Andrew and Kathleen

Just spent an hour taking apart the laptop after having spilt breakfast cereal and milk all over the keyboard this morning whilst reading the news online. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to clean it thoroughly then and there, and it was sooo nice to come home to a computer smelling faintly of curdled milk. Not.

This thing has more screws than you can poke a stick at - and of course, after putting it all back together, there is one left over. Stuffed if I know where it goes.

The bed that we bought last weekend felt so firm and supportive on the shop floor. At home, however, it's a different story. Kathleen has been waking every day with a sore back - apparently having it on a slat base as we do makes it a degree harder than having it on a castor base. I, of course, don't feel any discomfort, much to her annoyance.

Of course, the shop doesn't do refunds, so we may just have to bite the bullet and pay to have it padded by the manufacturer. Is there any way to 'test drive' a mattress other than a five minute lie down?

People originally from Tasmania are used to coincidences. It's nothing unusual to meet someone new in Sydney or Melbourne and, after a few minutes, discover that you're both from the South Island. This is usually followed by the realisation that, if you don't know them personally, you know their mates or family, or at least have a degree of separation somewhere.

We went to a house-warming for a friend of Kathleen's from uni. Here are the relationships with some of the other guests:

• Kathleen knew Renee from uni. Renee is getting married to Matt in exactly the same place as us three days earlier than our wedding.
• We knew Ray through Kathleen's brother.
• Kathleen knew Lindsay through high school, and has run into her at the gym in Surry Hills.

So at the same house-warming, we know 3 people, ex-Tasmanians, all through different aspects of growing up in the same state.

Truly, there is no other state like it.

Kathleen reckons she's found the song we'll use for the wedding waltz. She didn't really like my alternative.

Part of the joy of Japanese junior high schools sports days (that is, joy for the western observer, not the Japanese participant) is the introduction to rajio taiso, or radio taiso - warm-up exercises to music.

One particular sadistic form of punishment in junior high schools is leading the school in radio taiso - it's such a dorky thing, standing up by yourself, that no matter how low you wear your pants (for guys, anyway), there is no possible way under the sun that you can finish with your dignity intact.

The best bit of the Olympics? Roy and HG on TV every night.

One of football's best commentators, Dennis Cometti, has a new book out: Centimetre Perfect: The Classic Commentary.

Some classic Cometti-isms:

"Scotty Cummings, alone in the square, jumping up and down and waving his arms like they're playing My Sharona".

This one from Melbourne v Collingwood:
Healy: Word is this guy is the most reliable kick for goal in the side. They say down at Collingwood if you had to have someone kicking for your life, Tarkyn Lockyer would be the man.
Commetti: I'd prefer my mum.
(Silence)
Commetti: Not a great footballer, but at least she'd care.

"Richardson contests the ruck... without much conviction. Well, he may be the best player on their list... well, certainly Matthew thinks he's the best player on their list at the moment... mind you, that's a bit like being the best Centre Half Forward in Czechoslovakia..."

Dermott: And the ball spills free to Kickett...
Cometti: Troy Cook, you mean?
Dermott: Yes... well, they do look rather alike.
Cometti: How so, Dermott?
Dermott: (Realising that both players are Aboriginal, so this might sound a little dodgy) Umm, well, they are both... er...
Cometti: ...Midfielders, yes Dermott.

On Corey McKernan's poor form: "He's like a long jumper who can't reach the sand."

An old friend from PwC days is in Melbourne for a year working on a project. It's always interesting to hear what people are up to after not having been in contact for a while. Turns out she's long since left PwC.

Out of 14 people who started with me in Melbourne in January 1999, only one person is left.

John Safran, the man who once streaked through Jerusalem in the belief it would provide spiritual support to the St Kilda football club, has a new show coming to SBS:

From next Monday John Safran will be remembered as the guy who had a fatwa placed on Rove McManus... He picks McManus for the fatwa because he was dumped as a guest from Rove Live in 2002 to make way for Pink.

No blogging tonight - we postponed our anniversary dinner from Sunday night to tonight, and Sushi Suma doesn't take bookings.

Iron Chef is coming back to TV! Wok on!

Last night we went to a social night for the NSW umpires association at Forresters. Only four other people (including one umpire's partner) turned up. I know it's a school night, but fair dinkum.

Most umpires in NSW are expatriates from the southern states, predominantly Victoria. Which is great, but there doesn't appear to be much of a grassroots push to hit the schools, or large businesses, to get more people joining. We've got some great benefits - what other organisations pay you to train twice a week, give nutritional advice, as well as having such a shallow talent pool that you can hit the top flights pretty quickly? The AFL is a top-class professional organisation, yet football in NSW really depends on the efforts of a handful. We have umpires doubling up, doing two matches a week, due to the scarcity of numbers, which is not sustainable in the long term.

