Stateside

So we're back in the USA for a visit.  Flying into and out of New York City just because we'd been meaning to make it back here for a while.  We just have a day here -- today -- on the front end so we just bopped around midtown, shopping and such, for most of the day.  We're staying in a hotel that backs onto the Empire State Building which is pretty cool.  I could write a long post here about New York but I want to talk about something else.

The differences between our home and adopted countries remains a continual source of interest.  After twelve years away it's mostly subtle things that come to our attention, or things that we've always noticed but never fully internalized, and sometimes it's complimentary to one country, sometimes the other.  The theme of this trip seems to be how much Americans overshare their personal lives, and how they all seem to have pet opinions that everyone must surely be interested in.  These are distinctly unAustralian traits.

On the leg of this trip where we flew from LA to NYC, the people in the row behind us had a loud conversation for much of the trip, which we had no real choice about eavesdropping on.  In the middle was a beleaguered Russian immigrant who was going to be working as a translator.  On either side of her were two New Yorkers who regaled her with their life stories, in exquisite detail.  The guy (Barry) especially -- I know so much about his life right now that I could do an identity theft on him, no doubt.  This went on for at least an hour.  The Russian woman was only giving polite, modest answers; we can't help but wonder what her opinion of Americans is from this.

Then at dinner tonight at Grimaldi's, we were forced to eavesdrop again.  At the next table a young software developer regaled his date with an unending monologue about his opinions about everything; opinions he clearly held in high regard.  She didn't get more than five seconds of uninterrupted dialogue for the whole hour.  We wanted to punch him by the end.

Obviously you can't generalize about a whole culture from a few isolated incidents, but these things certainly match America's reputation, and we've almost certainly been guilty of them ourselves.  And of course a few negative traits do not define a country; we're having a great time here amongst "our people" and have also seen a lot of small kindnesses.

New office

[Taps microphone] Is this thing on?

More a test of who's still following, so drop a comment if you're reading...

Anyway, my company has moved offices, and I've been loving it, despite being on support for the first week.  My explorer gene has kicked in; I'm never more happy than when I have a new area to explore.

Here's a shot of the area right in front of our new place.  Panoramic shots don't seem to fly as Facebook pictures, or on Imgur; I think no one can be bothered to actually zoom in.  But still, I've added a few annotations...

Nostalgia

Hey family -- remember this commercial?  The jingle popped into my head after... four decades?  That's good jingle.  So I decided to Google it.

Friend

Hamish made quick friends with this dog the other day.  They chased the ball non-stop for twenty minutes and finally took a break.  They were thick as thieves at this point.

Frosty morning

It's been seriously cold this week with no real relief in sight.  Our house does not heat terribly well so we are left to bundle up and shiver.

Olives

Trying to cure some olives that we picked off the tree in the backyard again this year.

Photogenic dog

Maybe we are biased, but we think Hamish is a good looking dog.

Veggies a la Mark

Recipe for Veggies a la Mark

Chop squash, zucchini, okra, water chestnuts, green chili (optional: baby corns, broccoli, cauliflower).  Fry on one side in vegetable oil.  Flip everything, season to taste, add chopped Chinese cabbage or chard, and a spoonful of ground red chili, and maybe a splash of stir fry sauce or rice wine vinegar, and fry for another minute.

I do this a couple of times a week these days.  Delicious.

Nostalgia

An side effect of the genealogy research I've done over the last year or two is an effort to document various things about my own life.  Not because I think it will be important or even mildly interesting to future generations, but just for my own satisfaction.  So I've been keeping (privately) a number of lists of things that stick out in my memory, or more accurately that I want to keep there.  Some examples:

• Concerts I've attended
• Comedians I've seen
• Lectures I've seen
• Plays I was in, in high school
• Addresses I've lived at
• Countries/cities I've visited
• Airports I've flown through without visiting the city
• Where I was when I first heard about various news events

At any rate I've just come across a site called BoardGameGeek that has an impressive catalog of just about every game you can think of, spanning back decades.  So I decided to see if I could find a few that stand out from my childhood to keep as another list.

One in particular I could only remember the barest details of.  It was a baseball game, and was already an old game when I was very young.  All I could remember was that the pitcher would select a pitch via a little slider, and the batter would decide whether to swing or not via his own slider.  The equations were good pitch+swing = hit, good pitch+no swing = strike, bad pitch + swing = strike, bad pitch + no swing = ball.  So I looked over all the baseball games in their database and finally found it behind the last link in the list.  You can see the sliders in the "Images" section.  It actually debuted in 1949!  (Edit: there's actually a version of it made in the 60's that's the more likely candidate.)

