Busy busy busy. So, what have I been up to?

I’ve been disorganised. A pile of mail grew steadily over the last week or two on a chair in my study/spare room/computer room (whatever I’m calling it this week), and - not for the first time - the pile included a credit card bill that went unnoticed until about a week after the due date. Now, this is not something that the Bank are going to chuck a spaz over and demand my cards back for, by any means. Quite the contrary, they must be delighted that yet again I have inadvertently missed the end of the interest-free period, and chi-ching, another $11 in interest is going their way. Damn. It’s not like I didn’t have the money to pay it off - I was just too disorganised to find it and pay it.

In a second example of my lack of organisation, I got a nudge from the friendly people at the State Library regarding archiving this diary in the National Library of Australia’s Pandora archive. It went something like this:

• Mid-2002 - Them: Hey, watcha reckon?
• Me: Sounds good. Let me read your web site, I’ll get back to you.
• … many months of inaction …
• April 2003 - Them: umm hey! So watcha reckon?
• Me: Oh jeez, sorry, forgot. Yeah, what the hell.
• Them: Cool.

So now it’s up. Mucho cool. I’m not entirely certain that my ramblings really constitute something of cultural significance, but it’s nice to know they will live on if I end up destitute and unable to pay my web hosting bill.

On Thursday night I went to theComedy Club in Lygon Street to see some stand-up for the Comedy Festival. As someone who hasn’t been to the Comedy Club before, I reckon they could do with a tad more signage. They’re next to theNova cinema, which has plenty of signs pointing to it from the street, pointing up the escalators, etc, but unless you know (or guess) that the Comedy Club is also up the escalator, you wouldn’t find it.

Remains of the building formerly known as Toorak Grammar

A beer at Catherine’s on Saturday night

Once I did find it, I spent most of the evening laughing my arse off, which was just what I needed after a busy day working hard, not to mention after walking up and down Lygon Street looking for a comedy venue.

On Friday night, following a lead on a friend who could get me a good price (thanks Les), I splashed out on adigital camera plus a few accessories. Well, okay, so I’m meant to be saving my money, but it was about time I had a new toy to play with. Hopefully it will liven up these pages at least, though right this instant I’m having trouble thinking of anything relevant that I could show a picture of.

Hmm, maybe it’s time for a new round of the Grooviest Thing in Melbourne?

On Saturday, taking full advantage of a limited time offer of good weather, I went out for a walk. I was walking past a real estate agent’s office, when my mobile phone rang. It was a real estate agent from the office I was walking past. She offered to let me look at the house I’m interested in on Sunday. Cool.

After hanging up I got on the train and went and had a walk around Armadale, a scouting trip on behalf of my friend Danielle, who will be down in Melbourne next week. In the late nineteenth century one of her ancestors was headmaster of a now defunct school in High Street, so I had a look around and found it for her, and made use of my handy dandy new camera to take a few snapshots. A shame, a once proud building is now derelict, its land taken over by a used car dealership. In stark contrast to similarly aged beautifully restored buildings elsewhere on the street, it sits neglected as it probably has done for decades - wood rotting, windows broken.

Later on I went for a bike ride. It was a longer ride than my previous one, but I felt less sore afterwards. I think it’s doing me some good, and my pedalling muscles are growing accustomed to being used again. Or maybe they appreciated that I stopped twice during the ride - once to take a phone call, and once to chat to a friend I saw walking along. That kind of thing happens when you walk or ride your bike.

On Saturday night, over to Catherine’s soon-to-be former flat to help her celebrate moving out. A kind of house cooling party. She and her boyfriend Christian are going house-sitting in the wilds of North Caulfield for a few months, which should be an interesting test of their sanity and patience, given that the owners of the house in question are total clean freaks. C&C have orders to leave their shoes at the door, and there might well be hell to pay if so much as a dent is found in the floorboards when the owners get back.

On Sunday I had a look at the prospective house, dragging Peter along to cast a more informed eye over it. It looks promising. The dream I have of finally being in control of my own place with no miserly landlady holding back on repairs could come sooner than I’d hoped. The last time she collected the rent, she was still singing the praises of the awful carpet - the same carpet that has holes in it growing bigger by the week. Anyway the next step is to make enquiries as to how much megadosh I can borrow, and if that goes well, head back to the house for a more thorough look.

I spent much of the afternoon with the kids at my mum’s place, and was there when the afternoon rain deluge started. Within a few minutes, her superbly landscaped back yard had flooded (and not for the first time, either). The kids put on gumboots and had a terrific time sploshing about in the impromptu lake. Damn. Maybe I should get some gumboots too. It looked like fun.

The rain let up for a little while, but by 5:45 when I was out driving, it was pouring down again. Bucketing down. Pissing down. I’m trying to say there was a lot of rain. One road I was driving along had flooded gutters for about 2 kilometres.

