Our stuff is here! Our stuff is here!
Finally we got the removalists to move our stuff from storage in Melbourne here to Sydney. My computer, my CDs, Kathleen's food processor - these are the things we have lived without for 18 months! Now we just need to unpack them all.
Tourism Tasmania has a Japanese and Chinese language sections - it's all about knowing your target market.
An interesting section is the copyright-free editorial section, presumably allowing lazy journos to line their pockets more easily if they are paid by the word. Tasmania Outdoors seems to have taken to this free resource rather enthusiastically.
You know that the 'f' word has hit the mainstream when they use it on All Saints. On All Saints for crying out loud!
Picked up the keys for the new place today from the real estate agent. And when I say keys, I mean keys.
Security key.
Front door key.
Dead bolt key.
Window key.
Balcony door key.
Letter box key.
Garage key.
We have keys coming out our ears. When we walk, we will be bowed to one side with the weight of the keyring. You'll be able to hear us coming from a block away, with the jingle jangle of the damn keys.
One of my groomsmen, Matt, and his wife Anj came up on the weekend for a mutual friend's engagement party. It was fantastic to see them again, but since they were in town, Kathleen was keen to get the suit issue sorted.
The main complication was the fact that we would want the suits for a longer period than normal - since we were travelling down to Hobart about a week before the wedding - and that Troy and I would be in Sydney, and Matt in Melbourne. Myer was crap - the bloke was aggressive, and insisted that we pay for a week and a half, rather than one week, since he "needed to guarantee that the suit would be in stock". Mate - if it's not in stock, what's the point of booking? Towards the end, he realised he'd lost us, and attempted to butter us up by showing us brochures for a free holiday if we went through them. No doubt there would be similarly aggravating conditions associated. Thanks for nothing pal.
We thought about Roger David, since they have a Melbourne outlet... but they've have always struck me as a little cheap in their suit department. Their stock wasn't much different from a normal weekday suit, either. I didn't want to wear something I wear five days a week.
At this point, I was sick of looking, and it took Kathleen a little while to convince me to look at one last place.
And I have to say:
Kathleen, I'm sorry I ummed and ahhed, and didn't immediately agree with your great idea, and I think everything turned out fantastic because I followed your instructions.
Whew.
So of course, from the moment we walked in to Ferrari's in the Piccadilly Centre, I knew we'd be going with this place for suits. Rob the proprieter was fantastic, didn't listen to any of my ideas, and talked me into a bunch of stuff which I was initially adamant I was not going to do. So if you need a formal suit, I recommend you go to Ferrari Formal Hire and have a chat with David Fox. And if that sounds like a blatant plug, it is, because quite frankly they shat over everybody else we looked at.
Had dinner in Chinatown (Superbowl!) with Eva, Steph, Denzil and Lu. Will probably be the last time for a while that we all eat together - Denzil and Lu are off to the UK in less than a month.
The next step in moving into the new place is getting all our stuff currently in storage in Melbourne up to Sydney, 1000km away. We're going with Wridgways. Now, if we were smart, or at least in any way organised, we would've labelled all the stored items, listed them and retained a copy of the list, so that in the event of loss (whether that be fire, flood, or act of God/Allah/Buddha/nature) we would know exactly what we're missing.
You can guess where this is going, and you'd be right.
We don't have a list.
So when Wridgways needed us to write down exactly what we had, and how many boxes, and how valuable all these things were, we had to write down a guesstimate. Straight away, I'm worried, since I have visions of the delivery guy rocking up, getting exactly what is on the list, and nothing more and driving on his merry way, leaving all the miscellaneous stuff not on the list behind. After all, theirs is not to ask questions or anything so complicated as that. If I sound bitter, it's just the voice of experience talking. They didn't exactly set my mind at ease, but I imagine there's no real way of interpreting "Get everything in the storage unit, regardless of whether it's on a list/delivery docket or not, and leave nothing behind. I'm sure we will find out soon.
The other, more critical, issue which came up when I rang them today was the date of delivery. When I asked for Friday the 19th, I imagined that that would be the day the gear would be delivered in Sydney. They imagined that that would be the day they would wander in and pick it up in Melbourne. To deliver on the 4th of April.
