I know there’s a drought, and that, technically, it’s probably illegal to hose down the concrete around your house, but I don’t think what my daughter just smeared on the path is the kind of thing you can clean up with the blower-vac.
Author Archive for drew
Overheard at morning tea today:
“I don’t want two pieces of cake!”
“That’s not two pieces; it’s one piece cut in half!”
I went on leave today. I have two whole weeks of anything other than work to look forward to. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while and it’s almost a little scary how quickly it’s come around.
Most of this week, I’ve even been in holiday mode: not getting too stressed about things, thinking about handballing current projects to colleagues, getting a few things finished and choosing to do the kind of ongoing jobs that aren’t too stressful at all. I wasn’t even in the office today, but organised a day out with the camera to build work’s photo library. (And fuck this lens makes your camera a bitch to carry around all day.) I even finished a little early to pick up Little Miss L from school.
So I bet you can’t guess why I’m stressed now.
Well, someone sent me an email, which was a link to a job-seeking site, and there’s a job there that, right now, is my dream job. So of course, I want it. And of course, I’m going to go for it. But it’s the post-going-for-it bit that’s concerning me. See, I know I could do it. I know I could be really good at it. I know I know what I need to know to get it and I know I could grow into the bits that I don’t have down pat yet. I know it would be an opportunity to get closer to where I think I’d really like to be.
The problem is that because I’ve been doing the job I’m doing for so long, having been away from some parts of this other job, I can see how, on paper, I might not look like the ideal candidate. I’ve been doing one kind of writing for a living and this other job requires talent in another genre. I can do it; I’ve done it before, but I haven’t done a whole lot of it recently and I think that counts for quite a lot when you’re asking someone to trust you that you’re, like, really really good at it and stuff.
And the epiphany I just had in the shower was that, for the last few years, I haven’t been doing the job I really want to be doing, I’ve just been doing a job at a place that’s really good to work. I’ve been mistaking flexitime, parental leave and good coffee for job satisfaction. Yeah, this has helped me through the rearing-young-children years of my career but enough is enough. I’m done.
Anyone got any good ideas on how to get extensive, recent journalistic experience over, say, a weekend?
…aaaaand we’ve just come off our fixed home loan rate to the standard variable, sending our monthly repayment through the stratosphere.
So now I can’t actually afford the shoes. Probably not this year.
Anyway, there probably would have been some kind of penatly fee for buying something in a foreign currency.
These are the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.
I can just imagine a hardened lecturer wearing a tight Tshirt with one of these held to their shoulder under the sleeve, and some junior tutor coming up to them in the refectory asking “Hey buddy, can I bum a Kafka?”
I get the Belair line train into the city most mornings. I met a work colleague at the station this morning and we got in the train together and were having a nice chat about work stuff; boring but interesting.
The Adelaide public transport system, the rail network in particular, has a bit of a reputation. Most of the rail cars are getting old, they run on diesel, the windows are made of some dual-layer Perspex material that ranges from translucent at best to almost opaque at worst, the trains NEVER run on time (at least not on the Belair line but I gather most other lines are the same).
I don’t know what the problem was this morning but we noticed that as we pulled out of the station and got up a bit of speed, the engines cut out and we rolled into the next station before the brakes went on, passengers got on, the engines were started again, we got up some speed and they cut out again. The fortunate thing is that the Belair line, being the only train line into the hills, runs downhill going into the city, so saving power for whatever reason is pretty easy when gravity can do most of the work.
Even when things levelled out after Mitcham, the driver was still turning off the engines after getting up to full speed and we rolled into pretty much every station. It certainly made chatting easier, as the lack of engine noise made for a very quiet ride. My colleague and I were having to keep it down a bit at times because there was just so little noise and we didn’t want to seem loud.
The funny thing, and perhaps the point of this post, was that after we rolled into Goodwood, and just before the driver fired up the engines again, he made the same announcement that every driver makes just before leaving Goodwood on this particular train.
“Express to Adelaide”
It was one of those occasions where the unwritten rule of keeping to yourself could be disregarded. For some reason, the train was only half-full and that remark brought guffaws of laughter from me and a few other passengers. A guy sitting near me pulled out his earphones and asked “What did he say?” and he laughed when I told him.