Our friends Lu and Denzil are in London for a couple of months working and, in Denzil's case, taking stacks of photos (that is, when they're not fighting off muggers). It's surely a sign of the times that people half the world away can still be in touch, via email and IM.

When I first moved away from Hobart, to Melbourne, a few years back, one of the first things I needed to do was buy a bed. And of course I left it until I had moved into a place, and, instead of shopping around and finding something that was good quality, I did what any bloke would do.

I bought the first one I looked at.

Businesses love people like me, since really I sell to myself. "Yep, that's good, I'll buy it." No real consideration given to shopping around for a better deal. I'm a bit more choosy these days, but that's only because Kathleen gives me stick if I get ripped off, which is generally what happens if you aren't picky. Kathleen, on the other hand, bargains like a Chinese woman. Hmm, maybe that's cause she is.

What I mean to say is, if you're having a big sale, and selling everything for cost minus 10%, she'll try and knock some more off the price.

"Look, the owner can still afford to feed his family once a day, they've got heaps of room to move on that price!"

Anyway, the bed I bought cost all up around $700, which is not much for a queen size mattress and a base. Not nearly enough if you want something that doesn't cause you all sorts of grief the next morning. And it's caught up with me now in the form of a bed that squeaks and rattles no matter how tightly you screw it together. The slightest roll in the middle of the night and you're instantly awake, thanks to the noise.

Jeez, I hate that thing.

So the last few weekends we've been bed hunting. We found something, too, or rather I did. Or actually, it turned out that the salesman barracked for Hawthorn as well (don't ask), so I felt almost duty-bound to buy from him. We're almost brothers, after all.

But Kathleen held out. Like the trooper she is, she managed to find an even better bargain.

Which gets delivered on Tuesday.

So the moral of the story is, always hold out for a better deal.

No, wait.

Always take Kathleen with you when you want to whittle down the sales commission to the point where he's giving *you* money to take it away. She's a shark.

A shark, I tell you!

Coming in at 14%, or 850 million, go you agnostics/atheists!.

Go you Hawkers!

Tired. Stayed up late last two nights watching Seven Samurai, which is over 3 hours in length, on DVD. I need to watch more classic movies. Any suggestions?

It's taken me a while to forget the horrible memories of the last time I was in the "I-Should-Be-More-Cultured-And-Watch-Classic-Movie" mood. 2001: A Space Odyssey almost put me off movies forever. What a piece of crap that was.

Seven Samurai was fantastic, by the way. Interesting to read the biography of Toshiro Mifune, who played Kikuchiyo, probably the standout performance in the film.

Regurgitator are recording their next album inside a glass bubble in Melbourne's Federation Square.

Wonder how many fans the band got through the song Polyester Girl that left straight away after buying Unit.

Is it heresy to say out loud in Australia that I can't stand watching swimming in the Olympics?

I'm not scared to say Buffy is crap in a roomful of geeks, but slagging off swimming? That's just suicidal.

Stef managed to get tickets to Sleek Geeks a few weeks ago, which was pretty interesting night of scientific comedy (scientific and comedy being two words not commonly found in the same sentence) with Dr Karl and Adam Spencer from JJJ.

Unfortunately, it clashed with an umpires' training session featuring Kevin Sheedy, who's up for the game on Saturday night, but you have to make some sacrifices in life.

Undoubtedly the highlight of the show was a test of perception: a video clip which featured people dressed in either white or black moving around and throwing basketballs to each other.

"Try and count how many passes the white team makes," was the instruction, and more than half the audience was so focussed on counting that they completely missed the person dressed in a gorilla suit casually walking across the screen.

How can you miss someone in a gorilla suit?! Pretty damn easy as it turned out. Sad to say I was in the group that missed the monkey.

A lot of people say they don't read the newspapers because it depresses them. Those people would probably have missed the story about the bloke trying to walk every single street in Sydney, which I meant to post about a week ago when it appeared.

He even has a website. What an inspiring story.

Kathleen has been banned from playing Bomb Jack until further notice, since, instead of relaxing her during a break in her studies, it gets her agitated and frustrated.

Andrew has been banned from watching, reading, or talking about John Howard until further notice, since, instead of making him feel relaxed and comfortable, it gets him agitated and angry.

Looks like the truth is catching up with "Honest John":

"I left him in no doubt that there was no evidence that children were thrown overboard," Mr Scrafton said yesterday.

Despite this advice, the next day Mr Howard told the public that the claims were true, brandishing the ONA report that Mr Scrafton had said was faulty. It was later confirmed that the report simply repeated incorrect comments by ministers.

Just another in a long list of disgraceful behaviour.

