like time – only more so …
Archive for March, 2008
The book of life…
Mar 27th
Liz was on the school run today and after picking Jack up, she called in on my parents (they live opposite the school). My dad had been to town and hard purchased a couple of interesting books for Jack – a kids dictionary and a kids encyclopedia. Jack was extremely taken with both books and set about reading random entries. Hence the following conversation between him and Liz at bedtime.
J: “Mummy! What are the first letters in penis?”
C: “Look it up!”
J: “Is it P. E. ?”
C: ” ……… ”
I go into his bedroom and ask him why he wants to look up the word penis (had to word that sentence carefully). He says because mummy pointed out that it had an entry in the book and he wanted to read about it. I find the page for him and he starts reading it, “The penis is a male oregon that produces sperm or errine.” Was it really so long ago that he had trouble saying ‘dog’?
Actually, while we’re on the subject of Jack wisdom. The other day he’s got his mate Jack round and they’re sitting in the front room playing with their transformers, whilst watching transformers on the plasma (the six year old equivalent of three-in-a-bed with pneumatic blonde twins, surely). Jack says to Jack – “When you squeeze your balls, does it hurt in your waist?” and Jack goes, “Yea, it does.” Jack says, “Why does it do that?” Jack doesn’t know. At this point the spy Liz in the kitchen and put the question to her. “Ask your dad!” she says.
The English abroad…
Jack is at a sleepover party tonight along with 20!!! of his little mates. So Liz suggests we go out for a meal, because it’s the first night we’ve had off in about a year. So she books a table for us at the mexican in Surftown. We arrive at 8:30 and are shown to our table. In the little sideroom near the bar we hear uproarious laughter coming from a group of six lads. Just as our starter arrives, the lads get shown to a table near us.
It quickly becomes apparent that they’re English. They’re English and very middle-class and very, very loud. They carry on in that loud “We’re the English abroad and we’re more important than you” voice relating anecdotes of one kind or another. They swap degree results, “I got a 2:2 – didn’t you get a 2:1?” “No I got a 2:2, Simon got the 2:1.” It becomes apparent from their conversation that they’ve only been in Oz for a few weeks and that they don’t all know each other. Liz and I assume that they’re over her doing something related to nearby Wollongong University. Their thrilling anecdotes are interspersed with mind-bogglingly loud guffaws. Around them, when they got there, were about three couples enjoying the tale-end of their meals with a leisurely glass of wine and intimate conversation. Not long after the chinless wankers show up though, all those couples leave, one after the other. Remind me again which nation’s supposed to be ill-mannered and uncouth?
Anyway – before long it’s just the gormless wankers and us left in the restaurant. “Gary’s just sad because he hasn’t pulled any Aussie birds yet. He wanted to ask this one girl out, but was too nervous, so he asked her sister to ask her for him and she said no becuause she couldn’t believe he’d ask her sister.” Liz pipes up at this point, “More like she said no because he’s a fucking twat.”
The loudest of the group then regaled his chums with various stories about ‘uni’ before broaching the subject of travel. One of the others asks him if he’s always lived in Surrey. “I lived in Barcelona for a couple of years, then I moved to Bristol for a couple, then I was in Newquay for a couple of years,” he broadcasts to the whole of downtown Surftown. “How fucking old is he?” asks Liz, since the tool in question doesn’t look like he’s been out of ‘uni’ for more than a year or two.
The waitress comes over to clear our plates up. “We’re not all like that,” I say to her. “They are loud, aren’t they,” she says. We’d have probably stayed for a while longer and had a drink, but the Little Englanders had become too much for us. What is it with the English abroad?
Like moving house …
Mar 25th
When we moved into our house about 18 months ago, we didn’t give much thought to what would go where – we just went with the way things were. However it has been bugging Liz and so, in time honoured fashion, she has been bugging me. She wanted a big move around and the long easter weekend seemed like the obvious time to do it.
We live in a two storey house – the kitchen, living room and bedrooms are upstairs. Downstairs is the double garage, a large room we used as an office, utility room and sun room. When we moved in, the obvious place for our office (since we both work from home) was the large room downstairs. So that was the way we arranged things.
