On the Bottom Half

'Paperwork' or 'How I learned to screw up my extended summer vacation'

So, there hasn't been too much to entertain the listening, rather reading, public ear lately. Since New years, I went on a three day, two night hike to an area called the Bogong High Plains with Adam and two of his friends. You may remember Adam from such adventures as the Overland Track and the Walls of Jerusalem. Same one. On 3 January, we drove up to a place called Falls Creek, which is at the base of a ski hill! At least I was on a ski hill this season! However, those of you following this adventure by atlas probably won't be able to find Falls Creek because it is so small, so look for Wangaratta and that's close enough. The park is called Alpine National Park and in Victoria, you don't have to pay to enter or use the National Parks. Notice the flies buzzing Adam's head... God do they have flies in Australia.

The hike was a good one initiated by a small climb up to the High Plains altitude and followed by three days of relatively flat, but cool high altitude walking. The first night was down in a little valley along a creek where the temperature got down to low single digits. What a relief because the rest of northern Victoria was scorching in high 30s... The next two days were about the same, but with one of our group developing some rather severe foot problems. Adam cheered him up though and took a lot of ribbing, but after the hike was thanked for organising it.

We finished on 5 January, and I arrived home around supper time expecting to find Bruce and Helen, but they hadn't arrived home frmo Sarawak yet. Around 2300, they got back and we looked at pictures and chatted about their holiday. They brought home some 'Sarawak black pepper and chilli sauce', which is worth importing if anyone is into that kind of thing...

The next morning, we went to pick up Helen's first post-retirement project. She's become an Australian Customs Puppy Walker, so for the next 12 months she is in charge of a golden lab. Customs provides all the food, vet services, formal training, checkups, etc., while she (we) are in charge of walking, feeding, sensitising, soicalising, and playing. There was an hour talk before we got the dog where the customs people went over all the information about raising one of these dogs, and we all went to that. It's been fun and the puppy is just how I remember them from my slightly younger days.

The next couple of days were pretty calm, we slept in a bit, watched Australia win the cricket, then on Monday, Helen and I went into town. Helen and a friend went shopping, but I went to see a Stanley Kubrick exhibit at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It was really excellent and left me with dreams of film-making filling my head as I went to bed that night.

As for the title of this post: yesterday I travelled down to Monash University and committed myself for the next three years. There is a lot of paperwork involved and doing the project involves cutting my travels short at 15 May of this year. Not completely sure how I feel about it, but if I'm clinically insane three years hence, you'll know the final outcome. I spent the balance of the day wallowing in self-doubt: I'm quite worried that some of the other things that I really want to do will be out of the question by the time I finish it, but it's too late to secondguess now, so I guess I'll be able to tell you in about three years and 6 months.

In other news, I opened a bank account with Westpac yesterday. They have this cool savings account linked to a standard no-fees transaction account. The savings account gives 5.25% interest, so I'm going to try put something in there while I'm away. Government people responsible for bonds should have a gander at that and make some bonds greater than 2% soon...

I applied for a Porter job at a 5-star hotel in Melbourne the other day. Haven't heard anything back, but the job is through an employment agency, and they said to expect a week before hearing anything. I'm terrible at getting jobs, though, because at home I've always kind of been handed them and really had nothing to do with applying. In fact, the first and only time I've ever used a resume was to get my job at the airport, but that was airplanes and showing keeness and enthusiasm about a job involving them is second nature.

Beyond that, I'm trying to get a hold of some new headphones to replace the ones I have for my MiniDisc. I went through a reputable on-line store (digitalHome), but I'm having trouble getting them delivered. Their entire sales office takes about three weeks off over Christmas (23 Dec to 16 Jan), which is frankly quite baffling to me. An on-line business is a 24-7 business and to have your sales people gone for that long is a bizarre level of corporate stupidity. I've now gone so far as to accuse the company of fraud, and I'm waiting to see if some desk-flying retail bigwig spits his coffee into his underused keyboard to refute that claim. I hope it was a hornet's nest I stuck a stick into.

I leave you with some train scheduling hypocrisy...

Update Complete!

posted by Kyle @ 16:22