Today we zipped around St Kilda, showing our support for the locals, obviously still reeling from yesterday’s Grand Final loss. Shocking as it may seem, there seemed to be a lot of Crows supporters around, seemingly gloating, wearing their team colours. So we decked a few and came home. Nahhhhh… <Mr Burns voice> "Let them have their Grand Final Cup. As long as they spend plenty of money while they’re over here."

Not that I’m actually St Kilda supporter. My team’s Geelong, but I’d rather not discuss their Finals performance.

Next Saturday we’re going to head for Flemington races. Not for the horse racing, though no doubt the sight of horses would keep Isaac amused for a while. A friend of mine has a scheme to de-throne The Wiggles from their place as Australia’s number one kids’ group, with a group of his own: Jump 2 It. Their debut performance will be at Flemington at midday. Be there!

Which reminds me… I’m wondering if at concerts for kids’ acts who have their videos distributed by ABC Video, if before each show they should get someone on stage to lead all the parents in reciting the promo that’s on the start of every tape… "All together now… There’s a place alive with the magic of imagination, and all the colours of the rainbow…"

Why is it that the team I’m barracking for always loses?

On Friday it was time once again to use all the technology that modern man has to offer in an attempt to look inside L’s tummy to see how the new baby’s doing, and most importantly, to see if we can find out whether we need more boy’s clothes, or some girl’s clothes.

It’s not definite, but the lady said she thought it was probably a boy. Which is good. Already having one boy, we know how they work. Not that I’d be complaining if it turns out to be a girl. As long as we get a human, I reckon we’ll be happy.

In the months ahead, comes the most difficult task. Harder than getting ready for the birth, harder than looking after the kid once he’s here… I’d even be so bold as to suggest that it might be more difficult than giving birth itself, though I’m nobody to judge that.

Yes, I’m talking about CHOOSING A NAME. And I can sense parents everywhere squirming as they read those three words. For everybody else, let me assure you, it’s a very difficult task. It’s a very great responsibility. The name you decide on will determine how the child’s life turns out; from when the other schoolkids realise what it rhymes with, to whether or not it needs to be spelt out every time a paperwork minion writes it down. Get it hideously wrong you may be murdered in your sleep by the kid fifteen years later!

We’ve got a few months, so we’ll drag out the baby name books again and start scouring.

• A previous ultrasound
  (November 1994)

It’s all over the news. The papers, the radio, the TV, the Web… what is it? No, not the Second Car Theory. The El Nino effect. Everybody’s talking about it.

But… umm… What exactly is the El Nino effect? Okay, I know it’s some kind of weather anomaly, but none of the numerous stories about it explains what it is or how it works. They just say "xxx is going to be effected by El Nino…" "El Nino has caused a drought…" "El Nino will be bad for your laundry…"

It’s as if everybody knows already. Did I miss something? Was there some big explanation of it while I was away being abducted by aliens or something? Or does nobody know and the meteorologists and the journalists are plotting together to keep everyone in the dark?

I haven’t heard anybody discussing it in the lift or on the train. I don’t think down in the pub they’re all talking about El Nino. It’s probably just a plot by meteorologists to distract us from the fact that the weather forecasts are always wrong.

Well, I got back to work yesterday to find that my desk had moved. In fact the move had been on the cards for some time, and most of us believed it might never actually happen. Office relocations in big companies have a habit of being permanently on the drawing board, the actual event being continually delayed because of re-wiring, lack of space, people waiting for people to move out of the desks they need to move into, or just about any other reason you can think of.

But I had email last week to tell me that it had actually happened, and the plan had been known for so long that I knew exactly where to go when I got back to work. Which is good really, because you don’t want to be wandering aimlessly around the building looking for your desk.

Work itself has been flat out. Flat out in the sense that if there was space we could easily put a mattress flat out and sleep most of the day without impacting the work done. Instead we end up looking out of the window at the new view, conducting architecture reviews, watching the guy in the carpark downstairs shuffle cars around, and watching out for the ever-present Whitman’s blimp.

(Postscript: Hold the blimp watching, I’ve just been given something to do! Back to work!)

Well, today we said goodbye to my brother-in-law Daniel Boren after his two week stay here. Perhaps surprisingly there was no confusion with our names, since I insist on "Daniel", and he is generally known as "Dan". Just as well.

