Apparently this year’s Salvation Army Red Shield appeal fell short by around $2 million, with apartment block security doors and an increasingly cashless society cited as two major reasons. I think most would agree the Salvos do a good job, so if you had planned to give but couldn’t, now might be a good time to do the cashless thing and click through to their web site to donate online. Let’s show them that the wired age and the cashless society can still have a social conscience! (Ron and Jeff wouldn’t, of course.)

Did I mention I got 6 out of 8 in the footy tipping? Would have been 7 if I’d had enough faith to tip my own team.

The car has been making its funny noise again. So I took it back into the service place on Thursday to get them to look at it. The service dude rang me that afternoon, saying that one of the flange-gespacho defribulators seemed to be loose, thatlast time round the engine guys who had done the repair had only replaced one, and they all need to be checked, all eight of them, bless ‘em. Of course I don’t actually remember what the real name of these things is, and I have no idea what their usual function is, apart from making annoying noises when they go wrong.

And so we were once again into the situation of the car triangle: me, the service place and the engine repair guys, who put the replacement engine in last year, and who thankfully have to repair it for free because it’s still under warranty. Problem is that ironically for people who specialise in engines, they are not exactly speedy, and there was no guarantee the car would be ready for the weekend, when I really needed it. I would have to drop it back on Monday.

Friday night rolled around, and I was at a kinda bar/cafe/restaurant place in Footscray (gunzel heaven, it sits above a major rail line, with passing trains a la Blues Brothers) withsome
great
people for some booze and some food. Mind you, Tony was a bit critical of the guacamole that came with the nachos. Not the real stuff, you see, not quite right. Lack of avocado. Why would I bother mentioning that? Keep reading.

For much of the weekend I was up in Seymour for the annual PTUA planning junket. Well, it would be a junket if we didn’t have to contribute so much time and towards the costs. And it was, say, on the Gold Coast, rather than at Seymour’s Commonground, a kind of mud brick hippy convention centre, set in a valley inhabited by kangaroos. Being in the middle of nowhere we drove up of course, and yes there is some irony in public transport advocates all piling into cars, but dammit there is no PT to where we were going, and we car-pooled, so none of your smart remarks.

I’ll spare you all the excruciating detail of planning a year’s activities for a community organisation, but Saturday night was worth mentioning for the Thai food (Seymour’s finest, no less), the wine, the mozzies (partially deflected by a heap of insect repellent), more wine thanks very much, night trampolining, yesh another glass of wine pleashe, star gazing, and eventually sitting around a big table outside in the warm air, quoting Simpsons and Monty Python, glugging down Bourbon and Coke (after the wine ran out) and eating chipsh and dipsh. Mind you, Tony (a completely separate Tony from Friday night’s Tony) was a bit critical of the “guacamole-style dip” we had got. Not the real stuff, you see, not quite right. Lack of avocado.

I guess Tonys are fussy like that.

On Sunday morning Mother Nature put on a show, as I was awoken by a huge thunderstorm working its way across the valley. A flash of light and a huge thunderclap immediately afterwards showed it was directly overhead at one point, and the rain gushed down. No, gushed is scarcely accurate. It was pissing down, making it a comfort to be indoors and under the covers.

After wrapping up we drove back from Seymour that afternoon, yacking away merrily, and the car made the distance okay despite the funny noise. It’s gone back to the service place now, and touch wood, will be fixed, ready, and no longer making the funny noise, sometime tomorrow.

My mobile phone has rung so much in the last few days that I’m starting to imagine I’m hearing it. Not particularly helped by the following:

As I stepped into the toilet this morning, I must have been momentarily distracted, and as I turned around to close the door, my forehead and the high shelf in there collided - BANG! - leaving me with a bump on the head. Triffic. Thankfully it’s up near my hair line, so not excessively noticeable (though I am not in front of a mirror right now, so for all I know it’s gone blue without me knowing).

My sister says she was sitting at home in West London on Friday when she saw
three Concorde fly past. That would be a sight to see.

