In an exercise of self-indulgence, these are a few of the things that I'm enjoying lately:

Go Fug Yourself

Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke - this site kills me, but not one for the little ones.

Mimi Smartypants, again not for those easily offended, but generally very funny.

Rose wines, a new varietal for us, but one we are both enjoying muchly. We're also still enjoying sparkling wines, though I'm guessing that our ritual of "champagne Sundays" will be put on hold now that the Soccer season has re-started for Mark.

Running- Laika and I have been running anywhere from twice to five times a week for over a year now. I keep expecting myself to get lazy, but it's surprisingly addictive. That said, I need to get more serious about it and start running in some local fun-runs. I'd be very pleased with myself if I trained enough to run a marathon by the year I turn 40, but won't commit myself to it at this point. I currently run anywhere on average from 3 km's to 7 km's so a marathon would be a huge leap.

Music swapping- I've been trading favorite cd's with another expat (French) in an effort to move past our music doldrums. We were introduced to Phoenix this way, a band we both really like, and recently obtained a Ry Cooder CD that we really like too.

I wish I could add my new job to this list, but at the moment I don't feel expert enough to find it enjoyable, and instead feel depressed at being deskilled. I'm hoping to be illuminated in the near future, because at the moment nothing is making sense to me. My colleagues have reassured me that I just need to give it some more time. I'm definitely enjoying the new paycheck though.

The audition for The Rich List was today. They held it in the function room at the local German cultural center, and a LOT more people showed up than I was expecting -- maybe 120. The first part was a standard trivia quiz. There were forty questions; I started really strong, but stumbled a bit at the end. No matter -- I scored a 24, and the cut off was 18. Everyone under that was out. That whittled us down to sixty people or so.

They took a Polaroid picture of us next, that they attached to our questionnaires. (Of course, I blinked at just the wrong time.) Then the guy running it forebodingly asked if we had ever seen Australia's Got Talent. The thing was, each of us remaining had to get up and demonstrate a talent for thirty seconds or so, "or you can just talk about yourself, but that would be boring." We were given a raffle ticket, and we were called up in random order. I was thinking, "Please, please, give me time to consider this a bit." Luckily I wasn't called until about half way, so I had time to plan my shtick. Some people told off-color jokes, and some sang nursery rhymes, but lots of other people were just talking about interesting experiences they had, so I just did the same. It went basically:

Hi, I'm Mark, and I'm American, as you can probably tell by my accent. Or as I like to think of it, my lack of accent. [Mark pauses for laughter, *cough*] One interesting experience I had was that last year I participated in a naked group calendar photo shoot for charity, down along the Yarra River. The Age did an article about it, and of course they chose the one picture where my naked bum was directly in the front row. Do, uh, any of you recognize it? [Mark turns around and shows backside.]

Shrug. People laughed, but I stumbled over my words a bit, as I'm prone to doing, but it could have gone worse.

Then it was off to the one-on-one interview with the assistants. They asked a bunch of wacky questions, like, if you could pick a superpower, what would it be? I babbled something about super speed so I could avoid all the recent train delays, blah blah blah. There were a few others along those lines. I don't know, it seemed to go reasonably okay for the most part. That was the end of it; we just wait for a callback from here. I don't rate my chances as excellent. But it's possible. They promise to contact their selections by Easter. So, no news will be bad news.