I can't vouch for the numbers, but this website still gives me a good feeling about being here.

Our suburb

We moved to Moonee Ponds a few years back just to check out life in Melbourne's northwest suburbs.  After a few years, we'll say it's not a bad place, but not as dynamic as we'd like.  But I just found this video about it made by a realtor if you're curious.  The park and race track they show are both about a block from us.  Moonee Ponds is also famous as the home town of both Dame Edna and the actor who portrays her.

Gainfully unemployed

Yeah, so, I came back from our trip to the USA to find I no longer had a job.  Retrenched, redundant, downsized.

I'm not distressed.  It's a bad time of year to be looking for work -- not just because of Christmas, but because Australia seems to have an additional holiday immediately afterward known as "January" (similar to the one in Europe known as "August").  But there still seem to be jobs to be had out there.  If I find something before Christmas, great; but if not, I'm not going to sweat it.  I'm just trying to get my ducks in a row -- rework my CV, skill up, canvas lists of companies, etc.  My days are full and I'm a far sight from unhappy.  And of course the dog is happy to have me.

The time off also gives me time to get my life in order a bit.  People write entire self-help books about it but here's what works for me:

• Actively using an online to-do list site.  I use todoist.com (but there are lots of others); I've been on it for a long time but not actively until these last two weeks.
• Only schedule for tomorrow.  In the evening pull in a short list of tasks you think you can get done.  Leave everything else unscheduled.
• Make sure you have at least one simple task in the day's to-do list.  If you don't have a simple one to pull in, make one up.
• Do the simple tasks first on a given day.  This gets the ball rolling and starts the feeling of accomplishment.  And the harder, more important tasks will be a lot easier to concentrate on when you have fewer tasks hanging over your head.
• Make sure there's something each day that gets you out of the house!

Still, I'm finding it curious that (like everyone else it seems) I'm capable of putting in eight hour days for forty-some weeks of a year doing stuff for other people, but the idea of doing a solid eight-hour day doing stuff just for myself seems onerous.  I'm continually breaking up my tasks by running Hamish up to the cafe or something.

Thoughts on our most recent trip back to the USA

This visit back was a reminder of how pretty the United States is, especially in Autumn. We don’t have the same dramatic colours here in Melbourne. Culturally the US seems more and more foreign to me each visit back as well. I think this is probably equally attributed to my getting older and just being out of touch with pop culture as it is with the time away.

Crystal Bridges museum is definitely worth a visit if you ever find yourself in the vicinity (Bentonville, AR). The museum was truly world class, all that Walmart money is good for something, and there’s a lot happening outside the main building as well, including a Frank Lloyd Wright house and a beaver in the creek both of which I will have to return to see as it was way too cold to spend time outside the day we visited.

Rainbow narcosis, a video installation I watched at Crystal Bridges is so bizarre and oddly delightful (though warped) that I needed to link it here: http://vimeo.com/68236151

New York - This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me well, but my opinion remains unrevised, while I enjoy visiting I really don’t want to live in NYC. Mark on the other hand would love living there. For me, the city's too crowded, I'm too claustrophobic to ever really relax in New York, though I do like the mania.

The slogan for the New York lottery is “hey, you never know” this amused us muchly during our visit.

This was an especially busy return trip for me as I had reunions with several friends I hadn't seen in years. I caught up with several friends from my university days (Tim, Tom, Bob, Rich and Lana) and finally caught up with my good friend Karen, and even managed to see a friend from Melbourne whose moved to North America (Elise). Inevitably there are people we don't see on our return visits though, and we can only hope to catch up with them the next time round.

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.