Oh what a traumatic trip into the city today. I was standing - as I often do when there are few seats available on the train. Given that I sit in an office most of the day, if it’s a choice between sitting between two burly (or dare I say it - fat) businessmen or standing, I’d prefer to stand.

After a couple of stops all the seats were taken. At South Yarra a seat came free. A young woman standing next to me asked me if I wanted to sit down. I said no thanks and she took it instead. Do I look old? Is my grey hair taking over? Tired? Crippled? Weak and puny? Am I looking dishevelled and in need of a seat on the train? Oh, please tell me I look healthier than that.

Actually, I’m worried about my trousers today. My black trousers. Not to be confused with my charcoal grey trousers, which of course are a completely
different colour. My black trousers seem to have a knack for picking up dirt. Last Thursday I was wearing them and suddenly noticed to my horror that they were speckled with flecks of light brown mud over much of their surface. I looked like I’d walked through a construction site.

And the thing is, I probably had. Every day I walk up and down Lonsdale Street from the station, and they’re doing major building work on both sides of the street. There is mud a-plenty on the footpaths. I’m sure if I had the inclination to get some forensic tests done, they would show that’s where it originates.

So anyway, after wearing them home in disgrace last Thursday night, I took them to be dry-cleaned. And today I’m wearing them again, and since it’s been raining overnight, I’ve been walking very gingerly in the vicinity of puddles and mud, I can tell you.

Not a bad weekend. Lazed on Saturday morning. Then went to look at a house at midday - one that has an auction time which actually clashes with the house I really like. Josh and Cathy came along and looked too, but the conclusion I had come to was that the location isn’t really what I want. I always said if I couldn’t quite get what I wanted, I wouldn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something I wasn’t totally happy with, I’d keep renting. So I’m not about to compromise and buy that place. Which leaves me concentrating on the other one, neatly solving the auction clash problem.

Saturday afternoon I went for a bike ride, then in the evening went into Richmond for Beth and Doug’s housewarming party. The view from their balcony was utterly spectacular. A little like the one from my sister’s place when she lived in the same street, but hers was merely two dimensional, through a window, not fully three-dimensional with surround sound like this was. Probably the most memorable moment was seeing Jen andOtherDoug arrive, Jen in her Tigers scarf, and her and another Tigers fan instantly launching into a rousing rendition of the club theme song. Well, that and Dave’s possum story (alas I didn’t get a chance to tell my own).

Sunday morning I kept myself busy during the kids’ swimming lesson by attempting to do a little swimming myself. It’s been ages since I did any substantial swimming. Like, anything more than a dog paddle. I’ve never been a brilliant swimmer - my style is closer to floundering grandmother than Ian Thorpe. But I attempted to do the length of the pool and back. Oh dear. Not impressive. Not that I actually sank and needed to be rescued or anything, but that much concentrated exertion in such a burst rather took it out of me. Or at least it would have if I hadn’t stopped halfway along each time to get the water out of my nose and mouth.

No matter. My fitness regime doesn’t doesn’t include swimming at the moment - I’m concentrating on the bike riding instead. Maybe at some stage in the future I’ll try taking up swimming properly.

In the afternoon I was at the supermarket. I wouldn’t normally mention this but for something irritating that happened. Here’s the scenario, see if you recognise it: person A is being served at the checkout. The last few items of theirs are on the conveyor belt, but there’s plenty of room for more stuff, and there’s plenty of those little divider thingies around.

Person B is waiting, only buying a few items, and holding them in their hands, refusing for some reason to put them down on the conveyor belt until the checkout chick is ready to serve them. Why? I don’t know. But person C (that’s me), who has arrived with a trolley full of stuff, can’t start unloading onto the conveyor belt because person B is obviously paranoid that someone will nick their bananas. JUST PUT THEM DOWN, YOU GIMBOID! NOBODY WANTS YOUR BANANAS. SEE, I HAVE MY OWN BANANAS!

Since I’m ranting, my other pet hates at the supermarket include:

• people who leave their trolleys in the middle of the aisle and wander off to look at stuff
• people who add their basket onto the pile by the checkout, but don’t fold the handles properly so you can’t add your basket to the pile without fixing it first
• the express lane checkout chicks leaving you waiting while serving some nicotine addict with another fix

By the way, the checkout chicks (and blokes) at Safeway are still happy enough to use my cloth bags. But for some reason while they started out putting them on their bag holder thing, now they try and hold them by the handles, leaving one hand to scan and pack the items, which is a bit of a struggle. Is this progress, I ask myself?

My lesson from Thursday night: when wearing a nice woven silk tie, don’t lean across a table with a rough edge for a protracted period of time. This course of action may well result in the little threads becoming broken, loose, or otherwise completely stuffed up.

Actually maybe not completely. It just looks a bit… well, wrinkled. At least from some angles. I’ll see if I can batter it about with an iron or something.

I’ve just finished reading The Year Of Living Dangerously. Yes it’s true, I’m not a particularly fast reader. That is, I don’t seem to have (or make) much time to read. Most of it’s confined to the trip to and from work, which is only about 15 minutes each way. And some of that on the way home is taken up by reading the trashy (but free)MX. So, it’s taken me a month or so to get through it.