I also found this messy and slightly hazardous game that I used to have.  Hard to imagine a kids' game these days that features a heater that heats up a metal washer.  I'm glad the internet can still surprise you after so many years.

Trip hazard

Hamish likes to crash out on the shower mat when you're in the shower.

Baking

Tried my hand at baking for the first time ever, and this red velvet cake was the result.  It wasn't perfect, but not too bad for a first effort.

Kidney

Now that I have a new droid with a decent amount of memory for apps, I can get back into photo blogging at least.  Which means, not a lot of text, but a picture is worth some quantity of words, isn't it?  Anyway, if you know me, you know of my recent kidney stone issues.  So here's my view for the last few days while I was getting the second one lasered.

Catching up

This blog seems to have followed a common pattern, where there's initial excitement that can go on for years, followed by a gradually tapering off, eventually to nearly nothing, followed by the occasional "I'm going to start blogging more" pledge that never actually pans out.  So I'm not going to promise anything.  I do know that I really like having the early days to check back against for reference, and that I'll regret the long stretches in recent years where there was nothing written here despite things happening in our lives.

Rather than try to remember all that I neglected to post about, I might as well just say what's happening now.  Others in my family are having health issues at the moment, which I won't go into (other than to say "Hi!" and "Get better!"); instead I'll talk about my own.

During a recent vacation to Sydney I had a mild attack of kidney stones, so a part of each day there was spent trekking down to a medical clinic for consultations, scans, diagnoses, etc.  Followed up on it when I got back to Melbourne, and after some more tests, it looks like I'm going to have a percutaneous nephrolithotripsy for them, where they jab a needle into my kidney, break up the stone, and suck out the pieces.  Twice, for the two stones.

It doesn't sound like a lot of fun.  I'll probably have to do three days or so in the hospital for it, and a week off of work.  Mostly I just don't like the idea of being effectively stabbed in the back, and worry about infection and such.  But it should solve the problem for the long term, which is good.

First I need to get some x-rays to make sure my stones aren't the uric-acid kind, which would be awesome because you can get rid of them with drugs; this is unlikely though.  I see the doc again next week.

Explorer

I realized recently that this blog passed its ten-year anniversary a month or so back.  We started the blog around the time we decided to move overseas, so it's not quite ten years living abroad yet -- not for another couple of months -- but it's some sort of milestone I guess.  We've had a lot of good times but nothing quite touches that early excitement of throwing our lives into turmoil.

I'm pondering a post on "Expat Life: Expectations Versus Reality" but today instead I will talk about a funny trait I've realized have -- my explorer gene.  There's a conceit involved in every such observation,  but here it is anyway.  I'm on a never-ending quest for novelty, it seems; besides the whole moving overseas thing, my explorer gene manifests itself in the following ways:

• My neighborhood dog-walking is always about taking Hamish to somewhere new.  I continually pore over the map of our neighborhood looking for streets that I haven't gone down yet.  Every "walkies" has to have a quest, usually quite minor, such as just walking by a cafe or tiny bit of green space to check it out.  Fortunately Melbourne is famously replete with hidden gems, both in town and in the 'burbs.
• Speaking of maps, I can spend hours with an atlas, mentally exploring a new area, pondering what it would be like to visit there, or live there (usually with the help also of Google Maps and Wikipedia).  Thanks to this I can do things like name all the countries in Africa (the online geography quizzes help too - ask my sister-in-law!).
• I continually explore different lunch options in town where I work.  My coworkers seem to have a regular rotation; I have some regulars, but I'm frequently going off somewhere strange, and have introduced a few new things to them.  Melbourne CBD is great for back alley eateries.  (The weird thing, I think, is that I eat the same breakfast every day, pretty much.)

We're looking to buy a house now, which is that much more scary because I have this trait.  To be worthwhile we're going to have to stay in it ten years, which is longer than I've lived anywhere, other than my childhood home.

The Happiest Place On Earth

Yeah, been a while.  There's stuff I should post about -- my trip to Europe, etc. -- but a maxim I'm slowly coming to realize is that I really need to just post about whatever I feel like posting about even if it means leaving out "important" stuff, just because otherwise it hangs over me and the only result is inactivity.

