My anti-terrorism brochure and magnet arrived in the mail yesterday. I have stuck the magnet to my fridge, and now feel alert, but not alarmed. Terrorists will have to go elsewhere if they want to steal any milk.

It’s meant to go with the TV adverts - you know, the ones that sound like John Howard wrote them himself "blah blah Australians are a decent democratic society blah-de-blah". Flicking through the brochure, thankfully it has some more useful information in it, like some basic first aid instructions. So I won’t throw it away just yet - I’ll have a full read of it first.

Josh and I rest on a couple of handily placed bollards, midway through a slightly exhausting hike in the Brisbane Ranges National Park.

This morning I woke up disgustingly early, to meet up withJosh, Cathy and Pete to go hiking. I met up with them around 7:30 and we squeezed into Pete’s car for the drive west to the Brisbane Ranges National Park. On the way we passed what appeared to be some dirt farms, and had to slow down and drive around a koala which was in the middle of the road drinking water.

We got to our appointed spot near some of the camp sites at around 9am, and with Cathy navigating, set off. It was raining at first, and we saw some kangaroos eyeing us suspiciously, as if wondering "what the hell are these crazy humans doing, walking in this rain?" But the rain soon eased, and we packed our coats away in our packs.

As we walked, we made various jocular comments. The jocularity decreased markedly as the walk got more difficult. Theoretically, according to the book, the walk was rated as "easy". This is what’s known as a lie. Oh sure, it started out easy enough, but at one point we were climbing at an alarming angle (I don’t know exactly how alarming; I didn’t bring a protractor) up a mountain. Hearts were pumping, lungs were going overdrive, mouths were swearing, and various bones all over our bodies were starting to grumble about how rude it was to indulge in this kind of activity on a quiet Saturday morning when we could have been relaxing in our respective beds.

Josh’s worldwide battle against litter continued, as he placed into a plastic bag any litter whatsoever that he found on the path. This admirable cause was doomed to failure however, as quickly one bag became two bags, and try as we might, we couldn’t figure out how to get the two dozen or so metre-long strips of metal that had apparently fallen off someone’s car, into a couple of small bags already bulging with crushed beer cans.

Several rest stops, a lunch break and about four and a half hours later, we completed the walk, our muscles and bones sore, but a sense of achievement… uhh… achieved. We drove back to Melbourne, promising ourselves the next walk from the book would need to be rated as "piss easy".

I had a couple of vivid dreams the other night. My dreams are pretty far and few between, so here goes a description.

One was that I was house hunting, and to do this, was riding through my neighbourhood on a kind of go-kart thing. No motor, just powered by pedals. The terrain was much hillier than in real life, and a few times I found myself actually riding inside people’s houses, wondering if they’d turn up and be outraged, or if the wheels would leave a mark on the carpet. Weird.

Actually, in the several hours since I had it, I’ve now forgotten the other dream. Hopefully it wasn’t the solution to world peace or anything. But if it had been, I’m sure I would have written it down somewhere as soon as I woke up.

Okay, I think the world’s journalists need to stop pronouncing Colin Powell’s name as "Colon". Just because his own pronunciation is up the creek (heard him on the radio this morning talking aboutSoddom Hussein) doesn’t mean the rest of us have to follow it.

Well now, I’ve had a pretty shithouse weekend, how about you?

Actually judging from the news, the world hasn’t gone too well this weekend. It’s been a shocking few days. On Friday there was the Waterfall train crash near Sydney, which left eight people dead. This morning I woke up to find the space shuttle Columbia had disintegrated while landing. To which I believe my initial reaction may have been: "Fuck!"

Meanwhile, in my world… well for a start on Saturday I was woken at 6:20am by neighbour’s SMS arriving. Grrr. Bloody technology.

And this afternoon I broke up with my girlfriend of almost a year, C. I’m not going to go into any detail about it, suffice to say that I think it’s fair to say that it’s nobody’s fault in particular. And that this is something that has been brewing for several weeks now, so I’m glad it’s been resolved, as the stress was really getting to me.