Of late, however, we’ve been tripping over ourselves in our bedroom (funny how you get used to the extra space) and Herr Oberleutnant wanted a change. So we decided to move Jack into our old bedroom, our bedroom into the large room downstairs and then we’d get an office each from the other bedrooms. So on Friday I began dismantling, removing, rearranging, shifting and otherwise humping various large bits of furniture up and down the stairs.
Fat git that I am, by 2am on Friday I collapsed into bed in a near-comatose state. So we now have a bedroom of hotel suite proportions, complete with massive walk in robe and en suite shower/bog. Jack has a much larger room from which to festoon the house in bits of lego and transformer legs and we both have our own offices. The simple joy of not having Liz look over my shoulder when I should be working and saying, “What are you doing at the moment?” is reward in itself.
The walk in robe (as it is now) was my little computer repair business’s workshop. On the Saturday I drove over to Bunnings and bought one of those wall mounted wardrobe/shelf boxsets. Naive twat that I am, I thought I’d simply have to line everything up, rawl plug into the wall and Bob’s your local cat burglar. I should point out that I am to DIY what Stephen Hawking is to extreme rock climbing.
On the instructions which came with the boxset, it told me first to locate the wall studs. These are, I was told, always either 16″ or 24″ apart. But how to locate the bloody things? I tried knocking the wall with knuckle, which produced inconclusive results. Then I phoned my dad and asked him if he had an electric stud wall finder. He told me did, and would find it and bring it over. Much joy.
About 30 minutes later he arrives and tells me that he couldn’t find his stud wall finder, but that it was crap anyway and that he and mum will happily drive over to Swindon and get a descent one from Bunnings. I say I’ll drive, because I need some more rawl plugs anyway, so we head over.
For those of you who don’t live in Oz, Bunnings is the equivalent of B&Q – massive shops crammed with everything you can possibly imagine in the whole DIY/home/garden arena. In fact there’s a funny ad on the TV at the moment from one of their smaller competitors in which they say, “We sell everything you need, not everything ever made,” in an obvious (but very accurate) dig at Bunnings.
So anyway – we consult one of the floor staff. Bunnings make a point of employing old bastards who know the difference between a mitre saw and a ballcock and so this wasn’t as futile as it might sound. The bloke we spoke to explained the difference between all the different stud wall finders they had and recommended a Ryobi one. We bought it.
So – back home. Read instruction for stud wall finder. Seems simple enough. Put finder on wall, let it initialise, start moving it over the plasterboard in search of wooden studs. Only the thing beeps continuously. Read instructions again. Try again. Same thing. Take batteries out to reset it. Try again. Same thing. “That’s what my old one did,” says my dad, “Guess they’re all just crap.” We spend about 45 minutes trying to get it working and in all that time – over a 12ft stretch of wall, we managed to locate just one stud. Yay.
I get online and consult the almight Google. Various videos explain how electric stud wall finders work, but in all the videos the things work perfectly, locating wood with pinpoint accuracy. Another tutorial explains how the plasterboard sheets are afixed to the studs with nails, which you can detect with a common or garden magnet. We try this … and it works. Only problem is that my wall appears to have been constructed from just three large sheets of plasterboard, afixed to just four studs, instead of the 14 or so I had expected to find.
So I resolve to anchor the top of the wardrobe thing to the four studs I know are there and use heavy duty 20kg plasterboard rawl plugs for the rest. I set to work and get the top wall anchor firmly attached with no further dramas. Then I had to ‘hang’ the shelf struts off this top wall anchor and afix them to the wall at the bottom. That goes swimmingly enough. Then I have to attach two extension rails to the middle two struts – to be afixed with two bolts each – top and bottom. By now I’ve run out of the heavy duty plugs and have to resort to bog standard ones. I consult the packet, which clearly states to use an 8mm drill bit and make my holes. I push the rawl plug in and it plops delicately down inside the wall partition. Great. Four fucking big holes.
