Marji votes and Marky votes and little dogs need surg'ry.

After taking Laika to another vet and confirming that she needs surgery (worse still, her other leg is likely to come down with the same issue), we went off to vote for the first time since becoming Australia citizens. It's a local election, and seemed pretty similar to voting in America, except 1) it's mandatory, and 2) we had to fill in a number for each candidate, from one to nine, in the order of our preference. It's an interesting system -- if my first choice isn't in the running, my vote goes to my second choice, then on to my third, etc... I think it's a brilliant system, much needed in America, but will probably never fly, due to those with a vested interest in keeping the system two-party.

Then we went and saw Ratatouille, which gets my vote.

Our broken family. Marjorie: sprained ankle from rolling it off of our too-high welcome mat.

Mark: Two sprained ribs from a vicious kick to the chest. The discomfort didn't manifest itself for a week though.

Laika: Ligament damage to left rear leg, which will require surgery. The answer to your next question is "lots and lots of money".

Everybody out of the water. Marjorie is an expert on sharks, despite or because of being somewhat phobic about them, but her famous meltdown on a reef in Cancun is a story for another day.

For some reason, I've never seen a shark while snorkeling, and I've done a lot of snorkeling. I must emit a natural repellent. But being in and around the ocean much of my life, I've definitely seen a few.

The topper was one day out surfing in Melbourne (the Florida one) with my friends Earl and Mike just after high school. The conditions were perfect; warm sun, clear water, good sized waves, glassy conditions. There were probably thirty guys out, but there was no peak spot so everyone was getting a lot of waves. Things were fine and carefree until a school of sharks, each probably six to eight feet long, decided to mingle with us.

Things can get exaggerated in memory, but I'm sure there were at least twenty of them. The weird thing is, only a couple of guys went in to the beach. The conditions were so nice, and the sharks were swimming about so lazily, that it was hard to believe that these sharks would want to spoil the party.

They definitely added a nervous tension though, like bikers crashing your keg party. You could see that, where surfers normally sit on their board waiting for waves, a number of guys were lying prone instead, so their feet weren't quite so dangly. To make the sharks seem less dangerous we started naming them. One in particular (who I think we named "Fred" for some reason) popped his dorsal fin up right in the middle of the triangle formed by myself and my two friends, as we were sitting only twenty feet apart or so.

There's no exciting ending to this story, fortunately or unfortunately; we just shared the water with them for a while without incident, and came in, a little bit exhilarated and maybe a little bit relieved.

Marjorie and I both cracked up over this New Yorker article.

I had pretty much given up on social networking websites, after efforts on Friendster and MySpace, but I've been convinced by workmates to give Facebook a go. It does seem a good bit livelier in general on first blush. So come join.

The days are just packed. On Saturday, golf with my soccer mates; I shot a 76. Okay, that was thanks to Calloway scoring; in the real world, I shot a miserable 110, and that's parring 3 holes. It's like, I'm playing at least once a year, but for some reason am not improving. Still lots of fun.

Sunday, our soccer match was an absolute classic, and reminded me why I still play. Fought back from 3-0 down against a bunch of prats; took a 4-3 lead, let them tie it again, then won the day with a late goal.

Last night we saw Ryan Adams from a far closer to the ceiling of the venue than the stage. Unfortunately he's still going through his tortured artist phase and played in near darkness all night; for the first two songs, I even thought the black silhouette of his backup guitarist was him. But they at least sounded amazing.

My trip home today took a little longer than usual.

I was leaving on our office elevator when it decided it didn't want to go any further. It clunked to a stop and the digital readout switched off. I looked at the clock on my phone: 5:35pm. There were five other people stuck with me; we called the emergency line and settled in for a long wait. One woman had just talked to her husband who was waiting by the curb. Another was on his way to a movie. Nervous jokes were made about how much air we had, how high up we were, etc. Everyone had cell phones and could connect out, fortunately, so there wasn't a lot to fret about. We weren't sure where exactly we were stuck, but had guessed in the basement carpark level, because we were only hearing noises above us. The repair guys made it there relatively quickly and the doors finally opened at 6:20. Turns out we were on the 14th floor. Not fun, but without plans for the evening, I figured I was better off than some of the others stuck with me. Forty-five minutes can't be too bad for elevator repair time.

