is what I’ve been able to fathom) is that they gave me a months pay all in one go on Christmas Eve, but it was less than what I would have got if I added two fortnightly ones together. I think I went into another tax bracket. Which is why it didn’t add up. Which is why I, in my personal form of budgeting which works by having about $10 left before payday, am going to be living on rice for the next two weeks. Gah. Actually, my budgeting wasn’t too bad, I had put a little bit aside to cover house repayments…kind of. Well, with the addition of all my secret emergency money *sigh*
Antipathy is waning. M made the best pesto I have ever tasted tonight for dinner with grape tomatoes and wholemeal pasta. I swooned with delight and washed up without a peep. I even took a picture of my dinner, but I won’t post it here because I am running out of space…actually had NO SPACE left until nice Martin gave me 20MB more to use and told me to start deleting to make some room. I can’t decided whether to kill off some of the Bidston Moss mp3 files (that are taking up 50% of all my space or wipe some [miaow] archives. I’m leaning toward the mp3s. Oh. Also saw the biggest spider I’ve ever seen outside captivity today. Sitting on my car. Took a picture of that too.
Not Too Cool
Wednesday, 21 January 2004
NOTE: to anyone trying to contact me, my mobile is lost. Email is best.
But not too hot either. Got up at 4am yesterday to get the 5:15am bus to get the 6:15am train which arrived in Brisbane at 9:40am. I had a chai tea at the appropriately named Jazzy Cat and then wandered around the art gallery shop until it was time to get my 2pm aeroplane. (Which I almost didn’t get due to lining up for VirginBlue instead of Qantas). Then the SkyBus, then the train from Spencer Street to Balaclava. Then the walk to my abode. No key. My dad was going to leave one in a specified spot and said he’d leave a message on my mobile phone if anything was different. However my mobile disappeared on Monday and I haven’t seen it since *sob* Trudged a few blocks to a phone box. Got told where the key really was. Collapsed with gratitude in front of the fridge in which my most excellent male parent had placed some Coopers Pale Ale, cheese, bread and smoked trout. Which was what I had for dinner. Hallelujah! I made it.
Am revelling in the lack of humidity. Am revolted by the sixty cent increase in my daily zone one ticket. Bastards.
Hitting the Road
Friday, 23 January 2004
M found my poor little phone, hanging on by its fingernails in the engine bay of our HiAce van. It was so near to the ground that if it had got bumped it would have been curtains for my (admittedly antique) Nokia 5110. By the way (finger pointing in the direction of Queensland) I did not put it there. I must have left it on the seat. The problem being that to access the engine you have to flip the middle front seat up…and that’s when it must have plopped to almost meet it’s doom. So now we just have to discover how much it will be to post it down and whether it’ll be worth the angst. When I have money one day I am going to gorge myself on gigs, like seeing Beth Orton at the Athenaeum *sniffle*
Flat Chat
Thursday, 29 January 2004
Stumbled into work today after 11am and subsequently have had no lunchbreak and have been flummoxing around trying to get it all together. Almost no time to blog! *gulp*
Last night’s Espy gig went better than expected - got a great influx of crowd just before we hit the stage - people coming out of The Strokes at the Palais and other shows around town. The best compliment I got was from a couple of guys fresh from Metallica at the Myer Music Bowl.
Him: You ROCK!!
Me: Um, thanks.
Him: No man. [does impossibly complicated handshake with me. I hope for the best.] You guys really rock! You were better than Metallica!!
Me: [gobsmacked] Really? [thinks] How were Metallica?
Him: Not the best mate. The music was great, but the front guys vocals….
Oh well. Not bad for a Wednesday. Dylan took lots of pics with his numerous amounts of freaky cameras. Jeremy from the lovely Tugboat came along to say hi (they’re playing this Sunday at the Rob Roy). Christian (BM drummer) had the odd experience of having his boss playing in the support band immediately before us! Weird. Thus he got to borrow drum-stuff and have a late start this morning which was pretty cool. The only downer of the night was my $50 parking ticket at the end of it :o(
I had been so happy to find a park that I’d forgotten to buy a ticket. So I got booked - just before midnight. Bastards. To find my park I had to drive through a film shoot out the back of the POW - a naked guy from The Castle streaking down the street ;o)
Note to World: The fact that they were giving away Sustagen Gold at the train station didn’t mean you had to drink it. Big mistake. Horrifying custardly consistency laced with nauseating fake banana aroma. No wonder they were giving them away. They’re fucking horrible.
Hold On. Detonating.
Wednesday, 4 February 2004
Work is doing my head in. I seem incapable of keeping my eyes open whenever I look at anything to do with economics. Which is why I can’t post anything here that’s even vaguely exciting. My brain had been hijacked by a bout of pure apathy - and the only things I have to look forward to while I’m still in Melbourne are tonights work dinner *gag* tomorrows frenzied last day at work for a while *shudder* and two visits to the airport in the space of twelve hours. Thus I have been reduced to defining myself as a Heroic Couplet (rather than Blank Verse, the next possible option).
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Something Stupid
Monday, 16 February 2004
Every day after I get up and have a cold shower I put 30+ Sunbock all over me. Yesterday I learned that even water resistant 30+ sunscreen can sweat off. As a result I have the worst sunburn on my back that I’ve had since… I’m not sure. Since I was about eight? Ow. It feels like I’m aging by the minute - at the moment I look like an English tourist, but by the time I get down to Melbourne I think I’ll look approximately 53 *sigh*
Dyl and Rach hired a little tinny yesterday and we went out fishing and shooting Super8 film at Burrum Heads. I was convinced I was in the shade of the roof awning the whole time - and assumed M would have pointed out my mistake, but no. He must just want me to look nearer to his age than I do.
There are still a million polaroids being produced every day and I think I’m going to have to grab my scanner out of storage. There’s only one thing standing in my way. The weather. Yesterday we escaped it by hanging on the boat for the first half of the day, and swimming under the pier for the last half. But today I’m trying to get some work done - but all I’ve done so far is make M solemnly swear on my fried upper back that no matter how much he likes it here, we are leaving Queensland before next summer (which I’m sure will be of moderate temperature and neglible humidity once I vacate the state - humph). Now I just have to find a pin to prick his finger with so I can make him sign in blood.