I sit down and look again at the package that the wall screws came in and note these small plastic gromit things. I idly squeeze one and it folds up into a plastic bullet shape. Suddenly their purpose dawns on me (told you I was crap at this DIY lark) and, lucky bastard that I am, the holes I’ve drilled are the exact right size for this plastic plugs. Extension rails installed, I put all the shelves and hanging poles up and collapse in a heap on the floor.
Liz appears at the door with the first ironing basket full of clothes and sets about filling up the shelf space in a meticulously organised fashion that I will undoubtedly ruin the first time I put clothes on the shelves.
It has now been about 56 hours since I put that wardrobe system up … and it hasn’t fallen off the wall yet. That, my friends, is a miracle.
Later ‘taters ….
Here comes another winter …
Mar 21st
OK. Bit of background required for this anecdote. When we first arrived in this area, we were ‘adopted’ by a certain group of parents at our son’s school. Arriving in a new country is a bit like going to university and living away from home for the first time – you’ll happily make friends with anyone because, well, you’re a friendless zero. Anyway – we got adopted.
The clique of people we were adopted by were, on the whole, seachangers who’d moved from Sydney to the country to raise their kids. Some of them we gelled with pretty quickly, others not as much. They seemed like a friendly enough bunch of people and, even though we realised pretty early on that we had absolutely fuck all in common with many of them, it was nice to accepted. So we got invited to various social events be they official fund raisers, parties or just days at the beach. Some of those events were actually a good laugh … others not so much.
As the months went by that whole ‘nothing in common’ thing began to really jar and, what with making friends elsewhere who we *did* have something in common with, we drifted away from the clique. Things came to a bit of a head when I managed to alienate the Queen Bee of the clique with a badly worded party invitation (I shit you not). We suddenly found ourselves not being invited to the cliques events. Can’t say we lost much sleep over it because by then we’d made friends with some really sound people – found the whole situation pretty hilarious to be honest.
So, fast forward about five months and we get invited to a party. Not just any invite this one though – this one’s from within the old group. It happens to come from one of the couples we’d stayed in touch with. It’s a surprise party for another of the couples who we also got along with.
Day of the party also happens to be the easter hat parade at Jack’s school. We go along to cheer Jack on and after it’s all over I sneak off leaving Liz to have a gossip with friends. When I see her later she tells me that she bumped into the Queen Bee (actually a really apt description since she can’t seem to go anywhere without looking like it’s Melbourne Cup day). Liz said “See you later,” to her and the Bee said, “Have a nice easter.” The long and the short of it being that she clearly didn’t know we’d been invited.
We drive up to the party. Our hosts have a truly stunning home up in the hills above Broughton set in 40 acres of rolling countryside. We’re the first to arrive and we have a good chinwag and a catch-up. Several more people arrive. Then the Bee and hubby turn up. It was absolutely priceless to see her face – the sudden realisation that she didn’t exert as much influence as she perhaps thought she did. And then, get this, she says to Liz, “Oh I didn’t know you’d been invited.” Nice. What was even more amusing was that another couple had been welcomed into the clique – a nice couple who we’d met some months previously when they were in the area house-hunting. The Bee was buzzing around them in much the same way she had when we first arrived. I felt like warning them, but I got the impression they’d already sussed her out.
Kid, eh …
Was up on the balcony having a sneaky smoke earlier when I see two very young looking kids riding their bikes in the pitch black along the road past our house. Minute later a car pulls up, bloke gets out and says, “What did I tell you?” Silence from the kids. “What did I tell you?” More silence. “Put your bloody bikes in the back – we’re going home.” Not sure how many streets that particular concerned dad had driven round to locate his kids, but I suspect they might get their easter eggs confiscated.
Cold front …
Yesterday when I got in my car having visited my parents, the temperature gauge read 39 degrees – could barely touch the steering wheel it was so hot. Today it has been 16 degrees. Ouch.
Removalist …
Liz has decided that we’re not making best use of the space in our house (inclined to agree) and this weekend we’re doing a big swap round on the rooms. Our bedroom’s moving downstairs, Jack is moving into our old bedroom and our office is moving into Jack’s old room. I am really not looking forward to dismantling Jack’s bed again, because it’s one of those big cabin-beds with desk space underneath and it’s a complete bastard to take to bits.
