Well, the last day of my current contract job is tomorrow. I have found another one to take its place in the near future - just after Easter to be precise.

Apart from making sure I submit all my final timesheets and invoices and clearing my desk, there’s one other important event on The Last Day itinerary: The Lunch. When working in the city, there are numerous very nice restaurants, all within a comfortable walking distance. The Last Day Lunch at my previous job was a quite nice Greek place, famed on song and fable*, where much gobbling of lamb took place.

This, however, is suburbia, where the culinary choices within walking distance are limited to the food court at the local shopping centre, the milkbar, cafe or fish’n'chips shop up the street, or the big three of chain eating: Pizza Hut, the Pancake Parlour, or The Keg.

I’m not going to knock The Keg. Not yet, anyway. Because I’ve never been there. That will change tomorrow however, because that is to be our chosen venue for our "Bugger Off, Don’t Come Back" lunch. I’m ready to be impressed.

*Okay, just song. "Stalactites", by Weddings Parties Anything.

Postscript Tuesday: I liked it.

Every so often I like to bung an update in the diary. It helps the few of you who might be actually interested in finding out about some of the continuing things that go on in my life, as thrilling as it is. So here’s the update:

• Baby Jeremy
  is piling on weight. He was five weeks old last week, and had already reached 6 kilograms - 150% of his birth weight.
• The Car is going well. It hasn’t gained 50% of its own weight, but is settling into its new family life well. More importantly, I’m getting plenty of good driving practice, even if the miracle of the internal combustion engine has only reduced my commute time by about a quarter. Even hill starts are a walk in a park. Actually, that’s a pretty inappropriate use of that expression, isn’t it.
• My wife L has started driving lessons, and has been discovering the nuances of driving on the left hand side of the road. Coming from one of those weird countries where they drive on the right, it’s a bit of adjustment for her, but apart from hitting the windscreen wipers when she wants the indicators, it’s apparently causing her no problems. Because she’s held a licence before, she’ll get to go for her driving test next month, and won’t even have to wear P plates! Damn!
• It’s been ages since I’ve felt the need to thump on our neighbour’s door and ask politely for them to turn the TV down to something less than 100 decibels at four o’clock in the morning. Which suits me fine, it’s not one of my favourite hobbies.
• We have got some new neighbours in one of the other flats actually. We introduced ourselves to them - or was it the other way around? They seem pretty nice, anyway. Or at least, the one of them we talked to does.
• The dead possum’s tail is still up there on the power line.
• Someone asked me recently if I was still running. Well that’s the great thing about owning a car, y’see. Instead of going for a morning run, I can just drive around the course. Nah, I still go running every 2ish days, except on days like Friday when I forget to set my alarm clock and get up almost an hour late and have to make a mad dash into the shower just to make it to work on time.
• Last year both of our VCRs broke down, within weeks of one another. Last week, one of them broke down again, and if last year’s performance was anything to go by, it took the tape inside it to that big video tape library in the sky. Lucky it was a tape we owned, and didn’t have anything immeasurably compelling on it. I’m also lucky this is the VCR that is still under extended warranty, so Brashs end up paying for it again. It’s nice to know that just once in a while, it is actually worth coughing up the extra dosh for the extended warranty.
• Actually, the washing machine has also broken down. This has meant rather more visits to the laundromat than usual (the usual frequency of visits being never). This is also under warranty, but the company involved seems to have determined that the vital part is so obscure that they’re sending somebody to darkest Africa to retrieve it. Well, perhaps they’re not, but it seems to be taking just as long, so heck, maybe I’ll ring them tomorrow and suggest that they do.

Regular readers of my diary will probably have deduced for themselves that work is going exceedingly well at the moment. It’s easy to work this out because I haven’t been complaining about it, not like some of the previous contract jobs I’ve worked at.

Sadly, it would seem that this job is coming to an end. Sometimes in the computer contracting world, jobs continue ad infinitum. Sometimes they come to a natural end, when a product or system is completed. And sometimes, they come to a sudden end when you’re booted out on your arse because of some imagined or actual stuff-up.

