Last night we caught our first film of the Singapore Film Festival with friends Carolyn and Mike -- the disturbing but engaging Capturing the Friedmans. Seemingly uncensored, too. Wow. We all talked about it for a half hour afterwards, which is a good sign. Next Tuesday (I think) we're seeing Osama.

Oh, and I've given up on Gmail for the present, until they include an address book that works. Bummer.

The way we were: I just spent about 20 minutes reading the archives of our blog back to our first international move. Reading back, it seems like our life in Atlanta was much more exciting then our life here (ironically). And I was clearly naive about how long it would take us to migrate to Oz. There's a post from Aug 2002 were I suggested we start the process then because I thought it would probably take 4-5 months, HA! Just in case anyone's curious the process actually took much closer to a year: about 4 months time for the correct agencies to evaluate our job skills, and about 8 months actual processing time beyond that. That's all water under the bridge now though, because we've got our passports back today complete with with new permanent residency Australia visa stamps.

New email. From being a member of Blogger, I've been offered an early chance to set up a Google Gmail account. I'm excited. The free gig of storage is what sold me -- I hate having to delete old emails. So so long, hotmail, I hardly knew ye. I'll be sending out my new address soon. Any predictions on how long until I get my first spam?

There is a Feng Shui convention in town next month.

Can you imagine the squabbles that go on while they're setting up their booths?

In other news...

From the Gooooooooaaaaaal Dept. comes this report on Sunday's game:

PM played a lacklusture 1st half as the heat forced many to play below par. As with the AM game , it took a goal in the middle of the 2nd half to wake us up. Mark S scored a rare goal off a corner before Kelvin rounded off the comback with a scrambled goal after good work on the left.

I've been averaging about a goal every other game this year. Not too shabby!

From the Too Damn Funny Dept. comes a report on the worst records ever. What's funny is that I've been hearing the "winning" song all over town in the past month, for some reason.

Writing. Six months after vowing to write a science fiction short story, I have the outline half done.

That's not as dire as it sounds. I had stopped work on it for several months. Just in the past two weeks has my interest in finishing it been rekindled, and I have the plot almost completely worked out, thanks to some heavy thinking sessions while riding mass transit. I came up with a narrative device that will let me tell the story much easier. All the pieces of the plot fit together nicely; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it even has a [gasp] theme. Ninety percent of the time I'm working on it, I think it's going to turn out original and wonderful and hailed by one and all; only the other ten percent of the time do I think it's going to be crap. Which, considering my usual self-doubt on creative efforts, is amazing.

I'm starting to worry about the size of it. Maybe it'll turn out to be a novel after all, although I shudder at the thought. There's a dangerous middle ground, I've learned, where stories are too big for magazines and too small for novels. A rather large gap, in fact: between 20,000 and 40,000 words, a story is useless. I'd rather shoot for under 20,000 than over 40,000, but it seems like I have an awful lot of plot and required expository.

I've heard that fiction can be five times harder than non-fiction to write, and now I believe it. I'm still reluctant to sit down and work on it much of the time. But once I get started I get into it. Still, if I end up with 20,000 words, and get published in one of the top magazines, that would earn me a measley $1000. How do people make a living at this?

Okay, this makes perfect sense to me. Why are there not more things like this in the world?