Heartland …
Leave you with some lyrics from The The’s Heartland from 1986 for no reason other than I really like them …
Beneath the old iron bridges, across the Victorian parks
And all the frightened people running home before dark
Past the Saturday morning cinema
That lies crumbling to the ground
And the piss stinking shopping centre in the new side of town
I’ve come to smell the seasons change and watch the city
As the sun goes down again
Here comes another winter
Of long shadows and high hopes
Here comes another winter
Waitin’ for utopia
Waitin’ for hell to freeze over
Later ‘taters …
Yesterday 2.0 …
Mar 17th
Liz’s Grand Final …
Last year, one of Liz’s friends asked her if she’d like to join her in a local touch footy team. She initially resisted the idea, but after some cajoling, started going along. She hadn’t previously played any form of team sport, let alone touch footy, so the beginnings were, ermm, painful. But she stuck with it and became one of the diehards that was there week-in and week-out.
The team has its up and downs, but by mid-season they’re starting to get their act together. Then, after a run of five straight wins, they make it to the grand final of their division. This was thanks to the efforts of just five players, though all the other slackers who’d done fuck all for the rest of the season showed up for the possible glory of the final. I had promised to come down and cheer Liz on for a bit with Jack and so we showed up at the Broughton playing fields on the allotted evening to find the match already underway. Things seemed pretty evenly matched and at half time the score was 3-2 in favour of the other team.
As I chatted to Liz during halftime I noticed a single bloke in amongst the opposing team, seemingly discussing tactics with his yellow-clad team. He was dressed in a flouncy white shirt, black britches (only way I can think of describing them) and had an immaculate Doberman on the end of a short leash. “Who’s the dick with the dog?” I asked. Liz explained that he was that team’s ‘coach’ – the only coach, it might be added in the entire division. Case of someone taking a friendly knockabout a tad too seriously? The bloke looked like a right nonce – if I’d pulled up at some country retreat in Gloucestershire for a bit of huntin’-'n’-shootin’, I wouldn’t have been shocked to see someone like him pulling an antique Purdey shotgun out of the back of his Range Rover and handing it to his man-servant, Simpkins.
The game got back underway and I noticed that the other team had a plentiful supply of players and that barely 30 seconds passed before one or other of their team subbed out to suck on a bottle of water like they’d just run a half marathon. It had the effect of Liz’s mob playing an opposition of 20, instead of eight. This was all the more ironic when you consider that Liz’s team had four members over 40 and not a single player under 30, whilst they other side were *all* under 18. They had supporters who were taking things a bit too seriously too, so I started chanting, “Who’s the bastard in the shorts,” and “Green’s mean, yellow smellos” (I know, dead grown up, me).
I had to leave before the end to get Jack home and to bed – it being a school night – and so Liz phoned me from the pub to say that they’d lost by a single try. Not only that, but a try that had been disallowed by the ref because Liz’s team tagged the player before they got to the line, was allowed after intervention from Captain Gaylord the team coach who had ‘seen’ that there’d been no tackle!! What a twat. Despite the loss in the final, Liz’s team still finished top of their division – no mean feat for a bunch of old farts.
The whole local touch footy division met up at the pub a week later for the awards ceremony. As the cheating yellow team went up to get their trophy, Liz told her team how I’d described the nonce as the ‘dick with the dog’ and they all pissed themselves laughing, just as he was handed the trophy. I’ve told Liz that next season I’ll show up in full hunting regalia complete with horn and coach her team on the finer aspects of manipulating match officials.
Anyway – Liz got a lift back from the pub at close to midnight and was, understandably, completely wankered. It turned out she’d had many chardys followed up with a couple of tequilla slammers. Wine and tequilla? The outcome was inevitable. No sooner had she done the traditional, “I’m really hungry can you make me something to eat,” cry of the pisshead, than she was hugging the toilet and yodelling for Australia. I gave her a pint of water, put her in the shower, made her brush her teeth and then put her to bed with a plastic bin in close proximity in case of night chunders, but she woke up next morning feeling none-the-worse for wear. Git.
