Auction
Well today it was the auction of my favourite house, and in fact the only house that was a real prospect for buying before I have to move out of my current place. After doing some scheming with a couple of accomplices, we went along. I had given the impression to the agents that I wouldn’t be turning up, and I was amused to hear later that as one of my accomplices looked through the house, one of the agents had spotted me and remarked "Ah good, Daniel’s here".
Initially it didn’t look like there were an excessive number of serious bidders, but once bidding started it quickly became apparent that there were. It jumped in leaps and bounds, and alas, leapt over my limit before stopping short of the reserve price. It was formally passed in, and the negotiations between the highest bidder and the vendor began, but obviously today it was not meant to be.
Ah well. So at this stage the plan is to find somewhere else to rent, save for a year, and provided the market doesn’t jump (and it’s not expected to) I should be in a better position to buy something I like in a year or two.
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Photo
![[My award winning photo - Parliament station platform 2]](/images/2003/05platform.jpg) My award-winning photo. This was a very well contested competition and difficult to judge. The winning pic (No. 6) is very well done with great exposure and colour and perfect movement to suit the comp theme exactly. Whilst I think it could have been cropped a little tighter on the top (to remove the screen in the top right) and a little on the bottom, this clearly would be a very saleable shot and would easily sit in a company annual report or on the pages of a trade magazine or niche newspaper/magazine like the AFR or The Bulletin. Congratulations! – Cameron Laird, Photojournalist |
A few weeks ago I was on the way home, and mucking about withmy new(ish) camera, trying to figure out what all the various controls did. I took a photo on the platform at Parliament station. A little later I happened to be surfing around and came across a photo competition web site – the theme of the month: "transport". Judged by some photojournalist dude. So I entered the picture.Today I found out it won. Okay, so the prize is only a $25 voucher, but maybe it’s my lucky week!
To be self-critical for a moment, I think it’s a bit blurry. I mean, that’s okay for the train, in fact that’s the cool thing about the picture. But it’s not so okay for the platform and the people – the camera (and my hand which was attached to it at the time) must have moved a bit. And of the pictures in the competition, I actually preferred the one of the camel.
Meanwhile on the moving front… I took another look at the secondary choice house tonight, and decided that I don’t like it enough to go horrendously into debt for. So I’m putting all my efforts into getting the other one. And if that doesn’t work out, no matter, I’ll rent for another year or two and bide my time, building up my savings a bit more for something equally good – if not better.
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Stuff probably only I find funny
1. It’s hard not to smirk when you hear a colleague talking on the phone, telling someone else to send a copy of a screen by saying "yes, go onto that screen and take a dump…"
2. Forgot to mention something from the school re-union last week. The school was known for its high academic achievement. One day they’re going to ask why I was there. Anyway when I was there the vice-principal was Mr Duke, who was seen as somewhat fearsome. One of the teachers recalled the day they arrived to find that someone had written on the school oval with acid "DUKE DESPOT". They joked that at any other school, it would have been "DUKE C—".
Well, it made me laugh, anyway.
Auction day on my favourite place is this Saturday, and as fate would have it, another place I quite like is up for auction at exactly the same time. So, my current plan is to go to one, and find someone to go to the other place and – I know I sound like an evil overlord planning some dastardly plot here – do my bidding. We’ll keep the phones on the whole time and make sure I don’t accidentally buy both of them…
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WTF?
What the hell is going on? Is there something in the air? How is it that in the past week or so, no less than four friends have had their relationships end? FOUR?!? Lucky they don’t all know each other, they’d start wondering if it was a curse to know me.
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15 years on, when afar and asunder
It was my school reunion last night. 15 years. I’m getting old.
It was good to see people again. I went to the one 5 years ago – less people turned up this time, but still a crowd of about 60. As last time, we were all a little fatter, balder and/or greyer, apart from the bastards who hadn’t changed at all. And it’s interesting to see where people ended up – a bunch of IT people, a few artistic types, a couple of airline pilots, an accountant or two, a car designer, an environmental scientist, a couple of teachers, a couple of cops (one of whom, eerily, is the spitting image of a guy I know in theCFA)… and all the rest. And of course we did the traditional things – drinking, singing the old school song, drinking, telling tales of personalities and pranks from days of yore, and more drinking. Good stuff.
Things wound up in time to catch the penultimate train home, and I found myself with a bunch of the blokes, standing around on the concourse of South Yarra Station causing trouble. Which just shows that nothing’s really changed since our school days.
Something hit the back of my foot. A blind guy almost walked into me, and he asked us where the next city train was from. One of our number, who was possibly more intoxicated than was apparent from his speech, posture and stability, glanced at the big screen, and not only directed him to the wrong platform, but also made the mistake of directing him by pointing and saying "That way!" Fortunately sanity prevailed and one of the others who could read the screen properly, and knew how to guide blind people around stations, took care of things.
My 23:58 train arrived. Walking home the street was dark and quiet… except for the Internet shop. I glanced in the door as I passed – half a dozen hard core netters were wide awake, surfing for all their worth into the night.
Surely I’m not the only one getting old, going to reunions every few years to reminisce? Do some people avoid them, figuring the only people you’d meet are those you specifically didn’t bother to keep in touch with?
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Everything old is new (and digitally restored) again
Nostalgia is big business. And nostalgia and DVD make a great combination. Recent nostalgic DVDs to enter my house include the brand spanking newGoodies 2 disc set. Ah, 8 classic episodes, beautifully restored and with all the rude adult bits previously excised by the ABC for family viewing time intact. It just enforces my opinion that all along The Goodies was a multi-level show – slapstick for the kids, satire and parody for the adults, and – as it turns out – a little lewdness thrown in for good measure. As TBT himself has said, the Simpsons of its day.