Telephony
Thursday, 11 March 2004
Plagued by phones. My boss has a new one that I’ve been playing with all morning - it’s v.snazzy. Finally figured out how to put a midi file of a ‘old phone ringing’ ringtone on it. I await his rapture…[tapping foot expectantly]
Here’s a link to the page - if you’ve got a phone that does those kind of fancy things. The site is free - as opposed to the crap ones that charge you megabucks.
Pizza should fix my state of mind. Am meeting Mr Crime who has offered to shout me lunch! It’s a crisp sunny day and last night I ate some cherry pie with cream. Sparked up my morning with the chai latte. I’m off to escape the office now…here I go….!
Sun Dazed
Thursday, 13 May 2004
The weather was pretty bad for the whole week after I got back from my trip, but, as I’ve mentioned, the last few days have made up for it. I noticed the other morning that our little front encosed verandah room gets soaked in sun from about 8:30am onwards. Goddamn it makes it hard to retreat to the study! I finally live in a house that gets some sun - but it’s so hard not to sit in it drinking cups of tea and reading my book - it’s a wonder I’m actually sitting here typing this at all - though of course, laptops are designed to be portable…
Mwah ha ha ha ha.
T-G-I-F
Friday, 28 May 2004
Moments later I caught a whale. Not bad for a Friday afternoon.
All that was missing was the esky.
Brain Malaise Plus Panic
Tuesday, 1 June 2004
I am losing the plot. Have a million things to do. Hand washing (that would be clothes not repetitively drenching my digits) that I’ve put off since I got back, the kitchen is breeding it’s own new lifeforms and it’s M’s mothers birthday tomorrow. We are going to dinner at his sisters tonight. As our lack of finance situation is still fully fledged, I had the Bright Idea of heading to the bottle shop, buying an $11 hipflask bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label, coming home and siphoning it into my empty bottle of 10 year old Balvenie Single Malt (thank god I kept the tube it came in) given to me by my boss for my birthday somewhere over Singapore.
I feel no shame. She can’t taste most things. We have no cash. Faking it is totally the way to go. So I can now continue on with my stupid report with a slightly less heavy heart - some days I completely loathe my job, and this is one of them. I have reached a point where I’m trying to summarise a particular presentation, and I repeatedly read the paper in question up to the third paragraph and then my brain goes into a ‘ALERT ALERT too-much-academic-speak-help-me-to-help-you-not-slide-off-your-chair’ kind of trance and I have to shake myself and start all over again. I’m dealing with sentences like:
‘the formulation of a conceptual framework to analyse the likely outcomes resulting from the better use of…’
and:
‘It is important to recognize the on-going continuous improvement that is likely to take place over time with respect to…As a result of these continuous improvement of overall services aimed at…’
Etcetera, etcetera. Only Balvenie can help me now. Bugger.
Prospects
Friday, 4 June 2004
We’re all in at work today, drinking tea, listening to the last Cat Power album. J and J are arguing companionably and I am ricocheting between work and surf. There is talk of a work excursion to the Kill Bill Double Bill. I may even make it to the footy while I’m down here - I have a twisted ambition to be forced to buy a cardboard four-beer-holder for fifty cents there. I am not really a football person - I leave that to Rae - but as I’ve never been to a game…I may as well have the experience guided by an expert.
After helping his mother buy a house on her birthday (June 2nd) M was feeling very pleased with himself, as he usually avoids family participation activities like he does instant coffee. However I think his mum must have had a reaction from her recent trip down to Eden (NSW), the cold she caught there, selling her house last weekend, her birthday dinner on Tuesday night and then putting down the house deposit on Wednesday. Thursday morning she was not so good and is now in hospital. M is going to visit today, so I’m waiting to see how she is. Stupid lupus.
Though I like listening to music at work - we all have very compatible tastes - I can’t write. Even writing this has been an effort. Yike. I have to get over my problem with lyrics taking over my thought processes.
Todays Vow: To stay out of all record shops. Out. Out!
Diving in the Steno Pool
Friday, 11 June 2004
Spent yesterday in the country being a secretary. I was going to write ‘glorified secretary’, but really, I wasn’t even that. Am now trying to decipher everything I wrote. Oh yes, because it’s all so exciting, this ‘trying to plan for non routine events’ stuff. It was soooo interesting, listening to pompous men trying to figure out a ‘planning framework’ for something that cannot be defined, or anticipated and may actually never happen. Something high risk and low probability. Maybe. If you’re lucky. One of the men there interrogated myself and my workmate as to our work projects and ‘academic backgrounds’ with the kind of authoritarianism that screams ‘I-get-paid-more-then-you-could-even-dream-of-for-dealing-with-things-that-might-never-happen-AND-I-have-a-penis’. Of course, when I told him I’d been working on economics and f i r e and that kind of thing, he immediately assumed I was an economist. I took great delight in telling him I have a BA in Journalism/Literature. I was going to leave it there, but my boss got jumpy and pointed out that I did have a masters.
“In what?” said Government-spook hopefully.
I was going to say ‘astrophysics’ but thought that the truth would be more annoying.
“In writing,” I said.
All of them looked at me blankly.
“Science writing?” wheedled Government-spook.
I looked smug. My boss looked out the window.
“No. Just writing.”
Huh. At least there was a free lunch. And when Government-spook stood up, I was happy to observe he was at least two feet shorter than me.
Avoiding the Issue
Wednesday, 16 June 2004
I’m slamming back the $5 Coldbuster Juice, Vitamin C and Odourless Garlic Capsules in an effort not to succumb to the bug that is threatening to take me down. I wage a losing battle not to get some kind of cold/flu thing whenever I come to Melbourne. Gah. Meanwhile, there is stress up there in Hervey Bay. Stress. Do you hear me? STRESS. And I’m heading back to jump straight into the middle of it; to disperse the pool and make calm little ripples. To open my rosebud-like lips and emit soothing whale sounds. M-All-Alone is having some kind of family fuelled catharsis and has reached the point of of stress denial (seemingly more popular with males). I must buy him a bodhran.