I’m happy to say that I’ve never experienced the third possibility, but it looks like my current job will come to a natural end next week. Which means I’m back out hunting down work, a process known in the industry - particularly on Tuesdays when the newspapers have their computer supplements - as "reading the paper".

Something I’ve written has finally showed up in print - in an actual glossy magazine, distributed internationally. The February 1998 issue of a little-known US magazine called "Portable Computing Direct Shopper" has shown up on Australian shores with an article by me in it on page 46. Check it out at your local newsagent. Just don’t blame me for the exorbitant price of imported magazines - or the inherent uselessness to Australian readers of an American-based magazine concentrating on mail and phone order supplied computers.

Now… if I can just get them to send that cheque they’ve been promising…

Today we went for a spin in the car. Out the driveway, along the highway, onto the freeway, down to Geelong. Geelong is about 90 minutes from home in the car, and is home to the world’s greatest AFL team (shame they keep on getting losing all their finals games).

Our target was today’s Highland Gathering, in a park in the suburbs of Geelong. Despite the scary looking queue of cars going in, and the even scarier prospect of finding a car-sized spot to park, we got in and walked around, gazing in wonderment (is that a word?) at the haggis throwing, tug of war, archery, bagpipe bands, and trying to work out a way of looking underneath a few kilts, possibly with the aid of mirrors.

For lunch, L was brave and foolish enough to try some haggis in a roll (a kind of HaggisBurger - you can see McDonalds putting that on the market, can’t you - McHaggis) whereas I stuck to the more traditional (well, in the Australian sense) sausage sizzle. It’s worth pointing out that despite L’s bravery she didn’t feel so good afterwards, and demanded that I cease speaking as soon as the topic of our conversation got anywhere near to sheep’s stomachs.

All good fun stuff though, and listening to the pipe bands makes me wonder if somebody shouldn’t make an alarm clock that kicks you out of bed with the sounds of a massed bagpipe band. I know it would encourage me to get up in the morning.

Before we left, we made sure to call up L’s brother Dan on the mobile phone. Being a piper himself, I’m sure he would have loved to have been there. But since he lives in Seattle, the chances were pretty slim. He wasn’t in, but so I left a message saying we thought he was there in spirit, accompanied by a minute or so of some of Victoria’s finest pipers.

Postscript: Actually, Dan was in. He couldn’t hear the phone. Because he was playing his bagpipes.

Well, who’d have believed it. Somehow my diary got mentioned in TV Week this week. I’m not sure how many TV Week viewers actually surf the Web, but it’ll be interesting to find out.

I don’t actually read TV Week very often - in fact I think the last time was about five years ago, if you don’t count the occasional glances at a three year old copy that might be lying around in a doctor’s waiting room or at the barber.

So I’m not a regular reader. TV Week’s mix of glossy pictures of glossy starlet combined with in-depth, probing, investigative journalism (not!) isn’t quite my cup of tea.

But hey, it’s nice when there’s even a hint that somebody, anybody might be reading the drivel I post up on my Web pages…

I’ve got a handy tip for you.

On Saturday, my son Isaac, who is making full use of his toddler years, decided to pull about half a roll of toilet paper off the roll. And not for the purposes of using it, either. He would have pulled more off, but there was no more to pull off. And he put it all straight into the toilet.

I discovered this feat of plumbing, and took action. Very unwise action. And it is this action that forms the basis of my advice to you today. It may be obvious to most of you, but if it helps even one person who has as little knowledge about things pipey as me, then I’ll be happy.

When your kid, making full use of his or her toddler years, decides to do something toddlerish, and pulls a whole bunch of toilet paper off the roll and into the toilet, don’t DON’T don’t… attempt to flush it all down.

I did.

Everything seemed to go down okay, and we went merrily hopping on our way out on a little excursion. We returned a few hours later. L went into the toilet, and I know she won’t get mad at me if I reveal to the world that she did a truly spectacular dump. Just one problem: The toilet would no longer flush. To be precise, it would flush, but nothing was going anywhere. The bowl was gradually filling up.

Conference, diagnosis, possible solutions? Plunger. Toilet plunger. And where exactly do you get a toilet plunger at 7pm on a Saturday night? Ummm… Supermarket? Ring around a couple, no luck. One suggests the K-Mart in Burwood, open 24 hours. Worth the trip? Heck, we’ve got the car now, it can be done, even if it is a helluva long way to go to get a simple plumbing implement.

