I caught up for lunch with some friends who gave me the great news that they're expecting. She's four months along.
As we were leaving the restaurant, I glanced at her stomach, covered under a jumper because of the cold.
"Yeah, I know," she said, seeing my look. "I'm getting fat!"
"No no," I say, not wanting to make her feel bad. "I really can't tell!"
"You mean she always looks this fat so you didn't notice?" jokes her husband.
I have such a way with words.
We finally got around to going to Menya Ramen in Chinatown for lunch, based upon Kathleen's repeated reading of NQN. We got caught in the thunderstorm that dumped buckets of rain over the city, and went to the movies at CQ Dendy. Watched Lars and the Real Girl. I thought it was fantastic. Kathleen fell asleep.
We have wildly disparate tastes in movies.
Looks like one of the must-see things that we always recommend to people going to Tas on holidays is no more:
Cadbury ends chocolate tours in Tassie.
I can't believe the reason though: stupid, vague, blamable 'occ health and safety'.
When I was a kid, those tours were the best: frequent stops for 'samples' from the machines, a shop that sold chocolate seconds (misshapen, or slightly underweight or overweight chocs) for a fraction of the retail price. The prices became much closer to retail as I got older, but the tour was still a lot of fun.
And the smell of chocolate as you got out of the car in the carpark was awesome. A real-life chocolate factory!
For shame, Cadbury's, for shame!
We went over to Steva's on Saturday night for a BBQ for his future brother-in-law Ed's birthday. Steph's hooked up his Nintendo Wii to his TV set so you can browse the internet on the TV (however, keying in a URL via the hand controller is an exercise in frustration).
I can't remember what started it, but we ended up having a "YouTube night", where people suggested clips that they had seen which were awesome enough to share. Thanks to V, we saw Flight of the Conchords' Most Beautiful Girl In The Room. I shared the film clip from Gnarls Barkley's song Blood Red Nights.
It was like watching Rage except without having to sit through all the dud songs!
I haven't written anything for a while because I've been doing after-hours testing at work.
The schedule goes a little like this:
9pm - midnight: drive into work, conduct testing in a quiet time to avoid being impacted by other activities
11am: arrive at work, review previous night's results
6pm: head home, eat dinner
I've had a few days where I've stayed around at work until the planned test starts - those days suck.
It's nice getting in around lunchtime, particularly where you have the morning to sleep in, and actually see some daylight before going into work. It's also nice and quiet at night.
On the flipside, the hours play havoc a little with sleep patterns, going to bed at 2am, getting up at 7 or 8. Plus, the lights automatically turn off at 10pm, and the light switch doesn't seem to respond, no matter how many times I press it. Sitting in the dark, bathed in the light of a computer monitor, sucks a bit.
Just a bit more on Kathleen's full-on Boot Camp week...
Since all the sessions are held on the beach, poor Kathleen ended up tracking a kilo of sand in the car and through the house. She's such a stickler for neatness and cleanliness, too, so the pain and misery associated with the training effort continued even after she arrived home!
Thursday's trainign session was kayaking in the water at 5am, and Friday was a repeat of the previous four days over 3 hours.
She came home on a massive high of achievement that she woke me up (at 7.30am) just to tell me.
"Mmph, that's great," I mumbled as I rolled over and went back to sleep.
I bet that was annoying, me sleeping in more than four hours after she had risen and spent all that time sweating her butt off ;)
Turns out Bill Granger, a big-time Sydney chef, opened a restaurant in Kanagawa, down near the beach at Kamakura in Japan. Kamakura's a nice place, very relaxed seaside vibe (as much as Japan has those). It's not so relaxed around the daibatsu (Great Buddha) with all the tourists!
(via Japan Today).
Kathleen has been going twice a week to a Boot Camp workout for the last few weeks. She's been getting up at 5.30am every Tuesday and Thursday, which is a pretty good achievement just to begin with. To combine it with a pseudo-military workout makes it even tougher!
Last week, she signed up for what is called 'Tactical 12'. It's a high-effort, intense week of exercise, where the start time of 4.30am is just the preliminary!