I can discuss this no further, as much as I would like to. And there you have it. I cease to type. This is the one problem with having a blog that people that you know and love read now and again. The pleasures and righteous feelings of self-censorship. Oh. And on other topics - I just went to Footscray in my lunch break and realised how very little I missed it; the smackies that can hardly stand up, the coughing and spitting into the gutter, the general dodgy crapness of a lot of the shops. Bleugh. I am glad I don’t have to walk through all that every day anymore.
Au Revoir…Again
Tuesday, 5 October 2004
I am leaving in about 15 minutes to be driven to Brisbane with Lisa and Dennis, leaving behind M, Saf and Mow 
I am very sad to be leaving, as I thought I would be up here until we moved down to Melbourne, however, my boss had other ideas. I leave Brisbane tomorrow for Perth and this stupid conference, where yet again I will know no one and know nothing. Lisa has suggested I take up smoking for the duration so I have an excuse to race outside a couple of times an hour and escape. I can’t believe I’m seriously considering it. Gah. There is no hotel booked, that I can discover - and of course, my boss knows nothing about anything. I give up. Bye. Expect some mournful I-am-a-social-incompetent posts from the west…
Club Lounge Recovery
Monday, 11 October 2004
I spent the majority of yesterday cycling around Rottnest Island. So there are some perks to four days of conference hell, punctuated only by brief flashes of wonder (which were the morning/afternoon tea and lunch breaks). The ‘Gala Dinner’ was a scary faux Greek-wedding affair, with dodgy food, free flowing alcohol and people old enough to know better dancing to the aptly named horrifying cover band ‘Our Generation’. My table was non-plussed - it was anything but our generation - and cranked out the hits with such relentless predictability that we began guessing what they would play next…My Sharona…River Deep, Mountain High…they were infatigable. I was not.
Yesterday most people left, but my intrepid boss wanted to go to Rottnest Island. I - the humble employee - agreed. Of course it inevitably cost more than I could afford, and, of course, he (on his comparably stratospheric salary) didn’t notice. So I kept getting out my poor little exhausted plastic square. The weather on the way over was completely dire - slashing rain, huge waves, howling wind - in fact, it was so exciting that I didn’t feel seasick at all! Once we got there it cleared, and thus I am sunburnt. Again. Rottnest Island is extremely beautiful - and having completed my reconnaissance by bicycle, I have decided that M and I must return there by boat. The water is so clear and the Quokkas! Let me just say that they were lucky that I didn’t have a basket attached my bike, or I would have taken one with me. At least one. I took an obsessive amount of photos of a Quokka that had a little tiny Quok in it’s pouch - I almost died of its cuteness.
I am typing from the [gasp] Qantas Club at Perth airport - smuggled in by my boss. Bliss. Free internet, coffee, tea and trashy magazines that, alas, I cannot indulge in. It would only confirm my blondeness to the other conference people that are lurking about. There are accented blokes in suits doing deals on their phones all around my cubicle and I am feeling very jet set. Oh. Flight has been delayed half an hour. It takes So Long to get back to Melbourne. Gah. I’d best go and find a phone and begin bartering for accomodation.
William Tell
Monday, 11 October 2004
M introduced me to the term ‘the tell’. It’s when you do something that gives you away - e.g. like when John Howard says he knows nothing about something and blames his advisers - that’s a tell that he’s lying (and oh, what fun the next three l-o-n-g years are going to be…). Thankfully my boss has a tell - or I would have probably lost my job at least thirty-seven times already. He has a terribly annoying habit of clearing his throat. Constantly. So whenever he is slinking up behind me when I am, for example, blogging in the Qantas Lounge - I always get enough warning to switch to the other page I have open in the background. Usually something like this. I am aware I am breaking an essential rule of blogging here i.e. ‘never discuss your workplace online or you may be dooced‘ however, sometimes it’s necessary to either vent - or rampage through the airport causing a national incident. Gah.
Melbourne Monday
Monday, 6 December 2004
Back in the land of the many and varied seasons. I sent a text message to Christine while I was on the Skybus coming into town on Saturday night and it turned out that Meebar were playing at the Evelyn! So I went straight to the gig, festooned with my luggage and kept Mung and J company. They showed lots of video clips. After Meebar were Blessington, who I hadn’t seen before - they seemed very Go-Betweensy, though not quite as hooky. By then I was completely knackered and walked back to Collingwood trailing my wheely back, while Mung rode his pushy.
Yesterday (after a truly inspiring breakfast - asparagus, poached eggs, homemade bread) I spent an hour getting sunburnt shoulders at Camberwell Market, wandered through the city, caught a train to Coburg and helped the G.R’s with their afternoon beer ration. Then trammed back to Carlton and, on impulse, ducked in and saw Zach Braff’s movie - Garden State. I give it three and a half stars - and the soundtrack was great. Then I trudged from Carlton to Collingwood and went to bed.
Have been feeling very bad leaving M all alone up there to cope with the various house stresses we have underway. I feel very powerless and unhelpful down here - particularly because I don’t really need to be here for this stupid workshop that is taking place this week. Yes - I helped organise it, but I will be contributing nothing to it except my presence. Which is what my boss wants. Gah. Very frustrating.
Pink Monkeys
Wednesday, 8 December 2004
I got a donation!! Huzzah! Thank you, thank you. It helps - it really does. I am frazzling my way through at work - tonight is the big dinner that I have been organising. I shouldn’t be stressing over it, but couldn’t sleep and ended up reading for an hour at 3.30am this morning. Gah. My boss decided that people need training to use the blog I set up [yawn] and that I am to conduct the training this afternoon! I was ropable - until I realised that the chances of anyone coming to ‘learn to blog’ that late in the afternoon are minimal. Yay! I will stand in the computer lab, pacing back and forth, looking intensely disappointed, and then just hand out a ‘how to blog’ information sheet at the meeting tomorrow.
