Thu, 30 Nov 2006
Congrats to Troy who got engaged in Geneva last weekend. He's been seeing a girl from pretty much when he started working in Switzerland for the UN. I haven't met Katie yet, but they're both coming out to Australia for Christmas, so that'll be a good time to meet the girl that my best mate is going to get hitched to.
The wedding is in Memphis in the US, on the 7th of July - should be nice and warm.
And here I thought organising a wedding from interstate was fun and game. I can't wait to see how they manage the organisations from a continent away!
All I need to do is get over there. What with the trip to China in May that we've been talking about for years, it'll be a busy travelling year, next year!
Mon, 27 Nov 2006
Every morning, I catch the train from Wollstonecraft out to work at Parramatta.
It's about an hour, door to door, and most mornings I can read the SMH cover to cover (I normally skip sport) between the two.
Wollstonecraft actually gets two lines passing through it (despite what the map says) - the North Shore line, which becomes the Western line and goes out to either Richmond or Penrith, and the Northern line, which deviates at Strathfield and heads back around to Hornsby. As long as the train I'm on doesn't go to Hornsby, I'm ok.
This morning, I got on the Hornsby-bound train, since it arrived, I was there at the station, and I figured I'd get off along the way.
Of course, I didn't count on getting so absorbed in the news that I completely forgot that I had to get off the train before Strathfield at the latest. It wasn't until I looked up and thought, "Hey, this doesn't look all that familiar..." that I realised. By then, we were coming in to Rhodes, which was three stations past where I needed to get off. And by the time I got off, missed the first train going in the other direction, waited for another 12 minutes, changed again to the right train at Strathfield, I'd wasted 35 minutes.
Whoops.
Sun, 26 Nov 2006
At the rear of our apartment block, we have a common garden. We've been down there for the express purpose of looking at the garden, oh I'd say about twice.
It's a nice enough area, and one of our neighbours is a bit of a keen gardener, so she likes to get out there and hack around. She's keen enough to be quite aggressive about ripping out the noted invasive weeds and replacing them with natives.
Yesterday, she organised a gardening bee, and we had five of the units turn up (out of twelve) to do a bit of weeding, pruning, cutting and having a few cordials afterwards.
The back garden apparently used to be a tennis court, back in the day, when it was a house that stood on the land, rather than a block of apartments. The little old lady downstairs remembers attending evening tennis parties in summer. Must've been quite a memory, since she can remember that from 50 years ago, but can't remember our names a week after we tell her.
It was pretty good fun to get out and spend time getting to know our neighbours better. We managed to make some serious inroads into some of the tasks that our resident Don Burke had set, the only disappointment being not being able to completely get rid of a densy, spiny shrub that had taken hold in one corner. Damn thing give me a couple of splinters even through gardening gloves.
It's actually interesting to note that all other people that showed up are roughly the same age (give or take 10 or so years, and Kathleen and I are the youngest at near 30), which means that we're almost friends with the other units - remarkable given how frequently the papers like to trundle out the story about no one knowing their neighbours anymore in fast, hectic, rude Sydney.
Of these five units, one couple have two kids under the age of five, two couples have just had their first, another couple are expecting their first next April... which leaves us! At least we know that if anyone wants to chip in for on-site childcare, we might be in luck.
Fri, 24 Nov 2006
With one of the most cumbersome URLs I've seen in a long, long while, the Japanese Film Festival is on next week in Sydney.
Shortlist so far:
- Swing Girls
- The Castle of Sand
- The Mamiya Brothers
Now if I can just convince a few people to go...
Wed, 22 Nov 2006
There's nothing worse after a long day at work than to arrive at Parramatta station and find that the train that is taking you home is only six cars long, and is not air-conditioned. It's an hour-long journey home.
And the next one is not due for another 17 minutes.
Thanks CityRail. Nothing like summer to remind you all too soon about the delays in organising new, air-conditioned carriages.
Even worse is to have it happen two days in a row.
