Andrew and Kathleen

The Best Man is discovering the downside to working for the UN, judging by his latest missive:

Feeling the full brunt of UN bureaucracy. I couldn't officially get the job until I did a medical, but the medical staff weren't ready for me because I wasn't yet a UN employee so they had no paperwork.

On the upside, he's got a Swiss bank account now, so feel free to send him your leftover Nazi gold, or ill-gotten Offset Alpine gains, and I'm sure he'll take good care of it for you.

Kathleen's boss loaned her a copy of the Da Vinci Code. I hear that it's quite a popular book.

Actually, it appears as though it's almost compulsory reading. I don't think I've ever boarded a train here in Sydney and NOT seen someone reading it. That bloke must be raking it in. I bet he hires people just to sit around counting all the royalties that must be flowing into his house, like a raging torrent.

By now, it's way too late for me to read. If I opened the book up in a public place, I imagine that pretty much everyone walking past would be looking at me and thinking, what a sap, he's about six months behind the times. That book is so 2004.

This year, it's all about the sequel!

So I took the liberty of reading the major plot device (major controversy!) - pages 311 to 346. And the ending - page 593.

Damn. Our fan broke down the other night, after a summer of dutiful service. And tonight's going to be an uncomfortable one, too.

After an exhausting day rushing around looking at apartments (plus I was late to bed on Friday), we were in bed by 11 last night.

About 11.30, the phone rings, and at the other end is an English accent.

"Hello, Ian?" he asks.

"No, you've got the wrong number," I tell him, with the sleep-deprivation obvious in my voice.

"Ah, no problem. Sorry, it must be late. My mate is over there in Sydney," he replies.

And all the time I'm thinking, this is a lousy impression to be conveying overseas - that the Aussies are a bunch of people who are in bed by 11.30 on a Saturday night. This won't be good for our image at all.

Our friends in Japan, Jen and Dale are the proud owners of a new baby! Young Dale IV (or Shirou, as he's commonly known - it's a Japanese play on words) is another of a long list of new kids appearing amongst our friends. Heath and Tomoko, Matt and Anj, now Jen and Dale... where will it end?

We'd just watched a young mother wheel one child in a stroller with the other perched on her hip across the road.

Andrew: How does she do that? Surely you'd have a leash or something just in case they decided to go AWOL on you.

Kathleen: Kate goes shopping with three kids under five.

Andrew: Does she have a leash?

Kathleen: No, she just manages.

Andrew: I'd have a leash. And that way, if the kids started annoying you, you'd give it a big rip and they'd go down. That'd teach them pretty quick.

A few seconds pass.

Andrew: Do you think I'd be good with kids?

Kathleen: No, you'd tease them and annoy them until they started to cry, like you do to everybody else's kids.

As Fark.com so eloquently puts it: U.S. spends $300 billion to elect Iranians to rule Iraq.

Excellent!

The pre-season comp starts again this weekend. Three games on TV in Sydney (albeit two very late at night) - including Hawthorn vs St Kilda.

It's been too long.

The fan in the computer is on its last legs, whirring away with the sick whine of a bit of hardware which knows its on the way out. It has got to the point where I can't leave it on over night, since the sound creeps into our room and keeps Kathleen awake. I, of course, am able to tune it out, much like a parent is able to ignore the crying of a child.

Luckily, the fan in our bedroom has been brought into use almost every night since mid-December and so tunes out the computer - it's a sauna in there without it!

Today, I found out the other difference between looking at a place to rent and looking at a place to buy.

When you put your name down as an interested buyer, you get the phone calls on Monday morning asking you what you thought.

I got three this morning alone. I just about had to get a stick to beat them off with.

So, I've decided that I need an alternative name and address. A nom de plume, if you will.

Any suggestions?

Our tenancy reaches the end of its six months in about 32 days' time. Tuesday is when we need to answer the immortal question: should we stay, or should we go?

And, to be honest, we're not sure.

While we like Surry Hills, a few unsavoury incidents in the last few months mean we're less enamored of its 'edgy character' than before. But tempered against that is the fact that moving is a sheer pain in the arse, and best avoided like a Middle Ages epidemic.

Just to confuse things even further is the determination that this year is the year that we will get into the speculative, zero-sum, get-rich-quick-and-shaft-the-other-people game commonly referred to as the property market.

Can't hurt, we thought, to start looking. Maybe we'll extend the lease until something comes up - it'd be a pain to move, buy a place and then have to move again. Plus it's always much easier to just stay here than have to find somewhere else.

So, on Saturday, having found a few places we were interested in (okay, okay, places that Kathleen found), we popped along to a few open houses. Or, rather, open apartments.

Let me just start by saying that the difference between the rental and owner market could not be more pronounced.

In the rental game, the places are shitholes, dirty, with filthy tenants who look like they've last wiped the benches in 1992. The places are inconvenient, over-hyped, and the agent has often just arrived from a Friday night out on the tiles.

In the owner market, the agents (yes, there are often more than one) are impeccably presented.

Okay, most of the places we looked at were pretty good. Except the more modern places were starting to develop large cracks in the walls, probably caused by cheap material and craftsmanship that was chucked up quickly during the property boom to cash in on the market. But one place in Chatswood took the cake.

We walked in, and the place was just nasty. It hadn't been vacuumed, a mattress was propped up against the wall, newspapers and magazines everywhere, there was something simmering on the stove, with a week's worth of dirty places propped up in the sink. And the five Korean tenants (in a two-bedroom apartment) were still at home, all watching TV in one of the bedrooms.