Hot Under the Collar
Wednesday, 5 January 2005
Stress levels mounting. Applying to refinance the home loan (very adult sounding) - too bad they’ll probably tell me to bugger off because I no longer work full time. Then we’ll be living on rice and hiding from the debt collectors. On top of this, at work they are advertising my job. And they are not advertising the way that I was told they would. It is being advertised externally - not just internally inside the university. It is also fulltime (this is bad) for a two year fixed term (yeah, right). I’m supposed to be experienced in policy development and analysis (hee hee) - and no, I’m not going to link to it. The less competition I have the better!
(Am listening to a recording of The Breeders playing in Stockholm in May ‘94 - they are better than good. I need to get back to Melbourne and crank up the band!)
Everybody wants to work, no no, not me…
Wednesday, 2 March 2005
It’s uncanny. My time on a long long leash is coming to an end. With the interview for my job looming on the (very near) horizon, my boss warned me today that I would be asked when I would be coming back from Queensland. Which is fair enough - I have had a very flexible, ‘working from home’ arrangement happening for the past 18 months - and I doubt they are going to offer me a permanent, Melbourne based, position without that vital piece of information. [sigh] So I am going to have to come up with a plausible explanation…and also a date by which I am going to be back in town. This is very hard - as it relies on someone buying our house.
My boss said a while back;
“We will fly you down to Melbourne for an interview…”
But apparently he forgot this minor fact - so I had to swallow my distaste and inquire how I should go about booking my flight. He seemed to think I should pay for my own flight to go and get interviewed for my own job. I conveyed that this was not going to be the case, and reminded him of what he’d said. He sounded rather incredulous, and commented that he must have been in a generous mood at the time. Gah. I feel no guilt. I have to go to Canberra at the end of the month as well - both times the Tilt Train from Maryborough to Brisbane will cost me $100 return. He’s lucky I don’t sting him for that.
So it’s all coming to a head. I may have to relocate to Melbourne after all in a month or so, leaving M here to hold the fort. Not something I’m keen on - but, as much as my job leaves me cold, I need it until we sell.
The Interview
Monday, 14 March 2005
So I had my job interview, and lied my way through it with general aplomb. There was a panel of four interviewers including my boss (who I was instructed not to recognise as they were treating this like a ‘regular’ interview - as in, I was supposed to ignore the fact that I’ve already worked in the position for the last two years). What a joke. I had warned my boss beforehand that if anyone used the word ‘paradigm’ while interviewing me, I would not be restrained from launching myself across the table and physically assaulting the culprit. I can only remember a few bits:
Interviewer2: What do you see as the blah blah blah paradigm blah blah blah?
Me: [Stiffens. Shows remarkable restraint.] Yes. That’s an interesting question. I would have to say that…blah blah blah blah [I still don’t understand the use of that stupid word.]
Interviewer3: And in five years or so, where do you see yourself?
Me: Further away from here than you can possibly imagine…oops…I mean, I anticipate by that time we will have produced a number of publications and completed our major research project, so I feel that as a group we will have great credibility in our field. I hope very much to continue and expand my role over the next five years. [Yeah. Right.]
Interviewer3:…and possibly begin a PHD?
Me: Absolutely. The area that I’m currently researching is very intriguing and I would love the opportunity to examine it closely. So that’s a definite possibility, yes. [lie lie lie]
Interviewer4: Presenting work…blah blah…public speaking…blah blah?
Me: Sorry, I don’t understand the question.
Interviewer1: Presenting work…blah blah…public speaking…blah blah?
Me: I have extensive public speaking experience and training. I have studied broadcast journalism and worked in public radio for a number of years. I have co-authored papers that have been presented at international conferences, and I am completely confident about presenting research that I have a good grasp of. [Meaning: I have never presented any research or powerpoint presentations to anyone, anywhere, ever - and intend to continue thusly.]
So after the whole shambolic, overly-formal excercise, A and I are wrecks. The boss says “Let’s go to lunch!”
“Great!” we think - “his shout - we’ll choose somewhere good.”
So we go out, order seafood, a couple of glasses of white. And when we get to the cash register, our boss says - “Just give me a twenty each, and we’ll call it sqare.”
Bastard.
[…this post may be removed after a week due to dooce potential]
U.S Passport Photos
Thursday, 17 March 2005
Today I convinced my workplace to pay for the renewal of my US passport - thank god. My boss has a fixation that they won’t let me into the US without it - even though I visited back in 2000 on my Australian passport without a problem. I decided that if I had to renew it because of a work-related visit, then work should shoulder the cost - $126!! Luckily they agreed. So after lunching with L, we took off to one of the two photo places in the city that the US consulate deems worthy.
“Oh no,” says the woman at the Swanston street Kodak Express Smiths.
“I know they have us on their site, but their information is wrong. I’m sorry.”
Grrr.
I come back to the office and look at the list again. I call the other mob who go by the fancy name of Van Der Toorren in the Block Arcade on Collins street. With an address like that, I should have known there would be a problem. The voice on the end of the phone is cultured.
“Hi, do you take US passport photos?”
“Yes we do.”
“And how much are they?”
“They’re $35 for a sheet of five, and the processing is overnight - you have to pick them up the next day.”
“Thirty-five dollars? Right. I only need two photos.”
“We can give you two photos…”
“Good.”
“…but it will still cost you $35.”
“Thank you, goodbye.”
At present I’m dossing in Collingwood - so I call the consulate approved Kodak shop in Smith Street.
“Hi, do you take US passport photos?”
“Yes we do.”
“And how much are they?”
“Twelve dollars for a sheet of six.”
“And how long do they take to process?”
“They’re instant.”
“What time do you close?”
“Seven.”
I just have to wonder what those Block Arcade people are actually doing when they are processing their passport photos. Dousing them in liquid gold? Employing Icelandic virgins to seal them with a kiss? I don’t get it.
A Recap
Wednesday, 6 April 2005
I have waaaay too much to write about - so I am going to cover the past two weeks in point form in an effort to clear my mental state and move on…
AMENDMENT: Ian says he caught a fish. But he didn’t write the theme tune, or sing the theme tune, so I don’t believe him.