Warning: gardening in progress

Okay, to business. Apart from ENJOYING myself this weekend, I also need to do the following:

• mow the front garden and nature strip (in geek terms known as organic systems maintenance)- man that was hard work. I’ve definitely earned second breakfast today
• laundry, ironing, dishes, all that good stuff
• do my tax (x2 - this month’s BAS and my tax from the last fin year)
• buy a black pen, so I can fill in these tax forms (where have all my black pens gone?! And why do the ATO insist on black pens anyway?)- found one that’ll do the job. Even better, when passing the supermarket later on the way to Tony’s bizarre auction barbecue, I found a packet of two. Now I can fill in ATO forms to my heart’s content.
• put the new rego sticker on the car so I don’t get pulled over and strip searched by the cops next week
• continue the relentless tidying up that I hope will one day in the distant future see the house without a single box out in the rooms
• write to relatives to thank them for the birthday cards they sent two months ago
• post that package of stuff to Iris in Israel
• find those Gold Class cinema tickets I got given last Christmas, and check the expiry date on them- 31st December. Excellent.
• start reading some of those novels my dad lent me written by
  people he
  knows
• take my VCR to be repaired (no, it isn’t as continually unreliable as the one I destroyed)

and most importantly,

• stop writing this damn diary now and go get started on all this stuff

I’ll tick them off as I go.

Why is it that as I’m doing one thing, I’ll think of two more that need to be done?

Sunday 10:30pm. Managed to make a dent in the list, but still a fair bit to go. Too tired now to do more. Will continue in my copious (ha!) spare time during the week.

Well I didn’t get invited to Howard & Bush’s barbie, so I went to work today instead. (Still,
it doesn’t sound like a real Australian barbecue - no mention of snags fried to a blackened crisp).

Funny weather. Initially out this morning, it was drizzly. Then stopped back past home, just cloudy. Left for work, and it was sunny. Got to work, still sunny. A little later, pissing down rain. Then a gap in the clouds when I went to run a lunchtime errand. Shortly after, I am told, it once again poured down. Then back to just cloudy for pretty much the rest of the day.

Tonight as I walked home from the station, the local vicar, done up in his dog collar, was putting out the bins. He gave me a wave, even though I’m not Anglican and have never met him. I smiled and nodded back. Neighbourly friendliness and all that. Perhaps I am destined forevermore to live down the road from Anglican churches with cheerful vicars.

The sun setting behind Melbourne Central last night. Click for the full size image. (Yes, that is the reflection of my hand you can see).

Yesterday I used my car horn in anger. I was merrily driving down the road. The sun was shining, the road was almost clear of traffic; it could have been a car commercial, apart from the fact that my car is 10 years old and has started making that noise again - insert rant about car repairs here.

This woman in a silver Ford was ahead of me, and pulled over to the left. As I went to pass her I noticed her right indicator was on, and before I knew it she’d pulled out in front of me to do a U-turn. Oh, nice one lady.

I braked to avoid a collision, and beeped to make my presence known. Only then (and by this point her car was at the point where I’d have hit her side on if I hadn’t slowed down) did she look around and see me. And you know what she did? Not the reaction of "Oh no, I’ve done a stupid thing!" Not "Hey, whatareyou beeping at me for, I own the road!" No, she smiled and gave me a wave. Bizarre.

I’m firmly of the opinion that car horns are a safety device only. I came to this opinion after putting up with the neighbours at the old place whose friends had a very nasty habit of

(a) pulling up at four o’clock in the fucking morning to go fishing, and using their horn as a substitute for getting out of their car and knocking on the door to say "Hi, we’re here, let’s go"

(b) having parties until the wee small hours, and their friends using their horns to say "goodbye" as they drove off, as if they hadn’t just said "goodbye" anyway.

Okay admittedly maybe my gripe was with my neighbours friends rather than my neighbours. But those neighbours (and their friends) had other bad (non-horn related) habits, so I’m prepared to blame them for having friends like that.

My new crop of neighbours… well, one or two of them do have a horn habit. Though so far never in the middle of the night.