The first night, the 4.30am start was combined with a 10pm briefing down on Balmoral Beach... and the 10pm 'briefing' turned out to be a one hour workout on the beach, in the dark!
The instructor, who all participants have to refer to as 'Sarge', seems to subscribe to the 'surprise' approach of fitness.
Tuesday morning was a massive run, and the poor girl came home close to tears from exhaustion and the thought of sustaining the effort for the next three days. She came home and went to bed for a few hours to catch up on sleep... it was getting to the point where I almost pretended to be a Balmoral resident and ring up the council to complain about the noise and get them shut down, just to save her from the rest of the week!
A further 'midnight' briefing for Wednesday night was proposed as well, so Kathleen spent a few hours waiting for an SMS to confirm it. Luckily, that one was cancelled. But the late notice meant that she (and presumably all the other attendees) couldn't catch up on rest to compensate for the early morning starts!
In any event, I reckon Kathleen will be in the mood for a celebratory sleep on Friday night at the end of this week, rather than a celebratory dinner!
They played this clip at the end of Spicks and Specks tonight:
Alongside our apartment block, there's a council-owned laneway that lets people take a shortcut between streets. It has a set of steps for the last 10 metres. About six months ago, somebody posted a sign on the six foot wooden fence separating the block land from the lane, reading "Playing On Steps Prohibited", black letters on white, and it sticks out like dogs balls.
It always bugged me when I saw it as I was walking home each day - primarily the fact that it was drilled into the fence that we own - without our knowledge and permission - and secondly because it's pretty officious to put a sign up for a problem that doesn't even exist. I have never seen any one playing on the steps ever before. It's the sort of anti-fun, prohibit-everything mentality that gives the Nawth Shaw such a stuffy image.
I'd always meant to do something about it, especially since no one in the block admitted to posting it, and the owner of the unit with the fence didn't do it, so it must have been someone who lived in a different block. But by the time I got home each evening, I'd usually have forgotten about it, or said "I'll do it on the weekend" (and forgotten), or some other excuse.
On Sunday, I'd had enough, and decided to just do it already. I got out my screwdriver and started unscrewing the screws that held the metal sign against the fence. The bugger who put it up obviously had an electric drill, too, because there were about 14 screws on the damn thing and it took me a good 15 minutes and the screws were pretty tight in.
So as I'm there getting a bad case of unscrewers elbow, a middle-aged couple passed by on the steps. They saw what I was doing, and they saw the wording on the sign.
Evidently, it rubbed them the same way as it rubbed me (that is, the wrong way), and put two and two together and come up with five, thinking I was putting it up, because they stopped and said in a disapproving tone, "So, do you have much of a problem with people playing on the stairs?"
"Well, it's not my sign, it's up on our property without permission, I think it's rude and I'm taking it down, not putting it up." I told them.
Their demeanour changed immediately. "Carry on," they said.
The last two screws were threaded, too, so wouldn't come undone - I ended up having to rip the sign down before chucking it in the bin.
Good riddance.
The Discman I bought back in 2003 for $200 (stupidly I bought it just as the iPod was going from strength to strength but still costing a fair bit more) is not even getting bids of $20 on Ebay. There are stacks of auctions, most of which have no bids at all. Maybe I should just donate it to Vinnies or something.
And the even ancienter Walkman from my teenage days (heh, all of 15 years ago) is sitting here staring me in the face as I try and work out exactly who would need a Walkman, even a free donated one. Does anyone still listen to tapes these days?
We went to an engagement party out at Wentworthville for a girl Kathleen used to work for.
The engagement party itself was a semi-formal 3 course dinner, complete with speeches, for 90 people.
If that was the engagement party, what's the wedding going to look like??
The kids in attendance (all under 10 and cute as anything) had a great time running up and down the back of the room.
And that's two trips past Ashfield in the same year for us - crazy!
We had a big spring cleaning day on Sunday. We went through the cupboard in the spare room, tossing out a whole bunch of stuff that we no longer needed - cables, old electrical items (including a cassette Walkman, an old answering machine, TV rabbit ears, old desk lamps, a step-down converter for Kathleen's MD player she bought in Japan and had stolen when we got broken into in Surry Hills, and the item that I had the most difficulty letting go of - my old Commodore 64). Clothes went to St Vinnies. Most of the electrical stuff went to Freecycle.