Au Revoir *sob*
Sunday, 10 April 2005
The time is nigh. I have to abandon poor M and head for the lights of the big city. My ‘working remotely’ gig has run out, they have given me a permanent contract (which I have already put off for a month) and I have to be a constant presence at work, as opposed to someone who turns up every few months and visits the staffroom an unnecessary amount of times to convince everyone that, er, no, I really am around all the time, it’s just that I rarely venture out of the office. Yeah. I think that I can’t pull that scam any longer.
We are going to skimp by until the house sells. No more red wine for M. I am going to find some kind of short term bedsitter or share house place in Melbourne; I’ve been looking for places on realestate.com.au and domain.com.au - and you can tell I’m looking for the cheapest thing I can find - because I have to go through pages and pages of $50 per week inner city car parks before I hit the one bedroom flats [sigh]
Ungrateful and I don’t care
Tuesday, 19 April 2005
(This rant is in place of the lovely pictures I was going to post until my new ‘Universal Card Reader’ refused to read my card that has all my pictures on it….grrrrr).
Quite a few people have congratulated me on getting a permanent postion at my illustrious place of work. In case any irony deficient Americans might be reading, it really is illustrious. Not. Although I have never had a permanent position before and feel very legitimised and adult about the whole arrangement, to be completely truthful - it totally SUCKS. I would much, much (did I say much?) rather have remained a casual employee. I don’t really care about sick pay, and I holiday happily in poverty - what pleases me most is a decent pay packet. But as of May 2nd (and it just has to happen on my birthday…) I will earn a hundred dollars less a fortnight for working fulltime than I currently get for working four days a week.
Though they have put me on a dollar less an hour than my casual position, after tax, super, and don’t forget HECs - I actually take home nine dollars an hour less than what I’ve been used to for the past two years. Naturally I didn’t take any of this into account when I made my plans for moving to Melbourne. I have had to change my employment contract to fulltime instead of four days a week, and give up looking for a place to rent [tightens belt]. If I could think of any way to avoid my ‘permanent position’ short of going on the dole and letting the bank sell the house, I would. As it is, I am going to keep my beady eyes open for alternative employment…
But the news is not all bad. One bit of good news is that my lovely friend and fellow sufferer, A from work (the only other poor sod who is also being made ‘permanent’), told me today that her parents would love a boarder! So I think I am going to be staying in someone’s house, in the heart of Carlton, for the barely affordable, but definitely amazing sum of $75 a week! Barely believable. I can walk to hell from there in five minutes! Sorry, I mean work. This time next week I will be sleeping somewhere in the Humber - maybe Goonawindi or Coonabarabran if I put in some good miles [sigh] M and I are in mourning for each other.
Back into the grind
Thursday, 28 April 2005
I’m feeling sort of displaced. Lots of concrete, noise and rush.
The Eye Bags, The Eye Bags
Tuesday, 24 May 2005
I think I’ve finally got the main issues that have been killing [miaow] sorted out (she says confidently while clutching a Large and Solid Tree). And if I don’t, it can bloody wait until tomorrow, because my eye bags are knocking against my knuckles and hampering me from typing. This is patently the wrong way to go about cheating the sore-throat-cold thing I am being stalked by. In other good news - I got out of going to the US with my boss. Oh my wily wiles. More on that later. I’m going to catch a tram…
And don’t write to me telling me that SpamKarma is dead - that’s one of those ‘tomorrow’ things.
The Juxtaposition
Wednesday, 25 May 2005
Today is cold and windy. I’ve been getting text messages from an ebullient M.
Am doing 4 knots. Just crossed sandbank near pier.
Oomoo is on his first island! I am eating an or ange.
Have to tack out v.far. Just used chart and compass. Bit scary. All good tho!
I am eaten by the desire to get back to my cats, boat, house and boy. Can hardly believe I can sit here in the office talking to M while he stands on a small island in Queensland. It’s too weird. At least he has to suffer sometimes - we’re very short on money and M has been out of both coffee and milk for three days, and he is also making 32 tables for his sisters new restaurant. He just has to concentrate on not making them too beautiful and taking too long on them
My First Sick Day
Friday, 27 May 2005
Well, the title should read ‘My First Legitimate Sick Day’ - it’s probably not even that legitimate, as my boss said ‘if you’re still under the weather, take a day off’. I have no idea of the process of actually getting a sick day - i.e. the administrative processes - and I don’t think he does either, so we just avoid the issue. I’ve been feeling fairly crap all week, so a day off was overdue… I did cross a hurdle - I stayed home Friday night and actually put together a dinner of pesto pasta and some salad at my lodgings! My female landlord was very nice and threw all sorts of things at me to help the salad along, and gave me some stewed quince with some home made ice cream for dessert. They also pressed half a bottle of wine on me and instructed me to do my worst. Then they went out for dinner, and I kicked back with my friend the Dog in front of the TV. A million channels, and the only thing worth watching was Footloose.
A Night Well Spent
Friday, 3 June 2005
Last night I moved into Mung’s place for the weekend. Oh the bliss. Oh the slobbing around. The first thing I did was drink his last stubby of beer and eat a delectable pizza from Mama Dora’s. I kicked back on the couch, flicked the channels as was my whim, and watched Las Vegas and Lost. Oh the trashy American television. Oh the illicit pleasure of being in control of the remote. This morning I got up in a leisurely fashion, secure in the knowledge that my boss was away in Sydney, and ate cornflakes with hot milk and made a pot of tea. For the first time in a month I didn’t slam down the museli with soy milk and head out the door - I. Took. My. Time. Sauntered into work just before eleven, in fact. In this case, a change is as good as a holiday.
Sweaty Palm
Sunday, 5 June 2005
I leave to go to Beechworth via Macedon tomorrow morning. Which would ordinarily be a nice trip, but as it is for work, I will glimpse scenery on the way to the conference thingy each day, and that’s about it. Thank God I am staying with A and not dossing with everyone else, where I would run into people I only know by sight and have to pretend to look knowledgable (always hard - particularly early in the day). Today I discovered that my Palm Pilot has spacked out and erased itself. Everything. Everything on it is gone. All my information about flying cats to Melbourne. Phone numbers. The lot. I can sync it with my laptop, but it still means I’ll lose everything I’ve entered in the last month, as I just sync it on my work computer to update AvantGo. Goddamnit, this is annoying!