And for a points failure to have the train stop in the tunnels north of Sydney for five hot, sweaty minutes with no announcements, and no indication.
Tue, 21 Nov 2006
From crikey.com.au today:
Daylight saving is also on the agenda in Perth, where the West Australian chased comments from the state's leaders last week. Here are some of their deeper thoughts:
- "Who will cook the tea? While everyone is prancing around the beach or running around a park kicking a football, what will happen? I have a feeling our major takeaway outlets will love daylight saving because Mum will say to Dad: 'We've had a great time in the park but I didn't put the chops or potatoes on'." - Bruce Donaldson: Liberal MLC
- "If this legislation is passed and we have daylight saving, it will mean either that some alterations will have to be made or that people will have to accept that their wedding photographs may not be taken at sunset". - Ray Halligan: Liberal MLC
- "A lot of blokes do not turn up to work if the surf is up. They do not arrive until 11 o'clock in the morning. If we agree to daylight saving 11 o'clock will turn into 12 noon. By then it will be lunchtime, so they will take two hours off for lunch and think: 'To hell with it, it's not worth going to work at all'." - Barry House: Liberal MLC
- "The effect daylight saving will have on our circadian rhythms, which is the 24-hour cycle in the physiological process of living beings. When our circadian rhythm is upset, it puts us out of sorts. I do not want my circadian rhythm upset because I do not like being out of sorts". - Robyn McSweeney: Liberal MLC
- "If people are like the chooks and go to bed early, they are ready for a full day of daylight without touching the clock". - Gary Snook: Liberal MP for Moore
The most thoughtful response, however, came from the Nationals MP for Avon, Max Trenorden - a very deep thinker indeed:
"In physics there is no such thing as time. The Earth goes around the Sun and rotates on its axis, and that is pretty wobbly too. We need atomic clocks to adjust time every now and then because it is not perfect. It might be worthwhile for people to remember that". - Max Trenorden
And I thought politicians in NSW were dumb...
On Saturday night, after a three month wait, we finally got to go to Tetsuya's, which is reputed to be one of, if not, the top restaurant in Australia, and in the top five in the world. Our friend Chang was up from Melbourne for the weekend, and had booked in back in August. Luckily, it's easier to book a table for six there on a Saturday night than for two...
It was worth the wait.
Dinner there is a ten course degustation menu, degustation being French for "really tiny portions that taste absolutely incredible". Each of the courses comes out with it's own little presentation from the waiters, a little background story, which is nice, but I felt at times that the waiters were expecting a little more from us in response to their spiel. Not sure what to say - "Sounds good" probably wouldn't suffice. "Yeah yeah yeah let's get stuck in" maybe a little too vulgar.
The food was incredible, the service seamless. Glass empty? The waiters are there, topping it up. Finished the course? The plate's gone before you know it. The dishes come out quickly - three on one side, then three on the other. To be fair, it is a set course, which means it's not too hard to deliver each dish to every diner at the table in one hit, but it certainly makes you a bit remember other dining experiences where one poor sucker always seems to get his dish delivered late and cold when everyone else has finished eating.
We didn't bring our camera - not sure how the waiters would have reacted - but it seems like other people aren't quite so hesitant. So rather than describe each course in detail, I'll just point you in the direction of other, better, food writers like Grab Your Fork.
We unfortunately didn't get to see Tetsuya. Pretty sure he was tucked up at home on a Saturday night. We did, however, wonder just what a master chef would whip up at home. Baked beans on toast?
Was it expensive? We didn't get much change out of $1200 for the six of us. But it was worth it for the experience alone. Plus did I mention the food was fantastic? Yes, I think I did.
The highlight? Tetsuya's signature dish - confit of petuna Tasmanian ocean trout with konbu, daikon and fennel. Amazing stuff. Also worth mentioning were the wagyu beef, ravioli of lobster and crab and the tuna on sushi rice with avocado sauce.