"Ah, this might be a problem," I said. "We're ready to move in on Monday the 15th."
"You said that you wanted it picked up on the 19th."
"No I meant that was when I wanted it delivered. When's the earliest you can deliver it?"
"If we pick it up on the 19th..."
"No, no, we *wanted* it on the 19th. We don't care when you pick it up. You could pick it up today if you wanted! What we really would like is for you to deliver it on, or as soon as possible after, the 15th, which is when we're ready to move in."
She goes and checks.
"If we pick it up tomorrow, we can deliver it on the 19th, but it'll be a close thing. You should have said..."
I cut her off. "It doesn't matter. Look, we'll take it. Just... it doesn't matter." Trying to explain what I meant when I originally scheduled the dates suddenly seemed too difficult. If that's all we could manage, then fine, we can live with that.
Hopefully that's all that will go wrong.
It's all been confirmed - the landlord accepted our bid, so we're in like Flynn. The rental period starts next Monday, and we're paying $330 a week for a two bedroom place in Surry Hills. Excellent!
Last night's 60 Minutes had a segment of NASA's space mission, and more specifically whether the amazing amount of money estimated to get a man on Mars would be better spent fixing problems on Earth first. Which inevitably segued into the possibility of life on other planets.
Whenever I hear talk about extraterrestial life, I'm reminded of this cartoon:
In trying to track down the image, I came across the Calvin and Hobbes Strip Search - an indexed, searchable catalogue of every single Calvin and Hobbes cartoon!
Client: "My wife has got me between a rock and a hard place."
Divorce Lawyer: "That's her job. You should respect that."
Classic.
After the previous night's rental fiasco, Kathleen rented Intolerable Cruelty, which I'd put off getting on the basis of it being a fairly mainstream romantic comedy. It's a Coen brothers movie, so I should have known it would be hilarious.
You know a movie will be good when one of the opening lines is "You cheap Australian bastard!"
Typical of the weirdness of a Coen brothers movie are the outtakes - one scene in particular, features Wrigley, George Clooney's offsider, saying "Everybody eats berries!" over and over and over again in different takes. Another is a black and white movie of a train, part of a scene, but really of no use or interest to anybody.
It's mainstream, but it's Coen brothers mainstream. There's a big difference.
We were originally planning to go to the Mardi Gras; given that we live just a stone's throw from Oxford St, it would be exceedingly slack if we didn't. Unfortunately, the weather had other intentions. It belted down for most of the day, so by the time when we would have had to get moving to get a decent spot, we decided to give it a miss. Apparently, they don't call it the Festival of the Milk Crates for nothing (i.e. everyone takes a milk crate to stand on, otherwise you can't see a darn thing... which begs the question: if everyone is standing on milk crates, then there's no real advantage to be gained from bringing them. In which case, why bring them at all?)
So, instead, I volunteered to go up to the video store and rent something to watch.
Kathleen and I have been known to be in a video store for anything up to an hour, trying to find something mutually agreeable to watch. She likes her entertainment relatively light, while I generally don't. Which is why allowing me to get videos by myself is a bit of a tactical mistake on her part.
I brought back Punch Drunk Love and Ghost World. And forced myself to watch the first one. Which sucked. I persisted about twenty minutes with the second. Which also sucked. My taste in movies is now under suspicion in this household.
We finally put an application for a rental property we were keen on. Well, we weren't so much keen on it as "We must get a place or else we'll be sleeping under a bridge". And this was the best of a... tolerable bunch. Here're the good points about the place:
And the bad:
We have our furniture from Melbourne coming up at the end of next week, so we needed to get a place organised before that. It will be nice having our CDs, our furniture, our souvenirs from Japan, our life back.
One of my New Years resolutions was to get back into umpiring. Last night was my first night of training with the NSW umpires, after missing the preceding 7 seasons due to work and uni.