Today our target was to show Dan just a few of the very bizarre animals that inhabit this wild, wide brown land of ours. So we set off for the zoo. We arrived reasonably early, and only had to queue at the gate for a minute or two - a stark contrast from the last time we’d been when it was a gloriously sunny Sunday and just about everybody else in the city had also had the idea of going to the zoo. But this time round it was fairly quiet, apart from a few tourists and small gangs of schoolkids running around clutching clipboards.

The Australian animals were the priority, so we spurned the appeals of the big cats and tapirs and all those other weird and wonderful creatures they have at the zoo. Of course, we’ve all seen them multitudes of times, but the whole point was to show Dan, the visitor, the stuff he couldn’t see back at home in Seattle. So the Aussie creatures were first.

Wallabies are like miniature kangaroos - like they’ve been put in the tumble-dryer a few too many times. And they look and behave much like kangaroos - lazing in the sun, or sitting up washing themselves, and occasionally taking a bounce around just to give the tourists a thrill.

Next were the kookaburras. What you don’t realise about kookaburras until you see a whole bunch of them together in the zoo is that there’s actually lots of different varieties, sporting slightly different feathers, and occupying different parts of the country. They also vary in the amount of hysterical laughing that they do, and on this particular morning none of them appeared to be in the least bit amused by anything.

Wombats look a little like very small bears. The wombat’s main purpose in life appears to be crawl around looking cute, and they do this reasonably well, though the "Wombats may bite" warning sign meant most people weren’t willing to lean over the side of the enclosure to pat them. L has a strangely fanatical affection for wombats though, so she did. As long as you keep your hand clear of the wombat’s mouth, no bites will be forthcoming.

The koala’s ONLY purpose in life is to look cute. In fact there are rumours that koalas were especially bred just to bring in more tourists. They seem to spend most of their days sleeping in trees, climbing along the branches to find more leaves to eat, and then going back to sleep. Which to be quite honest, sounds like a pretty good lifestyle to me.

After watching the koalas laze around, we headed into the Butterfly House. The Melbourne Zoo Butterfly House is a must-see for anyone who is the remotest bit interested in insects. The butterflies fly around above you and between you, and they frequently land on you, so you need to be careful where you’re treading, and don’t make any sudden movements or you may end up with a squashed butterfly on your shirt. Which is not a good look.

The other thing to beware of is that the place is quite warm, so much so that camera and sunglass lenses tend to fog up pretty fast. And when you leave you’ll face a barrage of merchandise on sale just outside the exit, so if you’re not intending to spend much money, just push your wallet further down into your pocket, and keep walking with your eyes to the ground until you’re clear of the area.

Next we headed for lunch. The food available at the zoo has improved remarkably in the last few years. It doesn’t seem that long ago that on inspecting the sausage roll or pie you’d wonder if the animals were getting food which was of equal or greater quality. In fact, I really hope they were. Thankfully that’s all in the past, and if they could only organise the eating area so that it didn’t get so wet when it rained, they’d be onto a real winner.

After lunch we continued on around the zoo, looking at the rosellas and other assorted birds, which inhabit one of those very tall, old fashioned looking zoo cages which I think used to contain monkeys. We also took a quick look at the seals, which were up to their usual tricks, swimming around and looking cute (I’m always reminded of Dennis Leary’s "which animals are edible" routine).

The Aviary is a bit like the Butterfly House in that you get to walk through it and interact (well, a bit) with the inhabitants. Except that it’s not heated, and the birds keep well clear of the humans. Actually, it’s not really like the Butterfly House very much at all, is it.

Presumably kangaroos and emus have no inclination to eat or attack each other - which probably explains why they were sharing a display. In the Bushland display, you can walk through and if the kangaroos and emus are brave enough, they’ll come up and say hello. If, however, there happens to be a horde of noisy schoolkids going through at the same time, then the animals will probably stay in their private areas of the display.

Before leaving the zoo, we also went for a quick spin around some of the other displays - the elephants and the meerkats in particular, then through the Zoo Shop to see what wacky animal merchandise we should pick up.

We headed back for the city then, and while L and Isaac headed home, Dan and I continued on, with a quick stop at JB Hi Fi
to see what CD bargains were available that day, then we headed over to Young And Jacksons, for the customary view of Chloe flashing the goods, and a few well-earned pots.

While there we shared a game of pool with two people who were probably more than averagely pissed, considering the time of day. They still managed to win though.

The great thing about Young And Jacksons is that you can look across the street to the Flinders Street Station clocks and find out when your train leaves, then keep drinking until it’s about to go, stagger across the road and jump aboard. This we did after not too long, and headed home to prepare for the next day’s great outing.