We try ringing around a couple of people to see if we could borrow a plunger. They either haven’t got one (and it’s difficult to abuse someone for this if you haven’t got one either) or they had a plunger that was the wrong size, and "it wouldn’t work anyway".

So what about other solutions? Drano, or similar? Only have to go as far as our local Safeway for that. It seems easier, so I do. We try it. Supposedly the very poisonous sounding chemicals in there will blast their way through our debris, leaving a nice, clean, uncongested drain.

Several servings later, it is apparent that all it has done is to break the… ummm.. effluent up and distribute more evenly around the bowl so that we’re left with a lovely dark brown lumpy cocktail.

Nice.

It is apparent that the water level in the bowl is slowly descending, so we decide to leave it to do so until morning, hoping that it would somehow resolve itself.

Which of course it didn’t.

Okay, enough messing around, call the plumber. Which plumber? Maybe the landlady should nominate one, especially since she might know someone who would come out on a Sunday morning. She gets in touch with him, and he eventually comes over early in the afternoon, and fixes everything with a little manoeuvring of a plunger. Damn experts, they always make the rest of us look like idiots.

Everyone we’ve told this story asks: How did you manage? Well, sometimes you’d just have to grin and bear it, and other times… ummm, well, we made a lot more visits to Safeway than we usually do. Check your local supermarket to see if it has a public toilet. If it does, celebrate, and make a note of its location: One day, you may need it.

The great thing about this crisis is that it was a team effort. There were three unique parts that created the problem: the paper, the flush, the poo. If any of them had been missing, it just wouldn’t have been the big mess it was. The combined ability of three people to create a crisis is far greater than the sum of its component parts.

All went (nearly) to plan on Tuesday. There was a little mishap with the bank involving a delay in them coughing up the car loan money, but the bank staff very kindly handed over the bank cheque despite the delay, but failed to mention that this would mean our everyday spending account would be about $9000 overdrawn… Kinda bad luck if we needed any groceries that night.

But that was fixed after a couple of hours, and my sister gave me a lift back to Ferntree Gully to fill in the paperwork with BART! and take delivery of the car.

I can only hope he wasn’t watching when the first thing I did was to stall it.

The drive home gave me some much needed practice, and I’ve been driving it to and from work since Wednesday too. Apart from familiarising myself with the joys of the manual transmission, I’m also familiarising myself with the best route to take. On Wednesday, the advantages of car travel were not entirely apparent, when during peak hour it only saved me about 10 minutes of travel time over taking the two trains and a bus that I’d been previously catching. And my ability to read a newspaper is hampered somewhat when driving.

I’m sure I’m not the only person to think that the road system would work much better if there was nobody apart from me travelling on it. But by Friday I had worked out where a few of the troublespots were, and how to avoid them.

One unavoidable spot that I considered a troublespot is the intersection at the corner of Riversdale and Warrigul Roads. This is not because it’s clogged with ludicrous amounts of traffic, but because it’s at the top of a hill. No matter which direction you approach it from, you end up stopping on an alarmingly angled upwards slope if you have to stop at the lights.

This presented a problem, because for me, hill starts were a bit dodgy. For those of you wimps who drive automatic cars, all you need to know is that after stopping on a steep slope in a manual car, you will roll backwards if you take your foot off the brake. On a moderate slope if you’re extremely quick with your feet, you can get onto the accelerator and off the clutch before you roll back more than a few inches. But not at this particular intersection. Here you’d either need to be Fred Astaire (or perhaps Fred Flinstone) with your feet, or do a proper hill start - with all of that messing with the hand brake.

But after a few times badly impersonating Fred (and getting a few screeches of tyres and stalls as a result), I decided I wasn’t going to be intimidated by a mere hill. Who was boss of my car, that incline, or me? I did some hill start practice in some hilly streets near work during Friday lunchtime, and that night I purposefully drove to that intersection, and I stopped, and I moved off again, without a screech, without rolling back, and without a stall. So up yours, hill!