The boxes in the garage also had to go - we had the original boxes for some of our furniture ready and raring to go for the next day we move house. Ideally, that's a few years away, so the boxes got chucked into the recycling. A packing box filled with five books and two empty CD racks also got tossed - the CD racks went to the side of the road for council pickup, the books to the recycling bin.
I still cannot believe how much stuff we have lying around that we can't bear to throw away, on the off chance it might be needed 'some day'.
We bought a wireless laser printer.
It came with a special offer of ten reams of paper. Which doesn't seem a lot until the sales assistant brings the paper out, packed into two boxes, looking very much like the massive boxes of paper at your work.
Each of those boxes weighed 13 kilos. There was no carry handle, just the thin plastic strap, which made carrying the boxes out to the car a real pain in the neck.
Also a pain in the neck was setting up the wireless printing. In the end, I had to plug it into the router by a LAN cable; the wireless router suddenly decided its ethernet ports weren't going to work, so I had to dig out an old router.
God I hate technology sometimes.
But I eventually got it to work, and even found a good little out-of-the-way location for it to sit.
Note to self: find Hummer, take photo, send it in.
The weather was so nice on Sunday - blue skies and bright sunshine - that it seemed such a shame to spend it doing chores and cleaning the house.
Which is why, when Lu rang and suggested going out to Rozelle Markets with her, Denz and Steva, we said yes straight away.
The markets themselves were the usual type of Sydney flea market, full of junk (seriously, is there anyone buying VHS cassettes anymore?), so after wandering around having a look and getting a bite to eat, we wandered down Darling St for a few blocks.
We were going to go into About Life on Darling St and grab a coffee, but with the six of us it was hard getting a table. We ended up going across the road to the Common Ground Bakery.
On the inside we realised, looking at the long flowing skirts and headbands of the waitresses and the beards of the men, that it's an Amish cafe.
An Amish cafe is a little different from a Western cafe. For a start, there's no table service since "We're much too busy today." In addition, the machine is broken, so no smoothies. No frappes either. So most of the girls had their choices nixed. And Eva hated the coffee so much she had to go elsewhere for another coffee chaser to get the taste out of her mouth.
On the plus side, the magazine advertising their luddite lifestyle (Summer 2006!) was a good giggle.
Went for a bike ride along the new bike path which runs along the Gore Hill Freeway (you know, the one the NRMA hates so much*). It's a nice run, but very hilly. Seems most of the on- and off-ramps are designed so that the bike paths have to go under or over. As a result, there's very precious few flat spots. And the killer is that they haven't quite finished the part that runs under the Pac Highway to Lane Cove, so after a calf-busting zig-zag incline, I'm dumped at construction and roadworks with a sign that says "Take Detour", but no clear indication where the detour is.
I swear the RTA, who designed the path, are a bunch of idiots.
Anyway, ended up having a few coffees at Lane Cove before riding back home and catching a bus into town for a few beers with Steph. But on the trip in, the bus stopped at North Sydney.
"Sorry everybody," announced the bus driver to the packed bus. "I only have five minutes until my mandated driving time is up, and we won't make it to the city before then, so you'll all have to get off here."
A stunned silence. Are you serious?!
Yes, he's serious.
"Just tell the next bus driver and you won't have to buy another ticket," said our paragon of customer service as he shut the doors (but didn't pull away, mind you).
Luckily the next bus was right behind.
"Are you serious?!" exclaimed the driver as we informed him what his colleague had done. He just shook his head and we passengers continued on our way into the city.
I swear the STA, who surely would check their timetables and bus driver rosters, are a bunch of idiots.
But Steph is not an idiot, and he and I had a few beers in the afternoon sun down at King St Wharf.
* Funnily enough, most comments have an opposite opinion to that which the NRMA are advocating, demanding more cyclepaths and more emphasis on measures that support all road users, not just cars.
Going through a period of apathy with regards to updating. It's not for want of activity, either:
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!