Oh, we pulled into an unusual platform too (not that platform 4 is different in any way but this train usually comes into platform 1) and, such is the opacity of the windows, that people lined up to get out the doors on the wrong side of the carriage.
I was walking across town last night after work to meet my SO for a ride home.
I was carrying my Holga, in case anything of photographic significance should have made itself apparent to me, and was trying to put my headphones on (or in) at the same time.
My headphones are the in-ear type, comprising the hard, plastic bit that houses the speaker and, surrounding that, the soft, silicone rubber bit that conforms to the shape of the ear canal, creating a seal and shutting out much of the outside noise.
The cord had become all twisted and I was trying to fasten the little clip near the microphone (it’s part of my phone/mp3 player setup) onto my shirt… while I was holding my camera… while looking for anything cool to photograph. I had my bag half open. The other end of the headphones, not yet attached to the phone, was dangling around my knees.
So I got the clip sorted, finally. Then I got the other end and plugged it into the phone. I changed the position of the camera in my hand. Then I went to put my headphones in and realised one of the silicone bits had fallen off.
I hate losing these things. It makes the earpiece not fit in your ear, rendering the headphones pretty much useless. While they give you extras with the phone, I won’t be flippant about losing them because it would suck to have to buy new ones and I just know it would cost about $20 for four grams of silicone, which I wouldn’t want to pay on principle. I lost one walking to work down Memorial Drive once. I retraced my steps for five minutes or so and found it.
So I started to do this, in 5pm foot traffic, walking slowly, gazing downwards, looking for a grey bit of rubber on a grey footpath covered in shadow. I went back to where I thought I still would have had it, then walked back again and gave up.
Luckily, because I had a phone stolen a while ago, I have two pairs of headphones. The other pair went a bit spaz so I stopped using them but still have them in my bag. I plundered them for a silicone earpiece and spent the rest of my walk to Dequetteville Tce happily strolling with Regina Spektor.
This morning, C dropped my on Pulteney St and I walked up Grenfell towards work. I crossed King William and realised I was in the spot and thought ‘It can’t hurt to have a look’ so I slowed, only slightly, and went over the same bit of footpath again.
Nothing.
But 10 m further down, there it was, protruding like a nipple on an otherwise flat-chested footpath. It hadn’t even fallen into a crack or been kicked into the gutter or anything. It was just there and had been all night.
I’ll stick it in a cup of near-boiling water to sterilise it and put it back in circulation.
It seems so odd when fortunate things happen. In a good way though.
I don’t normally do book reviews. I don’t normally do reviews.
When everyone was jostling for publication in the student union magazine in my uni days, everyone just wanted to write reviews so they could hopefully snag free CDs and shit. I thought that was a bit transparent so never really bothered even trying to master the discipline.
But I just finished A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh and, considering the lack of anything much else happening at the moment, I thought I’d write about it. But this still isn’t a review. It’s just my observations about the book.
I like Waugh’s work. There’s a real sense of… not just humour, but playfulness in some of his works (off the top of my head, Scoop and The Loved One). I’ve only read his earlier fictional works but there’s a sense of play in the way he weaves recurring characters into his novels, so the reader familiar with his work, recognising these characters, can take a lot of the social background of the works for granted.
While this wasn’t as prevalent in AHOD (I think Lady Metroland only had one brief appearance, or it may have been merely a mention), it was still the slightly shallow, between-the-wars society he was poking fun at. But he never makes his characters airy or without substance. I hate to draw Seinfeld as a modern comparison, but there was a way he focused on some of the minutae of day-to-day goings on that made for a lot of the humour. It helps him satirise his characters but also ground them in some kind of reality.
