It’s breakfast time for the birds on platform 3.

While my girlfriend is away in Europe for three weeks, I will:

• finally tidy up the damn spare room and clear out all the crap from around the house (yeah sure Daniel. SURE.)
• do my tax and sort out my files (for one relies on the other)
• set my sister up with a blog of her very own
• do some work on some of my web sites, including moving all my old diary archives into the new system
• turn 34, more with a whimper than a bang I suspect
• be envious that it’s not me who is on holiday
• play a bunch more Halo
• watch some of the DVDs I haven’t got around to watching yet (especially the ones she’s not so keen on)
• experiment with cooking some new things, without exposing fellow humans to my inevitable initial failures
• be watching out for postcards

…but most of all, I’ll be missing her. Have a great time, Marita.

(You have a great time too, Justine!)

Saturday’s trip to the National Gallery wasn’t just a learning experience in art. We went along with X. X has cerebral palsy, meaning she is physically disabled. She’s either confined to a wheelchair, or can use crutches, but at a snail’s pace.

Okay I’ve wheeled around kids in my time, so I have some of the skills involved in looking out for ramps and lifts. This was a somewhat different experience however. On the plus side, unlike a baby, X is able to express herself clearly. But a fully-grown adult can’t be lifted when it’s convenient.

The gallery’s special parking entrance, parking spots and admission queue bypass made things slightly easier, and were certainly appreciated, but there are undoubted challenges in pushing a wheelchair around a crowded gallery: looking for a gap in the crowd, ensuring X could see the captions and the paintings clearly, not bumping too many people…

It was a challenge, and while not unbearable, certainly made me appreciate my working limbs and the fact that I don’t have to care for someone in this situation on a daily basis, let alone live with it myself. I didn’t just learn about art that day.

[10th October 2004 -- regretably the rest of this article and the comments have had to be deleted for legal reasons. At some stage in the future, they may return.]

This is the bridge from Flinders Street Station’s Elizabeth Street subway to Southbank. Does it have a name?

Ron asked, and I looked at various maps and walked around it, but can’t find a name for it. Anybody?

Or if it doesn’t have a name, would anybody like to suggest one?

(No actual naming rights to this bridge conferred or implied, except perhaps in your imagination.)

Blue skies over Flinders Street Station, lunchtime, Friday.

The Impressionists at the National Gallery Victoria. Some quite outstanding works, and in a variety of styles and subjects, certainly enough to keep me (and the rest of the crowd) interested for a good 3 hours of wandering around. Definitely worth a look, even if you’re a relative philistine like me.

(Busy weekend. Well, kinda. Okay so not really. But for whatever reason, I didn’t get around to taking a Here Is My pic. Unless I’m inspired in the next few hours, it’ll wait until next weekend.)

Overnight the power apparently went off for a little while, resetting most clocks in the house. I was whinging about this to a colleague at work, and got onto the whole saga of my old alarm clock and its hopefully imminent replacement, lost somewhere in CourierLand.

Not five minutes later, another bloke comes up. “Just signed for you on this, Daniel”, and hands me a package. From Sony.

The clock. The clock has arrived!

Annoying songs I have had going around in my brain recently:

• Roger Voudouris: Get used to it — he of the red pullover and hair blowing in the wind. Is there any more frightening sight?
• Billy Joel: For the Longest Time — hangover from that night at the cinema when they were playing his greatest hits? Will this be circulating in my mind for the longest time?
• Cold Chisel: My baby
• Peter, Paul and Mary: Leaving on a Jet Plane — possibly triggered by Marita’s imminent holiday to Europe, and casting me back to 20 years ago in Year 8 when a latter-day hippy with a guitar disguised as a teacher had us all in the classroom singing various aging easy-listening songs to badly mistyped lyrics: Oh babe I hate to do

Hmm. That’s all. For now.