Seventeen days, including two weekends, until I leave to head north and find M, cats and house. I’m not counting hours, but I’m definitely crossing off the days.
Buzzword Bingo
Wednesday, 8 June 2005
Last night dinner was at a winery, so today everyone is walking around looking a little fragile. Myself and my associates have developed a game that aids conference survival - it’s called Wanky Buzzword Bingo. We make a list of all the crappy, overused, pompously annoying words that all these highranking people spew forth and then cross them out as the day progresses. None of us have jumped to our feet and yelled BINGO! yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Here are a selection of the buzzwords’:
convergence
unpack the idea
toolbox
code down
drill down
empowerment
toolkit
fine fuel moisture
UPDATED:
paradigm (ohhh, how could I have forgotten this one?)
method/methodology (used interchangably)
Tipsy
Tuesday, 14 June 2005
I am coming second in footy tipping. However, being a footy nuffy, I often pinch my tips from the Swinburne Computer. My sister - the resident footy guru - doesn’t seem fazed by this. What she is giving me grief over is my confession that I didn’t get my tips in in time twice this season and put them in secretly on a Monday morning. I should add to this statement that I spent the two weekends concerned oblivious to any results - any results on anything. I was under media blackout with no paper, television or radio. Actually, more to the point, I wouldn’t have confessed to her what I’d done if I had cheated. Now it has all come to bite me on the arse. I did last week-but-one’s tips straight out of my own brain and did wildly well. The week prior to that I picked every team in the left hand column and screamed home again. Now I’m coming second, my sister cannot hide her disgust and keeps on bringing up the fact that I cheated. And not only did I cheat, I cheated twice. It’s like we have reverted back to being 11 and nine again; of course she didn’t give a toss when she was ahead.
Vent Vent
Thursday, 16 June 2005
The vent in the office blows like a constant minor hurricane. Occasionally, for no obvious reason, the airflow ceases. We all look at each other, barely daring to breathe for fear that it might be taken as encouragement. The silence is more than blissful, it’s precious, because we know it will be fleeting. Except for our initial squeaks of delight, no one speaks while the air is off - the reprieve from the white noise is too sublime to interupt. It only ever lasts for a minute or two.
Disem-Powered
Wednesday, 20 July 2005
Yesterday I became one of those people about which I love to rant. And Kartar agrees with me on the topic. We are having lunch in an hour and will tell each other, yet again, how much we despise Powerpoint ‘presentations’. So yesterday the spotless white of my soul was besmirched. I had to give one. I was the only person who was not a professor. Oh the joy, the rapture. Oh the sweat and adrenaline. It may have been less nervewracking had I actually had a handle on what I was supposed to witter on about, but as I was giving it on behalf of my boss (still overseas, still overseas) - it was all about as clear as mud. It also became obvious that his presentation (out of which I had manually erased the worst of the lies) was lacking in comparison to the ones that came before it (and probably the ones after it, though I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t stick around) - primarily in the areas of hard figures: i.e. there were none. Luckily my hair is now both blonde and pink, so I just hoped fervently that, in a room of combovers and mathematical boffins, I would be an object of curiousity and one that would not be expected to utter statements of brilliance. Which I didn’t.
Hourly Rate
Wednesday, 20 July 2005
A question. Does anybody know what freelance researchers charge per hour? I am going to see a man about a dog tomorrow morning…sorry, that would be, a lady about a job; and I’m supposed to be able to let them know what I charge [gulp]. I’ve done a few freelance gigs here and there, but they’ve been charged at an overall price for the whole project. This thing is going to be ongoing. I’m not sure what is too much, or what is too little. Help!?
And briefly…
Thursday, 21 July 2005
My boss just called. From the USA. He tells me what’s been going on, who he’s seen and what he’s done. We talk about my reviled powerpoint presentation.
“I think it went well,” I lie.
“Good. I’m very glad you went and represented us. What was everyone else like?”
“Umm, kind of boring. All about budgets and stuff.” I fail to point out that I left in the halftime break and never returned.
“Great. Well, we’ll go over it when I get back.”
I sigh. “That would be great.”
“OK, well, I don’t really have time to speak to anyone else, but say hello for me, and I’ll see them on Monday.”
I look around the room. I’m the only one in it. I’ve been the only one in it all day, and assume that I will continue on in isolation until 5pm.
“No worries, I’ve waved at them for you,” I say, waving at empty chairs.
“Thanks. OK. See you Monday.”
“Have a safe flight.”
Asking the Oracle
Monday, 25 July 2005
You asked
Vocational Make-Over: Is It Time For A Career Change?
The Oracle says
Time? It’s way overdue.
…it is time to act…?!
I’m a quitter
Tuesday, 26 July 2005
I have been offered a new job. A job of wonder and strange delight. A job that is about two minutes drive from my house, is three days a week and better paid than where I am now. I get my own booklined room (with adjoining sunroom), and they have told me I can go and buy my own chair, for which they will reimburse me. (At that suggestion, I went into shock.)
So yesterday, I fronted up to work (on the tenth floor with fluroescent lighting, minimum humidity, blaring vent, dodgy chair and crappy computer) and decided to hand in my notice. Yike! I was such a hopeless case that I put it off until very late in the day - which was lucky, as it turned out. My boss sent me to ’sit in’ for him at very high level, executive meeting, with the brief to ‘listen, and take notes’. Yes. Because I was employed as a secretary, not a researcher. So that added to my drive. At the meeting I saw a mate of mine, D, and he scribbled me a note that said ‘I quit last week!’
For a moment I thought he had some kind of direct line to my brain - how timely! But then again, I now know three other people who have quit their jobs for better ones in the past five days. Weird. So D and I went for a coffee in the park (my first coffee of the year), and he gave me the lowdown on his ‘quitting’ experience, and suggested that I talk in a quiet voice, and be firm. He said the worse bit was the minute before it happened - sweat, adrenaline, fear… but that after that, it was just sweet release.
So, prepped and ready and caffeinated, I strode back to work, whacked on some lipstick for good luck, and went into my boss’s office. I looked suitably serious, and said;
“I have to tell you something.”
His body kind of went into a sigh.
“What?”