One thing that interested me, early on in the book, was the use of the word ‘bitch’. He uses it twice in the early pages in a manner that means ‘to spoil’ in both senses of the word: namely, to ruin; and to fuss over. In one instance, Tony says to Brenda (from memory) “you’re being absolutely heroic with Beaver,” to which she replies “I think I’m rather bitching him,” meaning that she’s doting on him a bit too much and spoiling him. In the second instance, it escapes me who’s talking to whom (and I’m sitting too comfortably to go to the bookshelf and look it up) but someone says something along the lines of “we should call it a night,” to which the reply is “I’m afriad I bitched it for you,” meaning that he/she has ruined the evening for the other.
I looked it up on the online etymology dictionary and apparently that meaning was in use from the 1830s but seems to have disappeared. Interesting.
The thing I like about Waugh is that he doesn’t ever give you what would be considered a happy ending. Far from it. While he gives you humour and social satire, he does make his characters likable, so for all their shortcomings you’re still on their side but then things happen to them that can make you despair.
For Brenda and Tony, the death of their son and the breakdown of their marriage—the first was a surprise but the second wasn’t, given the first—would have been enough. But, in a similar fashion to Decline and Fall, we see pure tragedy unfold, with Brenda no happier (perhaps until the final pages) and Tony lost, isolated and pretty much done for.
Yet, along the way… Tony’s trip to the seaside with Milly was just pure farce. And the description of his hallucinations during his fevered delerium was comic genius: as you read the words you can sense the fun Waugh must have had writing them. Tony’s missed encounter with the Englishmen was foreseeable and a tad cruel, but the device serves to seal his fate: reading Dickens aloud to a slightly loopy mini-despot, literally in the middle of nowhere (his location being on the disputed, unmapped border between two countries).
I should probably give it some kind of star rating now.
But there it is, my not-review of A Handful of Dust.
I hate buying shoes. I may have mentioned that before. With the bad ankles and the orthotics and the walking and the needing support and rigidity in some places and flexibility in others.
I’ve been out again, trying on different pairs of shoes, buying them, taking them home and realising they don’t fit that well and/or they look crap.
The main frustration has been looking at shoes online, seeing stuff I really like, only to find that a) they don’t stock them in Australia or b) they won’t even ship them from the US. What kind of discrimination is that?
The perfect pair of shoes I have in my head are snappy dress shoes up top, but sturdy, walking shoes on the bottom. I’ve had my eye on a pair of Skechers, which seem to fit the bill so set about getting a pair. They were on the US site so I thought I’d look at the Australian site. I was disappointed: the US site had 299 styles of men’s shoes; the Australian site had but 27. Yes, that’s less than 10 %.
What’s worse, is that the US site won’t ship overseas. I’m not sure why, something about registered addresses or recognised credit cards or something. Last night I had a brainwave and thought ‘of course… Amazon!’ and got online to find they had the very pair in stock. I went through the ordering process only to get a message saying they wouldn’t deliver them either.
*** We’re sorry. This item can’t be shipped to your selected destination. You may either change the shipping address or delete the item from your order by changing its quantity to 0 and clicking the update button below.***
The last time this happened to me was when I was buying a CF card for my camera. I wasn’t sure why then either, I mean you could fit one of them in an envelope! How hard could it be?
Elsewhere on the site it mentions restrictions on sending things like phones, computer equipment, groceries (obv) and furniture.
But why not shoes? I know what size I want. I know what colour they are. Why can’t they send them? They’re the same materials as all the other made-in-China shoes you can buy here. Are there voltage issues I’m not aware of?
The other option is to have them sent to a friend’s address and reimburse them for postage. But I hate to impose. I just really want these shoes.
Bugger, I spent so much of today actually being a dad:
- feeding kids breakfast
- putting DVDs on for them while I tidy
- putting snot-covered doona covers in the wash
- grounding one of them telling her she’s not going to the show this year
- tidying their room because she wouldn’t
- taking the other one to the toilet
- mowing the lawns (including the bits that technically don’t belong to me)
- taking kids to the play café (exception to the grounding for family outings)
- making dinner
- sorting out clean doona covers
- getting the sleepy one to bed
- bathing the other (grounded) one
- listening to her do her reading (she’ll be a great ventriloquist one day)
- getting her to bed
- looking after pathetically sick wife (technically husbanding, not fathering)
…that I forgot to ring my own Dad.
Would it count if I txt him before midnight?