And the kids are getting into
Doctor Who, courtesy of DVDs featuring this fine time traveller. Initially I’ll admit I was a bit worried about the violence in some of them. Yeah, I watched it when I was a kid, but standards have shifted. Stuff that I watched at dinner time as a kid is now rated PG, and wouldn’t get on TV at the same time today. I occasionally had a toy gun, too, and these have virtually vanished from the toyscape. No matter, I’ll stick to the G-rated discs for the moment and see how we go.
So anyway Isaac turned eight last week (EIGHT! How the hell did that happen?!?) and one of the presents I got him was the DVD of "Doctor Who: The Aztecs". Ah yes, a little history, could do wonders for his wider education. The ancient and noble Aztec civilisation, all with home counties BBC accents. I probably should have known better – the makers of Doctor Who went through the whole "historical educational" vs "monsters" bit around 1966. The monsters won out back then, and while Isaac was not ungrateful for receiving it, I got the distinct impression he’d have preferred a monster story.
Ah well.
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Ketchup time
I seem to have been frantically busy the last few days. Alas, a good deal of the weekend was tied up with work. The nature of the work beast is that anything substantial has to be done outside of operating hours, so in summary, that’s how I spent a joyous Saturday night. And Sunday morning. And some of Sunday night, too. Yes, it was substantial, and no, it didn’t go entirely smoothly.
Saturday lunchtime I sent a couple of spies over to My Favourite Prospective House to check out the inspection and see who was nosing around. They reported back over a cup of tea, telling me that there seemed to be a few people looking in, dammit. Interestingly the agent rang me a couple of days later to see if I was still interested. I tried to sound interested enough that she should contact me if someone else puts in an offer, but not so interested that she sees dollar signs and tries and drive the price up beyond my limit.
My bike was due for its complimentary "a few months use" service, and a little later on Saturday arvo I was just heading out the door when Mr Phone Company appeared. I’d rung them almost a week before about my phone line, which went crackly the Sunday before. No less than two phone company blokes had already been out during the week when I was at work, and left cards proclaiming that (as I’d told them to expect) I wasn’t home when they called, and that the problem wasn’t in the wiring out on the street, it was somewhere inside. So it was the third bloke that actually caught me at home.
He came in and pottered around with some telephonic gear, poking it into various phone connections around the house. After a bit of fiddling he narrowed it down to an unused extension, which runs along the hallway, past the bathroom and into my bedroom. I was wondering why it should have suddenly caused problems on Sunday when I remembered how the washing machine outlet had been blocked on Sunday morning and caused a heap of water to spill onto the bathroom floor and out into the hallway, some reaching the carpet in the doorway of the bedroom, and much of it no doubt soaking the telephone line.
While I was remembering this, Mr Phone Company, squatting next to the phone point, looked up at me with a knowing look as he said "yeah, if there was any dampness down there, it would short the line out straight away". He disconnected the unused fatally wounded extension and sent it to cabling heaven, and everything phone-wise was hunky dory again.
 Ah the joys of the traffic on High Street |
What was I doing? Ah yes, the bike.
I had rung the day before to arrange to drop the bike off, and didn’t particularly want to postpone it, especially as the squeaky front brake has been bugging me. It was now a tad after 3pm, and the bike shop closed at 4. I had no wish to get myself killed riding the mean (and congested) streets to Prahran, so I’d planned to ride to Elsternwick and catch the train to Prahran. But was there time? Quick, jump on the web and check the
train timetable. Trains only every 20 minutes. 3:06. I’d miss that. 3:46 would be too late. And in the middle, 3:26. Could I get there to Elsternwick station in time? Well, I could try.
I zoomed out of the driveway towards Elsternwick, heading along the side streets. In the time I’ve had my bike, I must confess my time on the main roads has been limited. Knowing what dickheads some car drivers are, I definitely prefer the side streets. Okay so dickheads are no less likely to display dickhead-like behaviour on side streets, but there is likely to be less of them.
So, there I was, with about 20 minutes to get to Elsternwick via unfamiliar back streets, with no Melway to guide me. Thank goodness my neck of the woods was laid out in the late 19th century, before town planners decided to go all decorative and swirly and design streets the way they are in the outer suburbs – curving all over the place, so no amount of logic can determine where a street goes, and getting from anywhere to anywhere takes hours, most of it taken up by stopping and checking the map every few hundred metres. No, this was all entirely logical. I just kept going towards Elsternwick, and if I reached a T junction, looked for the nearest street that kept going in the right direction. Easy. Indeed, I surprised myself by getting there in around 15 minutes, not much longer than it would have taken in the car along the main road, especially if finding parking is taken into account.
Arrived at the station in good time for the train, which duly arrived and whisked me into the heart of Prahran. I rode up to High Street and decided on a whim to brave the traffic the block or so to the bike shop. It wasn’t bad actually, not as scary as I thought it might be, and it was fun being able to inwardly gloat at the cars stuck in traffic that I was passing. Got to the shop, and dropped the bike in.
Walking back to the train I saw a frail old man fall over at a tram stop. Onlookers crowded around to lift him back up and park him on a bench. Hmm. I really should ring my dad, see how he is.
Anyhow, I’ll do it all in reverse (the bike bit that is, not the stuff with the phone line and work) next weekend when I pick the bike up again.
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Winter arrives
Winter has definitely arrived, and a few weeks early, too. A shroud of fog was over the city this morning – one of those ones where when I got up to work on the 28th floor, nothing could be seen out of the window except white.
By lunchtime it was still hanging around, and dead leaves were blowing around among the office workers tramping down Lonsdale Street in search of food.
Mine was Souvlaki. <burp>
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