“I’m giving you notice. I’ve found a new job.”
I waited for some fireworks, but there were none forthcoming. He looked nonplussed.
“That’s very unfortunate.”
It was slightly anti-climactic, but also a great relief. We chatted for about 15 minutes, about how he values my writing (I pointed out that I’m so swamped by admin, I never get to do any), and who is going to fix the computers now (not me) and had I thought of freelancing? Maybe I could write up some reports a bit further down the track? I looked enigmatic.
I leave on the 5th of August. I will ride a white steed and play the trumpet all the way to the pub. Hallelujah!
That’s it then.
Friday, 5 August 2005
It’s all over. No more office, bad ventilation, mindless frustration at lack of direction, crapola computers and particularly, no more vista of the wall out the window. I will, however, miss the people that I worked with a great deal. My boss never advertised jobs, he preferred to employ friends of friends, which somehow guarranteed a run of people who I would have considered myself lucky to meet in any situation; co-habiting in our hellhole of an office was almost (almost) a pleasure. Tonight, my send off was a little bit lacking, due to short notice. J had already planned to leave on a hiking trip, my boss has sinusitis and my sister decided she couldn’t be bothered to come. So we have planned a proper night out on the 18th of August, and have given everybody due warning.
I feel like poking myself to see how I feel about leaving, but I don’t really feel much at all. I hated the job. I will keep in touch with the people that I’ve met - those who have helped me via funny emails, phone calls to Hervey Bay, hung out with me at those jaw-stiffeningly boring conferences and timely chai lattes *sniffle*
Ah well, it’s a new start on Monday, a new moon tonight. I think it’s all for the best. Who knows? With part time hours, I might even get an album recorded. I can only hope.
A New Day
Monday, 8 August 2005
Argh! The horrors of starting new jobs! I am staggering under information overload. Staggering. However, my little office is gorgeous - booklined with yachting and crime and history…and if I want fresh air I just have to open the glass door to outside. Pretty different from last week - where I had to go down ten floors just to see what the weather was doing. I am even feeling useful as I cranked out my first report - how I love having deadlines! How I am going to love producing stuff that Actually. Gets. Used.
On Wednesday I go shopping to [gasp] pick out my chair. I’ve been asked what tea I like best and what stationery I require. There are cats lounging about, and I’m free to play whatever music I like. There has to be something wrong… Surely?
So now I am home near the heater, M is cooking up his brand new wonder-soup (Sweet Potato & Sweet Corn with Blue Cheese Swirl) and there’s a bottle of white in the fridge. Great plans are afoot for thiscoming weekend when we’re thinking of going to the Australian Specialist Cheese Show! What a perfect event for M to attend! Now, if I could just stop checking to see whether Albert/Kennedy has arrived…keep going with that spicy food Rae!
Type what I say, not HOW I SAY IT
Tuesday, 9 August 2005
Bi haf a sduffy nodse abd feel likde I’be beed rund over.
I’m not joking, this is a fairly accurate representation of what I sound like right now. And d’you want to know the worst thing? I am training voice recognition software. If it wasn’t so damnably tortuous, it would make a good basis for a comedy sketch. I keep saying ‘is’ and it keeps typing ‘ease’. I say ‘a dog’ and it glibly replies ‘adob’. Bloody thing. ‘Buddy thick’. Gah.
Rumble
Tuesday, 16 August 2005
Don’t know if anyone else just felt the earth tilt slightly, but the email just went around confirming I am in third place on the footy tipping ladder, and gnawing on my sister’s heels. I’m on 98 points. She’s on 99. I can can feel her daggers reaching from the city to Sandringham. Because I’m such an uber sporting pundit. Not.
Scrambling, Sailing, Soundcarding
Thursday, 1 December 2005
Not dead. Just doing stuff. have got my new computer going! Woot! (as Kartar puts it). Turning it on for the first time was a little bit hairy. As I know next to nothing about electricity - except that you should touch something metal that is on the ground to discharge any static before sticking your hands into a computer) I kicked off my shoes, grabbed the metal pole of the standard lamp, pulled out my soundcard (the most expensive thing) and then pressed the ‘on’ switch. It just purred straight to life! I was gobsmacked. I would not have been the least surprised if the whole thing had caught alight and exploded. But it didn’t. Initally it only found one hard drive, but I switched around the hard drive ribbon and it then discovered them both (although the one that is supposed to be 160gig is only coming up as about 125gig - weirdly).
So it’s running Windows XP and last night I installed the soundcard drivers and breakout box. Yike! I really have to get the little stereo fixed so I can run my speakers…sorry…’monitors’… That’s what they’re called in studioland - ’cause you ‘monitor’ the sound through them.
Last night when I got home, M had come home early. It was a beautiful day and we were like a well oiled machine. We took Oomoo out for an after-work sail! I did most of the sailing. Yah! One of the perks of living right near the beach (though that will only be true for another few months, there are architects and builders circling close by - renovations are nigh - which is when we’ll be kicked out). Didn’t start making dinner until 9pm. And then I did the soundcard driver install…which is probably why I didn’t wake up this morning until 8.45am and scrambled into work at a quarter past nine. Having a tea break just before 10am when you’ve only been at work for less than forty minutes kind of lacks the ordinary thrill…
There’s no place like home
Wednesday, 1 February 2006
We have about five weeks before we need to get out of our house. It’s almost time to start our next big project. M and I have 95% agreed that we’re (well, he’ll be doing most of it) going to build a Schionning Wilderness catamaran. Yike! A big boat. We plan to approach it like we did the house [wow - I forgot I still had that site online!] - as a one or two year project.
We spent last night being very adult and doing lots of sums. I tried desperately to plot how best to utilise the bank without having to give it much money - pretty much a doomed quest. M has been very proactive and has been emailing the designers, making exhaustive budgetary lists and investigating builders insurance. (Blondely, I only realised yesterday that this kind of insurance isf for the project you are building, rather than insuring the builder himself. D’oh. Just call me Bambi and be done with it - just don’t shoot my mother, it’s her birthday today.)