If I owned that place, I'd personally come and kick their arses for losing me a sale.

Don't call us, we'll call you, we told the agent. Actually, he can't call us, 'cause I gave him a false name and number.

By about the fifth property, we were starting to look at each other worriedly. The commonly accepted dictum is that it takes about 50 to 100 properties before you find one you like.

But at 1pm that day, we walked into the place we'll bid on. "We've had many, many firm inquiries. This place won't last long," gloated the agent, trying to play his evil-real-estate-agent mind games.

We ignored him, and just mumbled under our breath to each other. "This is it. It's perfect. We have to get it!" Just one morning of house-hunting and already the fear of missing out was palpable.

Obviously, we need to talk money with the bank before we can actually put an offer in, and there might be a fair bit of paper work and legal stuff that needs to happen.

But it's real.

It's happening.

The price is so much more than anything I have ever spent before that it's surreal, just an arbitrary number.

We have to have it!

Could there be a more dangerous feeling to be had when swimming with sharks?

I had this dream the other night, and it was so vivid, I actually woke up in a panic.

I dreamt I was at work (which involves staring at a computer screen for long hours), and all of a sudden, I had all these browser pop-ups. For porn sites.

And no matter how quickly I closed one window, another one opened. And all these naked chicks were drowning my screen, and I'm checking over my shoulder to see if anyone's noticed, and no one has, but I can't stop the bloody things.

In the end, I turned the computer off.

Which is when a couple of people I work with came up and asked me to run them through a problem I'd found. Only thing was, I daren't turn the computer on, just in case the naked chicks come back, and in the ensuing misunderstanding, I get fired.

"Ummm, I can't at the moment, the computer's just died on me. The bloody thing," I tell them, giving the computer a whack on the side for emphasis.

You should call help desk, they advise earnestly.

"Aaah, no that's cool, I'll just let it cool down a bit, and then I'll try and fix it myself." The last thing I want is some help desker finding porn on the computer.

Well, let me try, says one of my coworkers, and he reaches for the on button...

And that's when I woke up.

I should make it quite clear that there is no way known in the world that this scenario could possibly happen in real life. I have no idea why I dreamt this - it's not like I have a guilty conscience that's causing me to wake me up in the middle of the night. Nor am I running any kind of crap OS at home that's susceptible to malware.

Damn, I'm so geeky even my dreams are IT-related!

If ever you needed a reason to heed your banks warnings and double-check your credit card, I got charged twice for accommodation in Mt Cook on our honeymoon. Luckily, it was all cleared up, and the hotel - the Hermitage - has credited the account.

That's the second time in the last few months that's happened to me - and both times, the charge has been reversed promptly. Check your bills!

Holy hell, it's too hot to do anything tonight. I had a whole bunch of stuff I wanted to get done, or organised tonight and nothing got finished. Remind me to write about the weird dream I had last night. Tomorrow, when, Inshallah, it's a little cooler.

We've just been clapping and going "Whoooo!" for the last few hours at the taping of The Glass House, which Eva kindly organised a booking for.

The floor staff try and encourage a lot of cheering, yelling, stamping and clapping, too, which gets tiring very quickly.

It's always weird seeing famous people in the flesh, especially when they're comedians. You imagine that everything they say will be jovial and hilarious, and it is. Except for when they say something serious while they're getting ready for taping - which is when they sound really, really pissed off.

I'm sure Wil, Corinne and Dave weren't being mean to that floor manager. Just serious.

Oh, and you wouldn't believe how small and buff Molly Meldrum is in real life, either. Or how many gay jokes he makes at his old expense.

The taped episode will be on tomorrow night (ABC, 9.30pm), so look out for us.

We're the ones waving spastically at the camera as it pans across us, like the kids on the cricket!

The Best Man has been in Sydney for the last two weeks, enjoying his last days of freedom before he heads off to the UK and an uncertain, unemployed-but-looking-for-work future.

But in one of those rare touches of serendipity, or karma, or your deity's hand, he's managed to tee up a contract with the UNHCR. In Geneva!!. How fantastic is that?

Geez, was he stoked! On Friday, when he got the phone call (3 hours after he'd first started drinking!) to confirm he was in, you couldn't wipe the grin off his face. We went out and celebrated with a bunch of people at Greenbox karaoke in town.

Then, on Saturday night, we went to our neighbour Kevin's housewarming downstairs.

And finally, on Sunday, we ended up at a first birthday party.

Daniel is one. He weighs 12 kilos. He is an absolute whopper of a kid. We've extrapolated and he'll be 20 foot tall and weigh 500 kilos when he's fully grown.

I wonder what the target audience for this English textbook would be?

The first night of footy training is always an interesting occasion.

Over the summer break, between roughly mid-September and early February, the coach is on the email, exhorting you to not give the training away, and to be seduced by summer's lazy days, but to push on with the effort. To go for a run instead of parking your arse on the couch all day with a cold one while the cricket's on. To at least *think* that we are going to do something.

I admit, I love the break. I love having an entire weekend to myself, no Tuesday and Thursday night training. It's like a free 10 hours a week.

But all that relaxing comes at a cost.

Which is due on the first night of footy training.

It also doesn't help that tonight was a 'fitness benchmark', with pushups, stepups, dips, sprints - all in a humid 28C - that just encourages you to go hell for leather, even if your body is not physically ready.

And my body told me it wasn't ready by popping my calves not 100m into the run.

That's body code for "Take it easy, you idiot!"

Good advice. I'll be taking it on Thursday.