Patrol …
Another Sunday, another patrol. Things are winding down now though, because the season’s coming to an end and as a result only three of us showed up. That was the bad news – the good news was that we were all grown-ups, which meant things got done properly and in a timely fashion … and we still got to blat up and down Seven Mile beach on the quad bike.
Nippers was taking place for the first couple of hours of our patrol and Nick offered to let me get some driving practice in, in the IRB. The surf was unthreatening, the water crystal clear and the sun shining. We dragged the boat off the sandbar and into the surf and putted out beyond the break. Then Nick and I swapped positions and I started driving. After about five minutes of this, he said, “I reckon it’s time for your first solo,” and rolled backwards into the water. Ermm … thanks for the warning mate.
I putted around and immediately realised how very different those boats are with a single person in them. They corner woefully, they steer completely differently and they’re very prone to flipping over, because there’s no balast at the front of the boat in the form of a crewman. After a bit of tooling about and a couple of figure eights, I putted back over to pick Nick up. He spotted the tow rope was loose and started stowing it whilst still in the water. I saw a wave coming towards us and gave a little squirt of the throttle so we were face-on to the wave … which had the effect of sending Nick towards the rapidly spinning prop. “Kill the fucking motor!” he shouted and I yanked the emergency release clip off. Ermm…. whoops. I let him drive the boat back to shore – think it’s going to be *some* time before I get my drivers badge.
Tribal council …
At the weekend I attended another gathering of my franchise co-workers. There was plenty to discuss, because John (whose franchise it is) had employed a general manager, marketing bloke, SEO guy, graphic designer and book-keeper. Anyone would think he was getting serious about it.
The meeting took place at a small modern chapel in Port Kembla. For those of you who’ve never been there, Port Kembla is where the steelworks are situated in Wollongong. It’s a truly massive bit of industry which takes up most of the foreshore for a good 10km in either direction. The building we were in looked over the dock and the back of the steelworks with smoke billowing from one massive chimney and flames from a smaller one.
Anyway – the meeting was tedious, but productive. Lots of issues got aired, problems either resolved or actioned to be solved. Turned out that the general manager, the marketing guy and the graphic designer were all poms too. I also noticed that the young lady taking notes and bullet points on the butchers pad was not a local either and in my half-asleep state thought she might be French. That was until I was talking to her later (she turned out to be the marketing guys girlfriend) and it turned out that like him, she was from Leeds. Fuck knows how I could have mistaken a Leeds accent for a French one but there you go – boring meetings on a very warm Saturday have that effect on me.
Here comes the sun…
While Adelaide breaks temperature records and Perth enjoys an unrelentingly hot summer, here on the east coast we’ve had one of those ‘blink and you’ll mis it’ years. Ironically, now that it’s officially autumn and the leaves are starting to fall from the trees, it has warmed up. In fact the last three weeks have been pretty bloody nice.
As soon as I saw the weather was on the change, I got down to the pool shop to have our water tested and get it ready. Just as well, because we’ve been using it a lot – after school swims and weekend with Jack’s mates round. Very nice too.
The long easter weekend approaches now and that means another influx of city-siders to our little part of the world. I checked the 7 day forecast and it said that it was going to get cooler and wetter by the weekend, just in time for the holidaymaking weekenders. Some things really don’t change wherever you are in the world …
Schoolmate…
Jack has a new classmate, he tells us, who I shall call Brian. This new boy is disabled and (according to Jack) all the blood dried up in his brain meaning he can’t talk. Jack revealed that Brian speaks by shrieking and that the first time he did it in class, all the children laughed except for Jack, because Jack just “knew it was the way he spoke and therefore not funny.” Funny how the Jackster can swing from the amazingly childish to the buddha-like mature within the space of minutes.
Aldi…
For those of you who live near an Aldi and who are interested in getting a new computer, may I direct you towards the offer which starts on the 20th of March. They’re flogging one of their excellent German-made Medion branded laptops for $1500. It comes with a phenomenal array of bells and whistles, not least of which is a new high-end Core 2 CPU, 3Gb (!!!!) of RAM and a 512Mb Geforce graphics card. It’s got a 250Gb hard drive, 17″ widescreen display, Bluetooth, WiFi and Ethernet builtin. It even comes with a built-in webcam and a DVB-T television tuner so you can watch (and record) free-to-air terrrestrial digital TV shows. If you know fuck all about computers and are in the market for one – then take it from me – those things are going to walk out of the door. Seriously considering getting one myself, despite already owning two perfectly good laptops and four desktop PCs.