I needed to go to the supermarket, and decided that Coles in Caulfield would be a good choice, due to it having an undercover car park. Okay, so I was driving to get my shopping, making me a SMOG PRODUCING TARMAC LOVING REVHEAD ENVIROBASTARD, but in that amount of rain, who could blame me. Seriously, the way it was raining, and footpaths and gutters flooding, any pedestrians out there were getting seriously drenched, umbrella or not. Anyway, I made up for it just a teensy bit by taking along my cloth bags. And I had been out anyway, it was (almost) on the way home.

I peered ahead, where the road dips under the railway bridge. The left lane had a lot of water, but the right was okay, so I used it. I reached the supermarket, and silently heaped praise on the builders who worked on the underground car park at Caulfield Plaza, who had managed to keep it free of puddles, where the council people who built the nearby streets had so obviously failed.

Coles are happy enough to use your cloth bags. At least, happy enough for you to pack the stuff in them yourself, unlike Safeway who will merrily pack the bags for you. No matter. I drove out, headed for home, back to the bridge and… oh… what’s that next to the roundabout… two fire engines parked nearby, lights flashing… oh, what’s that under the bridge… a car stuck in the water with its hazard lights on… I thought at that point that a U-turn and a hunt for a different route home might be in order.

The alternative route proved to be less soggy and hair-raising, though I did see a cab come within a whisker of a major crash by turning right across a bunch of other cars. Never a good idea. I got home, tramped upstairs, and cooked Laksa, the perfect thing for a cold Sunday night.

MX’s Showdown with Saddam page bar. Over on the other end of the bar is a little aeroplane.

With the war continuing, I thought it interesting to look at what the various media outlets are calling it. Some have gone for something of a neutral title (mostly the purely geographical "War in Iraq"), and some have gone for a more confrontationalist view, just to make sure we remember who the enemy is. And some have gone for the downright silly, likeMX’s "Showdown with Saddam".

Here’s a summary, collected off various web sites and TV news services. First you’ve got the neutral-sounding ones, most of which are the same:

• Age: War in Iraq - graphic with Bush on one side, Saddam in sunglasses on the other
• 
  BBC: War in Iraq
• ABC: War in Iraq
  - Saddam and Bush
• Washington Post: War in Iraq - nice radar-style graphic
• Guardian: War in Iraq
• CNN: War in Iraq - lots of cutesy graphics
• The Times: Iraq - That’s all. Just Iraq.

Then the ones where they remind you that we’re fighting the Iraqis, not just visiting them:

• SBS: Iraq war
• Herald Sun: War with Iraq
• Sydney Morning Herald: War on Iraq - with pictures of an aeroplane and stuff

• Al Jazeera: War On Iraq

• 
  The Australian: War on Iraq
• Courier-Mail:
  War with Iraq
• 
  ABC News (USA): War with Iraq
• Channel 9: At war with Iraq - oh, they even manage to get that Howard bloke on their banner

And then there’s the rest, most of which end up sounding just a little gung-ho:

• Channel 7: Strike on Iraq
• MX: Showdown with Saddam - ha!
• Financial Review: Target Iraq - Makes it sound like a sales target.
• MSNBC: Target: Iraq
• New York Times: A nation at war - uhh, there’s more than just one nation at war…

Of course, the headline used doesn’t necessarily reflect the sentiments or the balance of the coverage within. But maybe it does say something about the attitude of the outlet in question, or how they anticipate their readers might feel.

Anybody spotted any other good ones? Put ‘em in the comments.

Winter must be on its way - for the first time this year I saw some bloke in Lonsdale Street actually wearing a scarf on Friday night. A real scarf that is, not just a footy scarf. I didn’t think it was that cold. But maybe he was on his way to an all-night candlelit peace vigil. You just can’t tell these days.

I was looking around the gaggle of camera shops in Elizabeth Street for my preferred option of a digital camera, the Canon A70. It only came out last week. All the reviews sound good, and the shops have started to stock it. It’s tiny
- smaller than I thought it would be. So what’s stopping me buying? Well with the impending move, I’m suddenly having second thoughts about blowing $700+ (’cos I’ll want a bigger memory card, right?) on a new toy. Should I wait? Should I go for a cheaper model which doesn’t do as many groovy things? Or should I just damn the torpedoes and splash out? (Whoops, danger! Mixed metaphors!) I’ll mull on it for a few days.

With the aim of gaining more exercise and of course contributing just a tiny teensy bit to air quality, I managed to go more than 48 hours without using my car. Okay so I never use it to go to work anyway, but on Saturday I was out and about looking at houses. I took advantage of the glorious weather and rode my bike or walked.