The best man is officially on tour.

Had the roster match for the Sydney AFL competition yesterday. It will be interesting to see if I have a game next week - I haven't been to training in a while, since it's hard to get away from work at 5 two days a week, and I missed 4 weeks late in the season, again due to work commitments. Given that you want to reward the blokes who turn up week in, week out, it's hard to see my doing anything but watching next Saturday.

Finally got around to organising a membership for the video shop up the road. Last night we watched Along Came Polly, which was much better than expected, and this afternoon Japanese Story, one of the saddest movies I've seen in quite a while. We'll leave O Brother, Where Art Thou? for later in the week.

And tonight, we're planning on getting to Farenheit 9/11, which I've been excited about for a while. It's been quite a week for sitting on arses watching movies.

Thank you. Now watch this drive.

We've just booked our honeymoon in New Zealand with Flight Centre, Kathleen tried on her dress this morning, we booked the car she'll arrive at the Botanical Gardens in yesterday, and we have organised the flights and accommodation for the video bloke. It's really starting to happen! Thank God we've saved a fair whack, because now the expenses are really starting!

I enjoy putting other companies' junk mail into the reply paid envelopes that accompany unsolicited credit card applications. Surely I can't be the only one that finds hilarity in the imagined surreal scene that would ensue at the mail centre as Citibank opens the envelope, expecting to sign another sucker up, and is instead greeted with the local real estate agents pushy flyer?

Another period of slackness in terms of updating this thing. Both kamoi (the laptop) and toorak (the desktop) have been playing up recently, which doesn't make it easier. Yes, it's true - true geeks give their computers names. The naming convention around here is that the computer gets the name of the place we're living in when it was bought.

One of my good mates, Jon, was in Sydney for a night on Tuesday, having spent the last five years working in the UK. He's doing really well for himself work-wise, and even on holiday, he was in constant communication with HO on his Blackberry.

It was fortuitous timing. My best man Troy was jetting over to England for the start of his year (?) on a working holiday visa in the UK, with a brief departure through eastern Europe, Russia and Egypt. And we couldn't let him go without a few quiet beers.

Not only that, but we managed to organise another mate, James, to come along. The 4 of us had done the same degree at uni back in '98, and here we were, for the first time since graduating over five years earlier, in the same city at the same time.

We had a great night catching up in a Surry Hills pub, where we agreed that we were all older, much better looking, infinitely more intelligent, but not wiser. Ah well, you can't have it all.

Why are we going through the farce of one person in Australia solely responsible for the date of the federal election? And you can't half tell that bastard Howard really really enjoys it.

Peter Costello gets a bad rap for his smirk, but you listen to the smug tone that Howard gets whenever it comes up. Check out his interview transcripts over the past few days here, here, here and here, and tell me that he doesn't enjoy it. "I haven't decided yet, I haven't made up my mind," he claims.

Of course, what he can't say is that the reason why he hasn't decided yet is that it is the prerogative of the government of the day to decide when the election will be held. What is key in a government's mind when deciding? How well they are travelling in the polls, and how likely it is that they will be returned. And that's it. Of course, it looks really opportunistic and really sneaky, even if it's true, and everybody knows it.

Had an amazing weekend in Melbourne, for Matt and Kim's wedding reception. It's the first time we've been down since last August. Far too long.

Got in late to our friends Matt and Anj's new house in Balwyn. What an incredible place! They've also got two beautiful dogs - Oscar and Jemima the shar-peis.

Luckily, Matt also had some beers in the fridge, and it wasn't until we'd got through 8 that he mentioned they were a little more potent than your average stubbie. You don't say...

You know when you're drunk and you're trying to be quiet and discreet, casually bashing into furniture and waking up the dogs?

"What the hell were you doing last night?!" demanded Kathleen. "You left the light on, you made so much noise you woke me up, then you starting snoring. I hit you about five times and you didn't even budge!"

If it was any consolation, I felt like a bus hit me this morning. Matt looked about the same, too.

Caught up for lunch with Cathy and Cam, Chang and Jas and Darise and Tam. Good times, good friends. It was about here that the nostalgia started kicking in.

We went to Lygon St for the reception, at one of the Italian restaurants that line the road. Forget any pretensions that Leichardt in Sydney has to be a Little Italy - it just doesn't stack up to Carlton.

We were a little worried that we wouldn't know anyone - but Matt and Kim have some really interesting friends, so the time flew by. Had to bail on karaoke, hoping that the happy couple would still talk to us. Actually, I was just trying to get out of singing Back In Black, after being challenged by Taz.

Lazy lunch in Kew and Brunswick St. I swear our friends were doing this on purpose - even the weather this weekend was fantastic - to make it impossible for us to want to leave!