The looming issue is where to build. We want to do it onsite. So we need a shed of 90sqm or larger which is on a block that also has a house. It’s pretty much impossible to find for what we can pay (around $200 p/w) in the Melbourne area. Obviously the nearer to the water we are the better, as the cost for transporting the boat to the water in order to launch it will be dependent on the length of the journey. Thus, we also need to be somewhere that can cope with an over-sized vehicle.
I’ve been looking and looking. I usually use domain.com.au or realestate.com.au, but in the last day or so I’ve found homehunt.com.au very good and commercialrealestate.com.au. We have thought about leasing an industrial space, and living in one bit while working in the other - this is quite practical, but not hugely attractive. I am starting to get to the end of my tether and am dwelling fondly on the idea to moving to somewhere in northern NSW with an acre or two and some sheds. Of course, then I’d have to find a new job…
And it gets complicated all over again.
Mispronounciation of the Day
Thursday, 16 February 2006
‘…a fracture of the fish finger…’
–the more tired I get, the more creative DragonDictate becomes.
Not Dead, Just Plotting
Monday, 27 February 2006
I am actually still alive, as long as you don’t go by how little I’ve been posting here on [m i a o w]. There are changes brewing and I hope they will cure me of my non-blogging blues, which have been firmly in place ever since I was stupid enough to commit to working four days a week. It began as a nice three day job, and when it became a four day job ‘just for a little while’ I realised soon after that it’s actually a five day a week job in disguise.
Which is fine, but it should be without masquerade! Our time in Melbourne was supposed to be a bit of a holiday. M was going to finish his boat. I was going to play music. M’s stuff has happened according to plan. My side of the whole thing just got demolished by my new job, and the fact that I’m in Hampton and Christine is in the true depths of Preston and is playing in another band. And she doesn’t want to continue with BM. So…
On Thursday I quit my job. M and I are buying a shed, putting it somewhere in the middle of my dad’s orchard, filling it with our stuff and are going to hang out in Brunswick Heads in northern NSW for a few weeks, surfing and looking for somewhere to rent that we can build the big boat. We’re hoping to rent somewhere with a bit more action than Hervey Bay and not too far from a beach. And also within a reasonable distance to our friends in Rosebank, so we can bother them with Coopers and pesto.
So there’s the gossip. Meanwhile, Small Brother lurks in Rio, not yet having been mugged, as far as we know. We’ve got just over three more weeks in the wilds of Hampton before we put our plan into action. We’re going to be caravan park dwellers, and I can’t wait!
The Sad and the Good
Thursday, 23 March 2006
A day of high emotion, beginning with the funeral of our friends tiny baby whose heartbeat stopped 30 minutes before delivery The funeral service was beautiful, short and simple. Everyone was doing well until right at the end, when a Coldplay song came one. Chris Martin could wring tears from a stone. We all gathered for some restorative cups of tea and more tissues before dispersing.
In the gap between the service and the next gathering, M and I had a meeting in a cafe about our upcoming plans, before heading back for a wake/bbq and some beer. It was such a beautiful sunny day, it seemed odd that everyone was there for such a sad occasion.
I headed back to work at about 3pm and got in two hours of report writing. Went home, changed from one black dress into another black dress, and was picked by by lovely L and S from work. We collected my boss, who then treated us all to a goodbye dinner in my honour (!) upstairs at the Stokehouse. The food was sublime. I was given a card from everyone, a very beautiful little watercolour that my boss had done and a handbearing compass!! Gobsmacked!
By the time I got home, I was wrung out. Felt ridiculous for having quit my job. Felt sad about the funeral. Sat and dripped a bit of mascara on M and then went to bed. A fraught, but wonderful day.
We Reach Our Destination…
Tuesday, 4 April 2006
What do you do when you wake up at one of the best campsites you’ve come across so far? If you’re M, you drop two fishing lines in the water, while your girlfriend goes and blesses the amenities. All bites and no action.
We set off, without breakfast and did a brief investigation of Grassy Head- a caravan park, but very attractive, and Scott’s Head - the place that I want to stay on the way back . The beach is so sublimely swimmable, it looks like a pool. It has a perfect learning-to-surf size wave curving across that has my name on it. I wrote it on our ‘must return to’ list.
That area of the coast can’t decide if it’s the Sapphire Coast, the Banana Coast, the Coffee Coast, or the mid-north coast. Whatever. It’s so lush and pretty, it barely needs naming at all.
Nambucca Shire is particularly beautiful. I want to live there. So many rivers and creeks. We stayed in Nambucca Heads back in July on our way down to Melbourne, but whisked past this time, because we were keen to get to Brunswick Heads.
All the places I had been languishing over on the map, and pursuingon realestate.com.au popped up on signposts as we drove along. Valla Beach, Emerald Beach, Bellingen, Dorrigo. We stopped for breakfast at Woolgoolga, a very white-bread sort of township, saved by the cafe that we went to - the Blue Dolphin Brasserie. M got his usual scrambled eggs and bacon. I had a breakfast that rang my bell - butter fried mushrooms, tomato chutney and camembert on thick toast with rocket. It was so right in so many ways. If I get hit by a bus in the next few days, at least I’ll know that I’ve breakfasted well.
Back on the road M stayed behind the wheel until we stopped for petrol. Then I got to drive, all the way to Grafton and beyond. It’s river country. The rivers are hugely wide and spread and swing their way toward the coast. The Clarence river must have doubled back on itself about three times as we went over bridge after bridge.
I was really waiting for the Richmond River- because it’s the one I really want to travel down in Oomoo. It passes through Ballina and out to sea, and I want to chase it back up through Woodburn and beyond.
As always, scooting toward our destination meant that we looked longingly at places where we wanted to turn off but didn’t. Brooms Head, Minnie Water, Wooli, Sandon, Yamba, Woodburn, Tabbimobile. All to be saved for another time - or later this trip if we’re lucky.
Finally got past Ballina and saw signs for Brunswick Heads. It was hardly believable. The signs began with about 48km to go, and I whittled them down. When there was 4km left to go M and I looked at each other incredulously.
“I think we’re almost really there!”
“It wasn’t so painful after all, with all those places we stayed.”
Yah! We went round two roundabouts and cruised down the road into town. Last time were were in B