Today our target was to eat fish’n'chips. Not much of a target, you might think, but these were no ordinary fish, and certainly no ordinary chips.

There is a fish’n'chips shop in Canterbury, a leafy suburb in Melbourne’s east, which according to a survey last year in The Age makes the second best fish’n'chips in the city. (It may account for the astronomical price of houses over there, who knows.) The best, they said, was in Bentleigh, but we’ve been there a few times and we reckon that despite their judicious use of beer batter, they’ve lost ground to Canterbury.

So we decided to head over to Canterbury, to sample that fish and those chips, and to explore Maling Road. Maling Road is a bit like an old village shopping centre that’s stuck sometime in the 1920s, except that there’s more cars now. It’s difficult to exactly put your finger on what gives it that olde worlde atmosphere, but whatever it is, it works.

After dutifully exploring the Maling Road shops, we headed around the corner to the fish’n'chips shop. Which was closed. Because it was Monday. When it was always closed. A fact that we had neglected to check in advance.

Whoops.

After some debate we decided to get back on the train and head for Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn. This is a spot with zillions of shops of all shapes, sizes and persuasions. And, most importantly, a fish’n'chips shop that’s open on Mondays. To our surprise, their standard of fish’n'chips proved to be excellent. I’m not sure how I’d rate it with the place in Canterbury, but it was very good indeed.

We ate it out on the curb, though al fresco almost turned to al soako when it started pouring with rain. Fortunately we were able to move our table slightly further from the street and get undercover before the chips got soggy and the fish got as wet as… umm.. a fish.

Having finished the fish’n'chips and thus achieving our target for the day, we went home to rest. No, we didn’t. We kept exploring Glenferrie Road, along the way finding some truly delicious Hedgehog slice. We also found a Bowen Street (which was a good photo opportunity) and shops varying from hippy goods to antique and obscure books. I didn’t notice, but you could probably get hippy books and antique and obscure goods, as well. Not to mention obscure books about antique hippies.

Next we headed into the city for a stroll around the gardens. We crossed over Princes Bridge and through some of those obscure parks just south of the river that nobody knows the name of. We passed the Flower Clock, which these days still looks brilliant, apart from the fact that it doesn’t have the right time. The Flower Clock was donated by a bunch of Swiss watchmakers, who would probably be winding in their graves to know that the time always seems to be wrong.

We walked further down, past the statue of Weary Dunlop. It’s a truly humbling experience to stand and read the story told in the plaques there about the man and his deeds. No wonder they gave him a state funeral.

Further humbling is the Shrine of Remembrance. This is something that shows that Melbourne knows how to build a war memorial. (Insert Paul Hogan voice here: "That’s not a war memorial - THIS is a war memorial!") It’s massive, and can be seen from way up at the top of Swanston Street, a huge grey reminder of a part of history that some people would rather forget.

When viewed from the outside close-up, it’s grand and impressive yet when you get inside, you realise that this isn’t some huge glorification of war, but rather it immortalises the deeds and suffering of ordinary individuals caught up in something that we all hope we never have to get caught up in ourselves.

From the Shrine we walked over to the Botanical Gardens. The Gardens are celebrating their 130th anniversary this year, and it looks like some pretty good care has been taken over those 130 years to keep the whole thing looking lovely. We strolled through, gazing upwards at the flying foxes (the organic kind, not the playground ride), and watching the swans and the ducks frollicking on the lawns.

It was just starting to rain again when we stopped off for some well-earned hot drinks at the lakeside cafe, whereupon we discovered that Isaac had done a truly impressive poo and thus needed to have his nappy changed.

When the rain had let up, we headed out of the gardens down to Toorak Road, South Yarra. Toorak Road has two main distinctions. (1) It’s fiendishly congested at peak hour, which it was, but that was okay because we were walking. (2) There’s a whole bunch of very exclusive looking shopping. I almost feel intimidated just going into a newsagent to buy a paper.

We strolled down Toorak Road and on to Chapel Street. Chapel Street is a very long shopping strip, maybe three kilometres long, and varies from your average everyday shops down on the southern end, to the So Fashionable You Can’t Wear It Anywhere Except Somewhere Ultra Hip clothes shops. It’s not quiteup there with the stuff that’s only ever seen on catwalks, and never actually worn by anybody, but some of it’s not far off.

By this point most of the shops were starting to close, and having eaten out already that day we didn’t fancy hanging around to dine there, no matter how excellent the choice of restaurants. So we headed back to South Yarra station and home.