We have a new nephew! Wesley was born to Marjorie's sister last night our time. A little before predicted, but well within the drop zone. Weighing in at 5.8 pounds. Huzzah!

Regular readers of this forum know that I occasionally use it to geek out a bit.

But I usually hold back. So for my birthday this year I bought myself a new website, with the primary purpose being to start a blog where I have free reign to geek out. I've spent a couple of weeks setting it up, and now it's pretty much ready to go. I also spent some time just writing down topics that I want to blog about -- I came up with about sixty-five, plus another dozen or so that could be attempted with a little investigation, so I'll have no shortage of things to write about!

The main theme will be computer programming, with occasional asides into astronomy, math, and physics. So I hereby announce Computronium: the blog. Let me know what you think!

Took a nice long walk around Albert Park Lake today. Saw a rakali, which was cool; I've never seen a rat dive before!

During a stop for lunch Laika escaped and bolted off to confront a black swan. Bad idea. Luckily Marjorie was able to grab her lead, but not before Laika crashed into the water. The lady serving us lunch told us that these swans have a tendency to drown dogs by sitting on top of them while they're trying to swim.

Through a combination of nature shows and personal experience, we have learned that you NEVER mess with swans, badgers, hippos, cassowaries, or hyenas (besides the obvious poisonous critters).

Thanks for not smoking. I think. So, Melbourne just implemented its no-smoking-in-pubs law.

I have nothing but cognitive dissonance over the issue. I believe people should have the right -- not just to smoke, but to own and operate a pub where people are allowed to.

But man, it's nice to come home from a night out not reeking of smoke.

I so wish that market forces would have resulted in having some pubs that decreed no smoking, and that smokers could go off to their own pubs and mentholate their lungs to their hearts' content. In every city I've lived in, though, that never seems to happen. And so we get these laws.

A right has been lost here. And as horrible as smoking is, and as despicable as tobacco companies are, I don't want to say I'm glad about it just because I don't partake of that right.

There's a tradition in my family that whenever we would move somewhere new, I was always the first family member to need to visit the emergency room.

I kept this tradition alive since marrying, too -- in Singapore I had to go in for kidney stones. Well, today I got to visit my first Melbourne emergency room. Nothing serious -- I knocked heads with a guy on the soccer pitch and lost. Three stitches in my hairline at the very top middle of my forehead, and an ugly abrasion on my cheek. I think it's the first time in soccer that I ever went down and stopped caring about the run of play. Head wounds bleed, big time, so I as soon as I put my hand to my head, it came away covered in blood.

Luckily there's a guy on our team that used to do facial surgery. He set me up right, and got me on my way. I was in and out of the emergency room in just over an hour, and all covered by Medicare. I even was back to work the bar for the first team three hours later.

Today for my birthday Marjorie stayed home from work and cooked me a Thanksgiving dinner. How good is that? I skipped lunch just so I could make a bigger pig of myself. Turkeys are pricey down here but we get a lot of meals out of one bird. She invented a new dessert for the occasion, too -- she blended vanilla ice cream with Maltesers in the food processor and refroze. Yum!

Friday night we invited people from our respective workplaces out for drinks to celebrate citizenship. It was good fun, especially now that the pubs are smoke free. Marjorie led a quick "Aussie Aussie Aussie!" ("Oi Oi Oi!") cheer during a toast.

Sudden citizenship realization: we have a queen!

Aussie Aussie Aussie! Our nationality is now officially hyphenated. We had our Australian citizenship ceremony last night. Check out some random photos (sorry about the random ordering, but Flickr stupidly allows you to only create three photo sets for free, so those are retrieved by tag).

It started with the mayor reading a huge list of apologies from elected officials that couldn't make it. Then there were speeches from the two (besides the mayor) that did attend; one was Aborigine and talked about her ancestors, which was interesting. Then we did the swearing in, and the handing out of certificates. They pronounced my name as "Schitznius". *Sigh* We also got plants to plant, and a pin. Finally we sang the national anthem (badly).