By the time we finished, it was 11.30pm, an entire four hours after we first arrived, which makes it seem a little more value for money than you might at first expect.
Thu, 09 Nov 2006
The new series of The Amazing Race, has 10 families of 4, or 40 people. That's almost double the number of people to keep track of than in previous series.
Watching the first ten minutes, I'm struck by two thoughts:
- Who the heck spends as much time together as a family as each team claim they do in the introduction segments?
- Watching this show is like watching Morning Musume perform on Japanese TV. There's just waaaay too much visual stuff going on to concentrate on any of it.
Not sure this is going to be a good series...
In light of the Japanese rout of the Melbourne Cup, I'd like to share a little story.
When we lived in Japan and worked as assistant language teachers (i.e. human tape recorders) in the public school system, one of the funny little idiosyncracies that made life so much fun was the indoor shoe situation.
Every morning, when students and teachers arrive at school, they swap from their outdoor shoes, carrying the dirt and grime of the notoriously dirty Japanese streets and trains for the pristine beauty of their indoor shoes. They would then pack their outdoor shoes into little shoe lockers, situated by both the teachers' entrance and the students' entrance.
It's a major taboo in the schools to forget and wear your outdoor shoes inside. It doesn't go down well at all.
I managed to find a reasonably work-shoe like pair, and even more amazingly they were in size 11 - an absolute rarity in Japan - for about Y2000, which is cheap as chips. Set.
The poor Japanese students on the other hand were forced to wear a pair of generic, uniform cloth shoes, with their names written in black marker pen on the toes to distinguish them.
The best part, though, was that the shoes were mary janes - cloth mary janes.
Even the boys.
It's hard to be feel awkward in the presence of a bunch of too-cool-for-school teenage boys wearing mary janes. No matter how much they tried to scuff them up or make them dirty.
So you can imagine my delight at reading about this pervert in Japan:
A man suspected of stealing about 5,000 pairs of shoes in order to enjoy their odor has been arrested, police said Wednesday.
"I was enjoying their smell," Masashi Kamata, 28, a resident of Moriyama-ku, Nagoya, was quoted as telling investigators. "Indoor shoes for school sexually stimulate me. I couldn't throw away the shoes I obtained."
...
Local police confiscated about 5,000 pairs of school indoor shoes for girls and boys from a warehouse he had rented in Moriyama-ku on Wednesday.
Tue, 07 Nov 2006
Didn't watch it. Don't know who won. Don't care.
Yeah, I'm a party pooper.
But Kathleen won $65 at her work draw using the scientific method of choosing the horses based on the fact that they were owned by Japanese trainers. Score!
Because of a nasty bout of what I think was food poisoning, I called in sick to work yesterday and today.
Mid-morning yesterday, I got a phone call on my mobile. From work.
"We've got a question about how to do some of the tasks that you wrote down for us, but we can't seem to ring your mobile number from the desk phones at work, can we have your house number and we'll call you on that?"
Because I'm like a puppy - dumb, but eager to please - I gave it over. They called, I helped, we hung up. Sorted.
Today, I got five calls from work.
By the fourth one, I had to ask: "Look, have you asked Coworker X?" "Yes, but he's really busy!" "Yeah, but he's not sick. If he's too busy, it'll just have to wait until I get back in tomorrow!" *click* I hung up.
Gargh! I certainly learnt a lesson today - no good deed goes unpunished.
Wed, 01 Nov 2006
Oh no! Banjo's were raided by the AFP!
AUSTRALIAN Federal Police raided the Hobart headquarters of Tasmanian business success story Banjo's yesterday.
More than a dozen AFP officers descended unannounced on the 34-store bakery chain's Elizabeth St corporate office about 10am yesterday.
Staff were ordered to stop work immediately and leave the office without touching paperwork or computers.
I hope they're still open in December when we're home for Christmas - I'd die if I don't get my fix of pasties!
Hey - they have a store in NSW! Oh, it's in Glendale, over 100km away. Darn.