House A looked like crap, and there’s no way I want to be spending $312,000 on something that looks like crap. House B looked better - quite nicely renovated, but probably at the upper-limits of my price range. Too near the highway and the railway line for my liking - I could imagine being awoken by B doubles or freight trains in the dead of night. Not to mention the health effects of the smog. I pity the half-a-dozen overseas-looking students living in it, they looked a bit dazed when the agent and house hunters descended on them to look around. I don’t know how good their English was, but the agent seemed to have to emphasise "open for inspection" at them. One of the other inspectors obviously assumed the inspectees couldn’t understand a word, and spoke of them almost as if they were animals being led to the slaughter. "They don’t seem to realise."

House C looks okay from the outside, and the pictures on the web of the inside look okay too. It’s in a good quiet location, but not too far from the shops and station, but I haven’t been able to take a look inside or see the layout. Have to get in contact with the agent and find out when it’ll be open for inspection.

My cloth shopping bag shortage doesn’t seem to be a problem so far. I found a second cloth bag skulking in the bedroom courtesy of the good people at the Birkenstock shop, and will use that as my backup. But so far even at my most organised level ($40 of groceries on Sunday, though mostly small items) everything fit okay into the original cloth bag, which is rather TARDIS-like.

Meanwhile, after seeing the film, I’ve started reading Christopher Koch’s The Year Of Living Dangerously, and a few dozen pages in, it has become apparent that in doing so I may well gain new insights into my father. So far almost every bit of narrative about the character of Billy Kwan mentions some characteristic that is obviously based on Dad.

What’s also funny is that the review snippet quoted on the front cover is from another of Dad’s long time friends, poet extraordinaire Les Murray. I get the feeling that Koch, Murray, David Malouf and others who all seem to know each other (and my dad), probably have some kind of inner circle, and end up reviewing each others’ books, though I have no doubt that they have achieved their formidable reputations for their abilities, not by communal backslapping.

So, what of Dad is there in Kwan? I might keep a running list. So far:

• Philosophical thinking, quoting of classic authors
• Claims not to speak any Chinese, though given his Chinese parentage, this seems unlikely
• He keeps calling people "old man"
• "Kwan was one of those people who rarely answer questions directly, and who start conversations in the middle."
• Has an English girlfriend who wears glasses. (Fortunately that’s where the similarity to my mother ends)

More to come, I’m sure of it.

9:45am. You know what’s funny? This morning as I left, three blokes were snooping around the car park, obviously planning what havoc they can wreak during the forthcoming renovations. What walls they can knock down without the whole place falling down, etc. And parked outside? A BMW, of course.

4:08pm. Mr Speakerphone is at it again, but now he’s phoning a doctor and talking about an appointment for something or other. He closes his door whenever he has a meeting in there, but he leaves it open when shouting into a phone about his medical conditions. Do I want or need to listen to this? No. Music time again.

I got home on Monday afternoon to find wall-to-wall BMWs parked outside. Which could only mean one thing: inspection time. My landlady is bowing out of the real estate game. Evidently at 81 years old she has better things to do with her time and money. A fair bit of money apparently - a word to the real estate agent revealed he was expecting an amount of somewhere around $1.2 million to be changing hands. Which made me rather cynical when she relayed her last whinge about repair costs as she explained why she was selling.

Sold!

Apart from the agent, who naturally drives a BMW, a gaggle of developers, all of whom also drive BMWs (at least one convertible), were snooping about the place. What is it about BMWs? Okay, so they appear to be undeniably nice cars, but surely one of the points of having an expensive car is that there’s not lots of them all over the place. If you’re going to spend a fortune on a car, wouldn’t you want it to be something comparatively obscure? Every second European car seems to be a BM. Even the people next door drive one, and they are complete yobs.

Maybe I don’t understand the prestige of… um… prestige cars. My aging Magna turns 10 years old later this year. It can go at the speed limit as good as anything else, and apart from the squeak in the drivers seat (which causes a little noise every time I depress the clutch to change gears) I think it’s fine. Well, it should be, after the small fortune I spent on maintenance on it last year.

But I digress. The agent also said I’d need to have my flat open for inspection before the auction on Thursday. Panic! 72 hours to get my flat tidy enough that I wouldn’t feel embarrassed letting strangers in to poke around! I’d have to do some major tidying up. A big cleanout. I immediately made plans to take all of Thursday off - to spend the morning mucking the place out in time for inspection at 1:30, then to sit on the balcony, a cool drink in hand, and watch the auction from above.

This morning, a change of plan. He rang me to say the auction is off, because the place sold last night. He also told me it went to a developer (who I bet drives a BMW), who planned to refurbish, and they’d be requiring vacant possession. Which means I have not escaped the fate of so many other Melbourne bloggers this year - I’m going to have to move. According to the
Renters’ Rights book I should get at least 60 days notice, and the agent said this would be organised in the next few weeks.

What a pain in the arse. Oh well. What can you do?