So yeah, our new place is a block away from the Moonee Ponds race course, and the first race of the season is tomorrow so we'll see how that goes.  I'm a little worried about drunkards, parking, etc. but I'm still up for catching a race.  In general I have no problems with gambling as long as you don't let it get out of hand.  Which brings me to the subject I feel like writing about: Tabarets.  I will explain.

Pubs in Australia are a big part of the culture.  In Melbourne these days there are two basic varieties.  The first is your standard pub, which are homey neighborhood meeting-houses, typically with a few beers on tap and a kitchen which serves up basic traditional meals, with chicken parmesan ("parma") being ubiquitous.  Some have converted to "gastro-pubs", with more upscale restaurants.  But all are generally nice, happy places, with regulars of all ages.

A growing percentage, though, are of the other variety - the Tabaret.  These typically feature a game room with poker machines ("pokies") and the ability to bet on sporting events.  There's typically a room with a high row of TVs, showing various horse races, that looks something like this:

This picture looks bright and cheery enough, but that's only because I can't seem to find a picture that captures their true nature.  From early morning until late at night, you'll find gamblers ("punters") here, usually alone, slowly wasting their lives away.  There is always a sad, blank expression on their ashen faces as they expectantly watch events on the high row of TVs.  There's always an bettable event on somewhere, it seems, and it gets piped in so the slow drain can continue on them non-stop.  But if the punters need a break, they'll come out on the deck for a smoke and a beer (even at 8 a.m.).

Not surprisingly, as close as we are now to the race track, our only local pub is just such a place.  Lately every time we walk by it and look in I turn to Marjorie and say, "The happiest place on Earth!"  I don't know how I would feel about outlawing them altogether, but they seem to me to be one of the few blights on the otherwise generally functional society that is Australia in general and Melbourne in particular.

Our new neighborhood does have a nice wine bar though...

Moonee Ponds

We are all moved in to our new house in Moonee Ponds.  The move itself was hell, as I had a pretty high fever through much of it but no option to take it easy.  But we did it all in fairly short order, and Marjorie's good at motivating us to get all the little things taken care of - I would definitely still be living out of boxes.

The house has three bedrooms instead of two like our last, so we've converted the spare into an office-slash-storage room.  In the backyard there is a fig tree and an olive tree - the olives were ready to pick right around when we moved in, so I picked two big jars of them which are now curing and should be ready for a first try this Sunday.  As opposed to the hydrophobic dust of our last place, the back yard here has a fair bit of rich black soil, which is good for growing stuff I guess but bad because Hamish has been coming in with filthy paws.

It's a longer commute for me, and a good bit longer for Marjorie, but we're still figuring out the ropes.  Marjorie caught the illness right after me, so we haven't been able to explore the new neighborhood much.  Apparently it's the home of Dame Edna and Tina Arena.  We have been taking the dog to different places -- there are a lot of different options, all about a five to ten minute drive away.  Unfortunately, none are really within walking distance, other than the park that's basically across the street, which isn't off-leash.  That's where he typically gets his morning walk.

Pogues

So - we're moving, and I will post about that eventually, but first: we saw The Pogues in concert.  This is something that was on my bucket list, or rather would have been, if I thought it would ever happen.  Sorry, but this will be one of those gushy posts that's more for my own archival purposes than for general consumption.

I've long loved The Pogues and recently developed a major obsession with them, despite not coming from a terribly similar cultural background.  They play music heavily based on the Irish cultural tradition, and the lead singer is a notorious substance abuser, from an early age.  But he is an idiot savant, and a true poet I think.  Though Marjorie and I have both liked them for a long time - we even used one of their songs as the opening song of our wedding! - I had a spell a few months back where I went absolutely mental for them; I'd go as far as saying they peaked higher than any other music in my life, and that's saying a lot.  It only sustained itself for a few weeks, sadly; I don't know what happened, but try as I as might I couldn't hold onto it.  It slipped away; the love was still there, just not the infatuation.

Shortly after this fall from grace, I found that they were actually planning a concert here in town.  So of course I had to get us tickets.  I just didn't believe it would happen, as a decade or so ago Marjorie and I flew across the country to San Fran to see him (then solo) at a music festival, but he didn't show (we had to "settle" for just my other great love, Elvis Costello).  So I wasn't really expecting him to show, especially given his past personal issues and resulting bad blood with the band.  Honestly, I didn't believe it until he walked out on stage.  But he did show up this time!

