So now I’m thirty. I don’t feel much older than I was when I was twenty-nine. My hair hasn’t spontaneously fallen out or all gone grey. I don’t feel like I need a walking frame yet. Nope, it’s been a good birthday. Caught up with friends and family, got e-cards and paper cards from all corners of the globe, and generally had a merry old time.

I even discovered that although I may have had an hour stolen from my birthday by the Olympics, my sister and mothers’ boyfriends share the same birthday, 25th of March - the day that summer time ends. So I told them they owe me half an hour each. 

A leaflet in the mail today revealed the opening of a new Safeway
"We’re Muscling Into The Petrol Station Market" Plus in the neighbourhood. I found two things about the leaflet amusing.

One was that it had a map of the area, and that the old Safeway supermarket appears to have moved a block, onto my street. That will undoubtedly be convenient, but it would seem to be an expensive proposition for them, given that there is currently a reservoir on the site. Possibly they are planning to move the whole building, bricks’n'all, I don’t know.

The other amusing thing is that Safeway are using the slogan "Bringing food to life". That, to me, sounds creepy. Very creepy. If my local supermarket are really busy bringing food to life, I’m not going down there, especially not into the meat section. I could handle them being The Fresh Food People (even though I happen to know they stock pre-packed and frozen items as well, in fact they even sell stuff which isn’t food!) but now they’re making it sound like some kind of supernatural supermarket. A kind of occult grocery.

Why do they need two slogans, anyway?

On the phone to Ozemail Customer Accounts. After the recorded advertising guff, the hold music starts "I can’t take it anymore". Uh huh.

Yesterday in the mail I got my first driving ticket. (I’ve had one ticket before, but that was a parking ticket). I… err.. well, I seem to have driven through an orange traffic light. It’s a fair cop, I think I remember when it happened. So there goes $165 and 3 demerit points. And I thought I was going to manage having a completely clean record during my P plate time, too.

Ah well. Won’t do that again. In fact I think I’ll pay the extra $7.50 to the very ominous sounding "Civic Compliance Victoria" to get a copy of the photo, to put up on my noticeboard as a reminder to drive more carefully (or should that be less carelessly?) from now on.

Thanks to online banking
and BPay, I can pay all of my bills via the Internet. Except one. My ISP
bill.

The Olympic Games have ripped me off. No, I don’t mean the $50 each I paid for Soccer tickets. For a game that occurs two days before the opening ceremony… hmmm how does that work then? Strictly speaking, shouldn’t the opening ceremony be before everything else? On the other hand, I used to work at a corporate workplace that had its opening ceremony about a year after I started working there. Complete with visiting politicians to shake ribbons and cut babies and kiss hands… no, wait, I may have that mixed up… to kiss ribbons and shake babies and cut hands… errr.. never mind. Anyway, perhaps a few days’ delay isn’t too bad.

At least SOCOG
have got their act together and allowed people who live in Melbourne booking over the Internet for an event in Melbourne to collect their tickets in Melbourne. Originally they actually wanted tickets to be picked up from a booking office in Sydney.

Anyway, I’m not talking about Olympic tickets. I’m talking about Daylight Saving. This year, because of the Olympics, it’s starting two months early. Two months! Summer time starts in winter! Sunrise will be at 8am! And do you know which day the clocks go forward on? August 27th. My birthday. That means I only get 23 hours on my birthday this year! It’s an important one, too - I’m turning 30. I could have done with all the hours I could get!

It’s not like you lose an hour in the middle of a lazy Sunday, either. It’s in the middle of the night. Don’t they realise people need their sleep? I’m going to be wandering around on my birthday, over-tired because of that lost hour. People who don’t even know it’s my birthday are probably going to be saying things like "gee you look old today", which could shatter my already delicate state of mind about the whole end-of-my-twenties thing. And all because of the Olympics.

But for those of you who use computers in your office, there is a bright side to all this. This weekend is a good time to see if your computer maintenance people are really on the ball. If you’re on the east coast and your PC clock is updated okay next Monday, then they’re good guys. If not, they’re slackers! 

In this day and age, you shouldn’t be embarrassed about buying condoms, should you? I’m not sure - it can still be tricky. In my local supermarket, a lot of the staff know me. If you live in one area for five or more years, and you have kids, you can expect most of the local shopkeepers to at least know you (and your kids) by sight, if not by name.

Even if you manage to avoid the people you know in the supermarket, big companies are encouraging their staff to be more friendly to customers. So apart from the usual "Hi, how are you", there’s always the danger that the check-out chick/bloke won’t just robotically scan your items, but will actually notice what you’re buying. So it’s probably only a matter of time before we see conversations such as…

"How, how are you?"

"Good thanks"

"Ah, cooking up some pasta tonight eh?"

"Yep."

"And I see you’re also expecting to get laid?"

"Ummm… err…"

"Hey, have you seen the flavoured ones? I prefer them ribbed myself, though the girl on the next register likes the ultra-thin ones…"

Nothing like that for me at the supermarket yesterday thankfully. I did manage to avoid being served by anybody I know, but he seemed… well, a bit embarrassed at having to pick up the packet and scan it. Rather than the "How are you?" he had greeted the previous customer with, he stuck to a rather feeble "Hi." and avoided making eye contact throughout the transaction.

Perhaps next time I see he’s working I’ll go for some coloured flavoured condoms, half a dozen packets of KY Jelly, and a really big cucumber, just to see how he reacts.

Josh and Catherine, with silly hats numbers 1 and 2. Iris and I, with Josh’s silly hat number 3. Bourke Street, 1am - for our small change, we got a personalised song

To celebrate the tenth birthday of the Toxic Custard mailing list, on Friday night there was a bit of a get together organised at a pub in the city. My girlfriend Iris and I went along, and so did a few friends, which was just as well, as precious few others turned up.

But no matter, because we all had a terrific time - plenty of drinks, good (if not particularly intellectual as the drinks took effect) conversation, pool, watching some ambulance guys peeling someone off the pavement across the street… And most valuable of all, my mate Josh’s silly hats, which proved to provide much merriment. In fact, I had scorned Josh at the start of the evening for bringing silly hats, but they proved to be a stroke of genius.

Happy reader Erin admitted to having spent seven years of her life reading Toxic Custard, and we were all so sympathetic that we let her beat everybody at pool. Then she insisted that somewhere on Bourke or Collins Streets there was a busker who had a guitar signed by Nick Cave, who would sing us a personalised song, so we staggered down Swanston Street to find him. Along the way we collected some bloke called Matt who was trying to find his way to Coburg, after having successfully losing his company car in the Colonial Stadium carpark.

We found the busker in question in Bourke Street, and sure enough in exchange for a few silver coins and a couple of Matt’s cigarettes he ended up singing Iris and I a song, though we didn’t have the heart to tell him he was consistently mispronouncing Iris (it’s Hebrew and is pronounced something approaching "ear- iss" - I think this was explained to him but he didn’t quite hear it right).

After this great late night pavement performance, it was about 1am and most of us (except Erin, who curiously had probably drunk the most) were a bit shattered, so we headed down to Flinders Street to find a cab, but decided to avoid the taxi queue by catching the last St Kilda tram some of the way, a strategy which worked quite well.