What sparked me off reading the book - seeing the movie, and the character of Billy Kwan being based on my father - has faded somewhat as the story has weaved its way to the September 13th attempted coup. He was still there, but less prominent in the plot, and the rich characterisation which introduced his character has reduced.

It’s not Kwan’s beliefs (political and otherwise) which are based on dad, but rather his mannerisms. I’m happy to say that my dad doesn’t have the same strange fascination with dwarves that Kwan has — in fact my dad says this probably comes from Koch himself, who although not a dwarf, is a tad on the short side, and may have a bit of a hang-up about his height.

Anyway it remains an interesting read, especially as Hamilton walks head-long into the coup attempt. As I said when I started reading it, the themes are still very much present in the world today: the clashes between western and other cultures, the moral questions over poverty, and the involvement of journalists in the stories they cover. Definitely recommended.

A move has happened. No, not the house - the web server. Over the weekend I swapped toxiccustard.com onto a local (well relatively - it’s in Queensland) web provider. Cheaper and faster (at least for me and all the Aussies) and more disk space. How could I lose? Not that the old provider was unreliable, but right now the money counts for a lot. After all, I’m economising for the real world move, right? So no more greenback web providers for me.

Of course, it didn’t all go smoothly. A bunch of CGI scripts broke for a while, and I had to fiddle a bit to get them working again. And the diary comments script won’t run. I don’t know why, I spent a lot of time last night banging my head against a virtual brick wall trying to get it running again. Usually it’s down to file permission problems, but granting permissions like there’s no tomorrow doesn’t seem to help in this case. And not being someone who has been overly exposed to Perl, trying to decrypt it is not my idea of fun. To me, reading Perl is a little like trying to understand Norwegian. A minority of things - essentials like "Help!" or "Hello" - I can probably understand. The rest is just gobbledygook.

As for the rest of my weekend, well I did a little out of hours work. Really out of hours. Like 2:30am on Sunday morning. A related group rang up to get me to check something on the system. Oh, wonderful, just what I needed. I’m sure we told them only to ring if there was a problem, but I suppose they just decided to spread the joy around. And anyway, there was a problem. They kept me up for about an hour until they fixed it, and I’m thinking they need a bit of a lesson on how they can check for themselves if things are working.

Subsequently I slept in on Sunday morning, but zipped out to an auction at 11:30. A quite promising place - except that it had almost zero garden. It did, however, fail the noisy neighbour test - when I walked past on Friday night one house across the street was obviously the residence of a bunch of noisy people. Yes, that’s fair enough on a Friday night, but in fact during the auction, loud music began emanating from somewhere - possibly the same house. If it were me bidding, it might have put me off. Though maybe it was just a conspiracy from a rival bidder.

Anyway the place sold for just over my limit, which I suppose is a good sign, since at least what I can afford is in the ballpark for buying an okay place in that area. The problem is still most likely to be the timing. As of today I’ve got 81 days to get out of Dodge.

I drive into the station car park. It’s 9am, just after school drop off time. A woman sitting on the platform watches. She must wonder what on earth I’m doing. Everyone knows the car park is full by 8:15.

I see my target: the old red car. I stop next to it. I dig around in my car’s coin box for a key, then out I get. Click, I unlock the red car. Bag of stuff, out of my boot, into the old red car. I glance up at the platform. The woman is watching. Booster seat 1, out of my car, into the other. Booster seat 2, out of my car, into the other.

The woman’s stopped watching. She’s probably worked out what’s going on now. I lock the red car, get back in mine, and drive off.

It’s handover day. Just part of the weekly ritual of the single parent.

3pm. A colleague left her mobile phone, with loud annoying ring, on a desk while she went to a meeting. It rang and rang and rang. Then it stopped ringing. A few minutes later it rang and rang again. I got up, rejected the call, and switched to silent mode.

An hour later she got back and noticed voicemails left for her. Yup. I don’t think she’s noticed it’s switched to silent mode though. I wonder how long it’ll take before that gets noticed?

2pm. Well, I put in an offer for The House. Hopefully not so low that it isn’t taken seriously, but not so high that I’ve got nowhere to move when they inevitably come back to me asking for more. Tell you what, it’s quite a buzz. My fingers remain figuratively crossed (it’s a little hard to type when they’re actually crossed). I should hear back later today.

Of course, it’s only coincidence that at the moment I seem to be getting a lot of spams advertising cheap home loans and auction secrets. I’m probably just noticing them a bit more than usual.

8pm. Harumph. The agent rang back to say the vendor is going to wait until after the first inspection weekend before considering offers, since she wants to see what interest there is from other people. Oh well, fair enough, I’d probably do the same. So I’ll have to wait a week and a bit and see what happens.

The odds of the planets all coming into alignment are looking increasingly shakey. The bank saying "here’s the money!", the vendor saying "yeah I’ll sell to you!" and it all being over and done with before the 85 days in which I have to move are up is a bit of a dream, but if it doesn’t all happen, I’ll survive.