Manchester Lane, four years later. She looked about the same. Some bloke on her arm. Both smiling.

Don’t know if she noticed me noticing her as we passed. Didn’t say anything, just kept walking.

Glad she seems happy. Me too.

PS. It was an ex, not the ex.

On Saturday I went up on the roof of my house for the first time. Not for anything in particular, but just to see if I could, and to admire the view.

The kids stood by, Isaac in particular making worried noises about the steadiness of the ladder, and the strength of the polycarbonate verandah roof I had to get across to get onto the roof proper. Peter had assured me although it might bend, it would be strong enough to hold my weight. All the same I decided to only step where there was a wooden support underneath. It did bend, which I must say didn’t do wonders for my confidence.

Once up, the view of suburbia isn’t too bad. The lower rear part of the roof isn’t very steep, though it gets steeper as you go further up (or at least it feels that way). Not that I was feeling nervous you understand, but I elected on that occasion not to climb all the way to the top.

Okay, so I must admit that when it all comes down to it, I’m not outstandingly good with heights.

Instead of climbing to the peak, I cleaned some of the gunk off the kitchen skylight, though in retrospect it’s made little difference.

And despite portents of doom from the kids (who assured me they were ready to call Emergency) I made it down okay.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to church, but on Sunday I found myself at an Anglican service, for a christening.

I think if you had to sum it up briefly, that kind of mild suburban Christianity could be best described as a 2000 year old advertising campaign to try and get people to be nice to each other.

A lot of the service (which included the parable of the Good Samaritan) talked about loving God and being nice to people, and if you do that, you’ll get eternal life. Sometimes I wonder if a lot of religions weren’t based in part around using bribery to try and convince people in those wild and ancient times to stop chopping each other up and to be a bit more civilised.

I wonder though, if one were promoting such a message today, how would you do it? I’m betting that to reach the bulk of the population, you wouldn’t do it by setting up a weekly meeting (especially on a Sunday morning) in a big old building and getting people with robes to light candles, talk and sing about your message.

Nah. Billboards. TV spots. Newspaper ads. Promotional giveaways. Sponsorship. Online. Youtube videos. Podcasts. Viral marketing. That kind of thing.

Bob Geldof on Live Earth: “I hope they’re a success. But why is Gore actually organizing them? To make us aware of the greenhouse effect? Everybody’s known about that problem for years.”

But some don’t. I keep hearing about people who routinely use their clothes dryers for everything. Or people who leave lots of lights on around the house when they’ve settled into the lounge room to watch TV for the evening. Or buy huge TVs that burn lots of power. Or buy fleets of 4WDs to drive around town. Or leave the heating on in empty rooms. Or, like one of my neighbours, drive the 5 minute walk to the supermarket (OK, maybe he’s getting more than he can carry).

And offsets aren’t everything, either. Greenfleet is already running out of land to plant trees, let alone if everybody did it. And such schemes don’t take into account future loss of carbon through things such as bushfire.

It’s like the three Rs, the first of which often gets forgotten: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. Offsetting them helps, but it’s far from ideal. Reducing, thus not producing the emissions in the first place, is better.

A lot of people know what’s going on, and are doing what they can to reduce their carbon footprint. Some really don’t know, and don’t care.

And some just don’t believe. Maybe they watched The Great Global Warming Swindle and believed all of it; and switched off before Martin Durkin was queried on some of his claims.

But when people say they’re not going to do anything because they don’t believe carbon emissions make a difference, they’re ignoring that there is a myriad of other benefits from cutting pollution. Take my pet cause, public transport. Encouraging and enabling people to drive less is not just about cutting emissions. It also has benefits in, off the top of my head: clean air, road space, congestion, oil dependence/peak oil, transport costs, road toll, social isolation, equity/access to work and education, obesity, road rage, street crime. It’s not all about emissions.

And then there’s other people, who know about it, but think others should do all the hard yards.