And was in great form - so much better than I had expected.  He seems so slow-witted in interviews these days that I had doubted he could pull off any of their faster numbers, or for that matter, remember all the words to his wordier ones.  But apart from some minor articulation issues, he was fantastic on all counts.  Most importantly, the spirit was there.  And the band still smokes as well.

The next day, I posted a message on a Pogues forum where I know their guitarist hangs out, thanking them for their show, saying how much I  loved it, and asking if by any chance they're working on any new material.  He actually responded immediately - and curtly: "We're quite happy with our old material".  Serves me right.  They played their hearts out for us, and here's me asking for more.

This was the set list:

• Streams of Whisky
• If I Should Fall From Grace With God
• Broad Majestic Shannon
• Greenland Whale Fisheries
• Pair Of Brown Eyes
• Tuesday Morning
• Kitty
• Sunny Side of the Street
• Repeal of the Licencing Laws
• The Band Played Waltzing Matilda
• The Body of an American
• Boys From County Hell
• Thousands are Sailing
• Dirty Old Town
• Bottle of Smoke
• Sick Bed of Cuchulainn

First encore:

• Sally Maclennane
• Rainy Night in Soho
• Irish Rover

Second encore:

• Poor Paddy
• Fiesta

A great set list, I must say; I'm happy with nearly all of the choices.  Biggest surprise to me was Bottle Of Smoke, which is pretty much the song that kicked off my recent obsession, so I was overjoyed to hear it.  Of course it was great to have them play our wedding song (Rainy Night In Soho).  The other highlight to me was A Pair Of Brown Eyes -- a hit for them, but never my favorite before; seeing it live though, I "heard" it for the first time.

Grandmom

My grandmother has died.

Even facing infirmary and dementia of late, she made it 94 years without a harsh word for anyone. 

I'll forever associate this song with her -- she had a little record player at her house and we used to play this one every time we went over.  (Well, this one got a regular play as well.)  These songs definitely swing a bit -- but her usual fare was more Bobby Vinton and Laurence Welk. I made her a CD of that stuff a few years back but found it unlistenable myself, even in a retro-kitsch sort of way :)

She was Polish through and through -- her parents last names were Gąsior and Koczur -- and her married name Thompson was actually anglicized from Tomaszewicz one generation back. She spoke Polish with her relatives and made lots of Polish food, and danced the polka at family events with my grandfather. I tracked her heritage a bit last year and found the Ellis Island document of her parents arriving in 1908, which was very cool. They had her after they arrived -- she was the ninth of ten children (!).

She lived in Camden NJ for most of her life -- a place now infamous for being the most dangerous city in America. Seriously. The Google Maps street view car didn't even go down her street, I'm sure for safety concerns. It was a much nicer place while she was there, at least early on -- Mummers Day parades are my earliest memory of it.

She lived on her own into her nineties -- on the second floor, which required climbing stairs. Pretty amazing. Never learned to drive, I believe, and I don't remember her ever having a job outside the home. She made a mean batch of chocolate chip cookies, and always gave me a few tins of them to take with me whenever I visited.

I am exceedingly glad I got to see her just last month when I was home for my parents' 50th, even if she wasn't "all there".

Helen Thompson 1917-2012

One of those rare days

One of those rare days that I wouldn't mind having over and over.

First, brunch with a friend at Bistro Flor which was fabbo.

Then we went looked at three houses that were having open inspections.  We're not looking to buy just yet, just kind of practicing for when it gets real, maybe in a year or so.  Still it was fun.

Then, fantastic Thai massages at Vigorous Thai Massage.

On to a swim at the Fitzroy pool.

To our usual dog park, Darling Gardens, with perfect timing as Hamish's good friends Banjo, Tyra, and Grover were all just arriving.  Hamish is completely smitten with Banjo (a border collie).

Home, and pork chops on the grill with a nice Dal Zotto rosé in the backyard while we watched the lorikeets in the neighbor's tree, followed by "bat o'clock".  For music we dug back into our CD collection for four fantastic chill-out albums that we had neglected for a while.  Here's an sample song from each - each irreproachable, I would say.


Peace Like A River - Paul Simon - from "Paul Simon"


Into Temptation - Crowded House - from "Temple of Low Men"


Angeles - Elliott Smith - from "Either/Or"


Lover, You Should Have Come Over - Jeff Buckley - from "Grace"

Quite the dog park

An impressive dog park in our neighborhood.  Well, it's a dog park when there's no footy or cricket going on. 

(I know the last panorama wasn't really viewable - we'll see if this turns out any better.)