There were maybe thirty of us who were getting sworn in, and surprisingly, twenty-one different countries represented. The ones I remember are: Vietnam, New Zealand, UK, Samoa, Poland, Singapore, Sri Lanka, South Africa. I think we were the only Americans this time around.

They signed us up to vote straight away. There were tea and sandwiches afterwards, but we went out for a nice dinner at The Dogs Bar (sans dog) instead.

To infinity and beyond! I never understand people who denigrate anything modern, and pine for an earlier time, when art was better. They miss out on so much. I'm sure people like that will have ancestors who will look back on our time as a golden age, and continue to ignore the great works produced in their own future time.

Today we checked out the Pixar exhibit at the ACMI. I'm a big fan of all the Pixar movies I've seen (and am looking forward to Ratatouille). Even without the animated exhibits, this would have been worth attending, just for the artwork. The skill involved in their storyboards, color sketches, and close up studies is plainly evident. Add in the brilliant characterizations, story lines, dialog, and world-building, and it's clear that these movies will be timeless. It's amazing also to see how much work they do and later discard. One quote they had posted gave an idea of what it must be like to work on one of these movies; they describe it as everyone involved holding hands and jumping from an airplane, and then building the parachute on the way down.

The highlight, though, was the zoetrope. This video doesn't quite do it justice but you get the idea.

Back in my old hometown of Atlanta, they're tearing down the old party district, Buckhead. While I long ago outgrew it -- well before I even left Atlanta -- I must admit I had some excellent times there, back in my post-college, new in town, swinging bachelor days.

But now is not a time for talk of such things. Today marks the nine-year anniversary of Marjorie and I's [*] first date. Happy anniversary, baby! She's all sickly though so it doesn't look like we'll be doing much.

[*] Surely "Marjorie and I's" is wrong? But "Marjorie and my" doesn't sound right either.

My company had its end-of-the-fiscal-year party Friday night, which I had an excellent time at (well, I'm almost certain I did). It was held at the bowling alley downstairs from our office, and we had a tournament. I bowled out of my skin all night (136, 148, 144, and 115) and ended up finishing fourth. It was won by our resident Olympian (he actually has a gold medal for playing on the field hockey team for Australia) who was a no better bowler than anyone but turned it on at the end, finishing the final round with three consecutive strikes in the final frame. I guess that's why he's an Olympian.

There was a company bar tab, which I overindulged on, shall we say. Marjorie came to join me later in the evening but pretty much had to just rescue me.

Bummed! I just went to buy myself an internet domain, only to find that it's already been taken. I had the perfect name -- schnitzi.us -- not least so that my email could have been mark@schnitzi.us, but someone just snagged it, only one month ago. That was my one and only idea for an internet domain. Phooey.

Weekend roundup: Friday night -- karaoke with some of Marjorie's work people. We signed up to sing The Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" which probably wasn't the best choice for the crowd we were in (who were doing all sorts of cheesy 80's songs). Fortunately or unfortunately, they couldn't find the song, so instead we ended up singing Pat Benatar's "Love Is A Battlefield" (complete with shoulder shakes like the video), which had more of the proper cheesiness. Good fun, and we even stayed out past one (shocking).

Saturday night Marjorie indulged my current Gilbert and Sullivan obsession by going with me to see The Mikado. Despite being a small production, we thought they put on a damn good show. Of course, they had to modernize it a touch -- Ko-ko's version of I've Got A Little List was sung about a list he was keeping on his palm pilot, and the words were modified to talk about people talking loudly on cellphones, for instance -- but all in all it was a very good production.

Middle Park's soccer woes continued again this morning as we dropped yet another game. We played very well but couldn't score as usual, and we allowed a late goal on a perfectly struck free kick to lose it 1-0.

Clean joke.

A talking dog goes into a hardware store and says, "I'd like to apply for a job."

The owner says, "Um, we're not really hiring right now. Why don't you try the circus?"

The dog says, "Why would the circus need a plumber?"

How eccentric was my last Saturday? I went and saw The Pirates of Penzance by myself, then went shopping for ukuleles, and finished the day drinking port and playing Balderdash at some friends' house.