Maybe it’s time for personal carbon trading! Apparently Caltex is proposing it, with the RACV objecting.

Yes? No? Well consider this (though I wonder if there’s evidence to back it up):

In recent years wealthy Texans have discovered the joys of sitting in front of a log fire. As it is usually hot in Texas they must turn their air conditioners up so they can enjoy the cosy warmth from their hearths. — Clive Hamilton.

Despite having a silent number, and fiercely protecting it, I do get the odd telemarketing call. They are almost all from offshore call centres, and almost all during business hours, when I’m not generally home.

Call centre dialling systems are meant to detect when an answering machine picks up. But evidently their systems think my recorded greeting is a human, and connect the call through to an operator.

So every so often I’ll get home and find messages like these on my answering machine.

phone_messages.mp3 (MP3, 186Kb)

It makes me happy that my answering machine keeps the telemarketers busy for a few seconds on each call. Hopefully lots of others’ machines are doing the same thing, thus preventing them from bothering more people who have the misfortune to be at home when they call.

You know those sandwich board advertising things? A-frames, I’m told they’re called. The IGA in Ripponlea has recently got one. It’s as big as a person.

On the bright side, it’s unlikely to blow over in the wind. Though if it did, it’d probably kill somebody.

Update: Speaking of advertising, I just added Google ads here. I’m not convinced it doesn’t make the site look cheap and tawdry, but I’ll give it a go for a week or two.

If there’s one thing you want to be working in your house, it’s the drains. At their worst, if there’s a complete blockage, you’ll end up with nasty smells and even nastier effluent in the house.

Thankfully things weren’t that bad, but there was that suspicious level of water in the toilets, and some stuff wouldn’t flush down properly (eugh).

The benefit of owning the house is you can get any plumber you like, at a time of your liking, so you can choose not to hire the cheap-but-unreliable type. The disadvantage is you end up paying for it.

Having got the name of a good plumber from my sister (since I’ve never had to ring one before), he arrived and took a look around to work out where the drain actually goes. If it went under (and was shared with) the neighbour’s house, it could get complicated. It wasn’t actually clear exactly where it went, but he did find what he needed to have a go at unblocking, and went to get The Machine.

The Machine is an ancient looking beast. Probably the oldest bit of kit he has, it looks like it could easily be sixty years old. All utilitarian metal, it reminded me of the prehistoric hat-stretching device at Hattams.

The actual bits that go down the drain, though, reminded me more of the metal tentacles from the final battle scenes in the third Matrix movie, if a little more benign. 15 feet long, the plumber fed them down one-by-one, bit by bit. “15 feet… 30 feet… 45 feet… much longer and we might be in trouble. Ah! Here we go.”

The machine spluttered, and then kept pushing. Somewhere down in the depths of the local drainage system, the blockage — probably tree roots — had been cleared. A few test flushes later and all was well.

Except for the bill of course. $180. Ka-ching!

Still, worth it to avoid getting poo all over the floor.

Marita and I were walking along the Centre Road shops on Saturday when we saw a passport on the ground. We picked it up. From the cover, photo, and identifying marks inside, it appeared to belong to an Australian-Canadian boy of Asian (perhaps Chinese) appearance. Looking around, we couldn’t see him. A couple of bystanders suggested asking in the travel agent, which was next door. Maybe he’d dropped it after visiting them.

The travel agents didn’t know, but they said they’d hold onto it (and presumably send it into the authorities).

Ten minutes later, walking home, we passed a young guy, walking along slowly, looking a little sullen, eyes to the ground.

I had one of those light bulb moments, and ran after him. “Excuse me! Did you lose a passport?”

His eyes lit up. He had. He’d been visiting his father (who lives locally) from his home in Vancouver (where his mother lives). He made it clear his dad hadn’t been delighted to hear the passport had been lost. “He was shouting…”

Yeah. Sigh. I probably would too.

We led him back to the travel agents. He seemed very relieved. Good deed done for the day.