No Country …
… for Old Men. Downloaded it about three months ago, but only got round to watching it the other day, having seen how many Oscars it got … and thought it was a load of arse-biscuits. All the pace of a game of Crown Green bowls and an uber-killer who’s about as menacing as the lead singer from St Winnifreds school choir. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Coen Brothers, I think they’ve made some great movies, but I found No Country to be mind-numbingly dull and the wrong side of stupid.
Enough …
Right – didn’t enjoy retyping that little lot – hope you enjoyed Yesterday 2.0. Later ‘taters ….
Autumn …
Mar 2nd
Autumn has officially arrived and for those of us who live on the east coast of this country, the question we keep asking is – where the fuck did summer go? We’ve been here for four summers now and this one was a washout of British proportions. Torrential downpours, floods, grey skies, drizzle and thunderstorms we’ve had it all in abundance. Over on the west coast they’ve had one of the warmest summers ever. The only consolation is that QLD got it worse than us.
So anyway – autumn’s now here. In this part of the country that means median daily temperatures of about 25 degrees. As we move into the mercifully short winter months of July and August median daily temperatures will be about 20 degrees. It does get pretty cool at night though, which would ordinarily have come as a bit of a shock, but not after the ‘summer’ we’ve had.
The thing that makes winter such a shock to the system for immigrants from Europe is that your typical Australian house is about as energy efficient as a space shuttle. Very few homes have any sort of insulation in the roof space, which means that the house gets bloody hot in the summer and bloody cold in the winter. There’s often no insulation in the walls either as many homes are single skin or timber frame. Double glazing is unheardof.
In our house, the living room is directly above our double garage. If you were to stand in that garage and look up, you’d see the joists and floorboards right there. There’s also a bloody great gap above each roller door. This means that in the winter, when the wind’s up, all the cold air blows straight into the house and up through the floor and any heat we generate goes out exactly the same way. So our big project at the moment is insulating – we’re fitting this energy efficient insulation in the roof space. It’s called Air Cell and can apparently keep houses 12 degrees cooler in summer and 10 degrees warmer in winter. Piss easy to fit too – not like that horrible asbestos-looking cotton wool crap they used to use.
Party like it’s …
Our friends Karl and Katie threw a party for their son Liam on Saturday. Ordinarily I wouldn’t get too excited about a kids birthday party, but I went last year and had a great time. There was a pig roast, copious amounts of alcohol and lots of mucking around. This year we came prepared with change of clothes, swimmers and booze.
We arrived at about 3:00pm and I cracked open the first of the six pack of Budweiser I’d treated myself to. I used to drink this stuff when I lived in Bath, when I was DJing there and I’d easily get through eight bottles a night. Anyway – we settled down and said hello to everybody. Karl’s a fellow pom (aussie missus) who’s been here for nearly 10 years now. The rest of the guests were people we know from Jack’s old pre-school, Broughton public or just socially. It’s nice not to have to do endless introductions.
I knocked back my first bottle of grog and didn’t have a chance to get out of my chair before an ice cold replacement was plonked in front of me. By about six o’clock I was well on the way to being pissed, when it was decided we’d take any of the kids that wanted to up to the skate park, which was about 500 metres up the road. When we got there, there were a load of lads who weren’t much younger than me. One bloke, in green army fatigues, looked about 40 – he looked a bit of a dickhead riding a tiddly BMX bike, but he certainly knew how to ride it. Anyway – the 15-odd kids ran around like banshees, while we observed from the sidelines. We, of course, had a little go on the skateboards and, of course, proved that we’re never like to master an ollie.
The party carried on into the night. Jack crashed out at about 9 o’clock along with a lot of the other kids and everyone else carried on raiding the esky. We left at midnight and lugged a totally knackered Jack upstairs to bed. Not being a regular beer drinker, I paid in full the next day.