Matthew Hayden has announced his retirement from international cricket nearly 15 years after he was presented with his baggy green cap."
Looks like Hayden has been moved from his usual spot in slips to that most famous of fielding positions, Left Right Out.
I finally got around to filling in the form for a Sydney Water rebate, for a new washing machine we purchased in July just after the New Year.
Only to find, when I checked the website, that the expiration was actually the very last day of 2008, five days earlier.
Damn!
But I filled it in anyway, and a good thing I did, since it was actually honoured. I got the remittence notice via email today.
A crap day at work ahead can be signalled quite early by a lack of sleep the night before and a dry, scratchy throat that hurts every time one swallows.
The signs are more ominous when feeling hot and sweaty, even in an air-conditioned office. I think I'm coming down with something.
An even worse day is the above combined with having to present a training course to a number of clients. The combination of having to talk a lot, and be switched on all day, is incredibly tiring.
But luckily today turned out really well. My throat wasn't too sore. The students attending were excited by some of the new features in the product training, and that excitement tends to rub off on the trainer too! I can't wait to go out to their site next week and help put into place some of the things that came up in the class today.
Now I only need to get through tomorrow's class with a new group of students, and it'll be the weekend!
Ever since Kathleen heard the phrase "boy look" from my sister over Christmas in Hobart, she has been using it non-stop on me.
"Hey," I'd ask. "Have you seen the wrapping paper/sticky tape/scissors/car keys/mobile phone charger?"
"It should be there. Have you had a boy look or a girl look?"
"Oh yeah, here it is."
"A boy look. Right."
So annoying.
If you've never heard the terms before, they are both evidently dreamt up by a woman. A "boy look" refers to a search for a regular household object that comes up empty. A "girl look" is the subsequent look, usually by the girl, following the pronouncement by the boy, that the object cannot be found, where is it, you must've moved or hidden it. Incredibly enough, the object just somehow happens to be in the same place that the boy was just looking.
Huh.
But of course, the reason why men give up so easily is that they assume the object has been moved or hidden, usually by the woman in their life, in order to make them look bad and terribly short-sighted.
This is how the shockingly incompetent NSW Labor government fudges the figures:
Overcrowding will become accepted practice on triple the number of CityRail trains under a NSW Government bid to make its performance figures look good.
CityRail aims for no more than 5 per cent of trains to carry a "crush load".
But bureaucrats want to extend that target to 17 per cent after a review revealed 16 per cent of services in 2007-08 ran with such a load - whereby passengers exceed 135 per cent of seating capacity.
Just to summarise:
The official regulator target for overcrowding is no more than 5% of train services at overcrowding, which is 135% of seated capacity.
The current figures show that 16% of services are over the capacity target.
NSW Labor's solution? Make the target 17%. Problem solved!
The next state election, 2011, the next chance to vote this bunch of idiots out, is more than 2 years away.
*sigh*
We had some of our friends around on New Years Eve for dinner to see in 2009. We (actually Kathleen) cooked (and I helped prepare) a few dishes, and our friends brought some additional dishes over. As usual at our gatherings, there were so many leftovers we practically had to force foil-wrapped food into their hands at the end of the night!
Since we were hardly drinking, the only real excitement of the night came when the sliding screen door to the apartment was accidentally locked... with everyone outside on the balcony, we were locked out! Luckily, we were able to take the screen door off its railing, so didn't have to call out to the neighbours (who were out anyway), or jump down to the front door of the apartment building.
We walked down to the bridge near Wollstonecraft station at around 11.30pm, and it was packed. After ten minutes, we weren't even able to see the Sydney Harbour Bridge from our vantage point (though we could see the fireworks just fine). The crowd was happy and boisterous without being obnoxious or drunk.
And we finally got to bed at around 2.30am.
Hope your new years was good, too.
andrewandkathleen was meant to be a place to chuck our photos and diaries of our time in Japan. Since then it's transformed into a way of letting our friends and family know what we've been up to!
We've been together since high school, married since 2005. We've travelled and lived in different cities and different countries and are now trying to work out whether we're settling down or having a rest!