I can't believe it's been 10 years since I first started in Hobart as a boundary umpire. Good times. Training was hard and freezing cold, with the wind whipping down off the mountain to the Domain, the pay was lousy, but the benefits were incredible. Running with a great bunch of blokes, being involved in footy, getting to go to games where the locals would park their cars on the boundary and you could just feel the passion for the game. That was footy at its grassroots, at its most raw, a world away from the rarified air of corporate boxes and massive stadiums. A world where the team's sponsor is more likely to be Bob's Plumbing Supplies than Mitsubishi. Where corporate hospitality is not massively over-priced, but $5 for a beer and a pie.
Training was hard - as preseason usually is - and having been so out of action for so long didn't help. Stiff and sore today, but I can't wait for the season to start.
The scores from last week's social match between the Davids and the Hookeses are now available.
Yesterday I was pretty despondent. I'd been talking to, and meeting, a number of people in the niche IT area I'm keen on, and while I was making the contacts, I was hearing a lot of the following:
Which is essentially the sound of doors closing. People were nice, and amazed that I was interested in their field - the advantages of targetting specific people and companies, rather than sending blind letters to HR departments or in response to ads, are quite obvious.
The one company I'd had the most success with, given that I'd been talking to them since last year, hadn't got back to me in over two months after meeting with the partner responsible, and I'd pretty much given up on them. Today I gave him a call.
"Mate, virtually the entire office is in Melbourne on a project, and no one has had a chance to push it through since then. We write the report end of this month, so nothing'll happen until after then."
So, looks like another month of waiting, but at least they haven't said no. And that's all the encouragement I need.
I've had my credit card for a bit over two years, and there was a period of about a year where they didn't charge any fees, apart from the usual interest if you didn't pay the balance in full at the end of the due date.
Looks like the fees have started. And gee whizz, are they serious about milking some money!
First of all, 10% interest right off the bat, so an outstanding $250 adds $25 dollars. Then they have a $35, flat-rate, "Late Payment Fee". So not only are they charging you a fairly exorbitant amount of interest, they are charging you for adding that interest to your bill. So suddenly, I have to pay 20%.
Bugger that for a joke!
So I rang them, and they were adament, but in the face of my superior reason and intellect, they buckled like a belt. Bang. Charge dismissed.
So it's about time I got off my arse and actually looked for some other credit cards, perhaps from a credit union, that don't have the bonus points (which I never use, and which seem to be harder and harder to obtain), but also don't have so many bloody fees.
The window in the apartment building opposite is reflecting the full glare of the sun directly into my eyes. This entry is being written under a great deal of suffering and agony, yet I push through the pain barrier, delivering this humble missive to you.
"If you're over age 40, there's a good chance your computer isn't the problem" says Microsoft.
Justin Hall has written a guidebook for surviving Tokyo, and posted it on his website. It's freely downloadable under a Creative Commons license. Worth a look.
A sequel to Ghost In The Shell, one of the greatest Japanese anime movies, titled Innocence is coming out soon!
An old uni friend, Merilyn, was in Sydney for a week. She's been in the US and UK for the past few years, picking up a husband, a daughter, and another pregnancy, now in it's 5th month. Troy and I took her to BBQ King. Unfortunately, Mike the hubby and Amelia the baby couldn't make it. Next time.
Talk revolved around careers, futures, and mutual friends.
Went out to Forresters with Kris and Rodd last night. Good fun, even if I did eat way too much steak.
We've promised to take them out to Juju's for Japanese next time.
I would like to think that I'm not so unfit that bowling just three overs on a Sunday leaves me stiff and sore on a Monday morning, wincing in pain as I get out of bed.
The last few years have seen a bit of a controversy about girls playing footy with the boys. Luckily, this year has seen the creation of a new league in south-east Melbourne.
And the verdict?
"I like it because unlike basketball you can really bump people. And when the (umpire)'s not looking you can even give them a bit of a punch," says one of the girls.
Beautiful. That's what the game's all about.
If there's one thing that immediately became apparent in Japan, it was the ugliness of the urban landscape, helped in no small part by the massive amounts of clutter overhead.
Coming back to Australia, it's great to note that even the slight clutter we have is on the way out.
