Now listening:

I've been on a music binge lately. Actually, I think that every day should be filled with a background of music... So maybe, rather than call it bingeing, I've been returning to a more natural state of order.

Surround sound. What a great combination of words. I bought a nice little system for my laptop. Now the loungeroom of my brightly coloured little living space is now truly a home. 4:15am and I'm already out here grooving! Take that, motherfuckers!

So here's some of the top choices for the moment:



Foster the People - Call it What You Want. A classic pump-me-up song. There's a particular stretch of road I drive before work that I now associate with this song because I've played it so many times as an energy kick to get the day rolling.



The Black Keys - Little Black Submarines. This is from the latest album, with the hit Lonely Boy on it. In fact, the entire album is an absolute pearler. I'll be driving down a haul road, filthy and fucked off after a day in the pit, and bashing the hell out of the steering wheel to that fantastic rum beat in the last section.

Socks And Vibrators Don't Mix

When your ex packs all your stuff from the bedroom into bags and leaves them out front of what used to be your home, just check - before you throw it in storage for four months - that your jelly sleeve vibrator IS NOT NEXT TO A SOCK. The two may become one.

AusArt Monday

One of my favourite artists of all time, Brett Whiteley.

Safety Plus

An emergency stop button on a drilling machine...

Fuck off Summer!

Second day of the New Year, and summer decided to come around and make an apology for being late. It made up for itself with three bakingly hot forty-degree days, and then promptly up and fucked off again yesterday.

Every year I forget just how bad an open cut pit is when it's a hot day. It's like being in a desert. No shade. Surrounded by white rocks and plenty of dust. You're out in it in your mandatory long sleeved shirt and pants and your ridiculous metatarsal boots, sweating a river by eight thirty and wondering how you're going to last the rest of the twelve hours, let alone actually get anything done. Any water you have is hot by midmorning. You're glad for the rule about carrying gloves at all times because everything metal that you touch has become super heated.

I'm not much of a summer person at all. I'm a prolific sweater (sexy, I know) so especially at work my face ends up red raw just from wiping it constantly on my long sleeves. At least with winter you can pile more clothes on and still be able to do what you want (I bet I'll say different when I'm out in it, though). Days like those last three, woah. I felt like I wanted to die but didn't have the energy. Every movement was lethargic. Every movement was downright difficult.

Summer should either be three months off for the entire work force or six-hour days with a pool provided.

Sun Non-Sense

Some days you have to take your cues from Lawrence of Arabia...

Brand New Year, Happy New World

I'm back home after a lightning trip to bring in the New Year with IcePick and KelSuperStarSinger, surveying my surroundings and being happy with what I have.

Jonah is looking out the window. He plays a game with the three little dogs who border our flat. They like to hunt him from window to window and bark whenever they come across him. Jonah feels that he has the upper hand, because jump and carry on as much as the little tackers like to, they can't get past the fence or anywhere near him... and he knows it.

He'll lounge around on the sill and look down his nose at them for a while until they get bored. Then abruptly he'll disappear and reposition himself at another window. Fun and entertainment for all, except maybe the neighbours!

Brutus the oversize goldfish is wriggling away in his not-so-clean tank. It seems like he gives an extra happy wriggle whenever he sees me. The guy is a legend. He floats around giving a fuck off world I can't be bothered look until his light comes on late in the morning, and then it's all wriggle and happiness until about eleven at night when the light switches off again.

I have a guitar beside me on the lounge and plenty of friends to talk to. I have a job that is interesting and cool and pays well. I have goals to set and bridges to burn.

Life is good.

End of another year

I'm not going to see the fireworks spectacles anywhere.

I'm not going to wear a stupid mass-produced hat with too-tight elastic and the staples barely holding it together.

I'm not going to have one of those god-awful noisemaker things hanging out of my gob, and I'm certainly not going to explode any party poppers.

I will try to count the countdown in real-time, rather than join in with the pissed over-excited crowd that always rushes it exponentially the closer they get to one.

I'm not going to hug random people I've never met.

I'm not going to have a million facebook photos of me with some other person.

I will, however, farewell a rather shite year with my good friends and contemplate the goals I will set to make the coming one a tad more enjoyable.

Tickled

Yesterday I worked with just one bloke all day. We got paired up to do menial shit. It's boring as hell, but it's menial shit that has to be done none the less. My method is to just hook in and make it go away as quick as possible.

Today will be the same story, because we're not finished that pile of work yet.

The problem is not the work. It's the guy I'm with to do it.

See, normally I can work pretty well with people I don't like. Sometimes the case is that I don't like their personality but they're a hell of a worker. Sometimes it's the opposite - they can't organise their work at all but it's compensated by the fact that the conversation has you smiling all day. I try to find some aspect that is at least tolerable about them, if not truly likeable.

But this guy... Well, he's just tickled me with the dislike feather all over. Depressed conversation that is constant, not much knowledge of the work even though he says constantly how good he is at it, thick as a fucking plank, and top it all off he's plainly trying to assert his alpha maleness over me. Bahaha.

Boring. Fucking. Idiot.

Today I will snap the dislike feather into pieces.

Quote of the Day

Who was it that figured out you could milk a cow?

... and what were they REALLY thinking?

Back to Real Work

I've recently had a brief interlude in my working life to try out the world of surveying. It wasn't a bad job.... it was just boring. Also, it seemed more than a little pointless.

Through a some very serious connection forging over the years I've now landed myself a job that pays twice as much as the old one - back in the mining industry. All that time of learning names and talking to anyone and everyone, doing everything I was asked without arguing has paid off.

I'm climbing all over machines again and I love it! For the first time since moving to Planet Newy I am truly happy to go to work.

Listening List

Music makes me happy.

Darwin at Work

Stacker: A remotely operated conglomeration of metal structure and conveyors, mounted on rails. Controlled from a central location, the stacker moves without warning to pour out coal into different stockpiles as it is recieved by train at the dump station. As the ships arrive, the coal is reclaimed by another machine and moved by a series of conveyors over the road to the ship loader.




Plover: Candidate for natural selection.

Smart Sunday

State Library

Oh, the State Library. It's in a gorgeous section of Sydney right next to the Botanic Gardens, just up from Parliament House and not far from the Art Gallery of NSW and also the pointed beauty of the harbour and Opera House.

Forget about the surrounds - you could spend days in the library itself. I've only been twice, to see exhibitions they've put on, and regret not budgeting enough time to settle in for a while each time.

Last time there I spent a bit of time staring at the wonder of the reading room and then got down to business. First... Where the hell are the toilets here? But on my way down the halls I got a little distracted...



Why on earth do we have such a nice set of doors down the end where the toilets with the crappy pebblecrete dividers are? Let's stop and have a closer look. Click on the picture and you might be able to read it.



Ahhh. The Shakespeare Library. Fantastic! The plaque beside it says it was refurbished as a gift from some kind concerned person for the bicentenary of the colony back in 1988. I was excited at the thought of holing up into a room with such a beautiful door to read Shakespeare. I don't think many others have shared the same excitement (or maybe they have had too much excitement in the past?), because the doors were locked solid. I tried to peer through the keyhole, but did not get much of an idea of the space beyond.

I hate that the efforts of restoration cannot be shared by the general public. All I got was a few photographs and the dubious experience of being seen squinting through a keyhole in the vicinity of the public toilets.

Meme continued...

Carrying on with another installment in Maria's mammoth meme. There's already been a part one and a part two, and I still have't scratched the surface of the amount of questions really!

6) WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING RIGHT NOW?

More beer.

7) WHO DO YOU MISS?

My sister.

8) IS ANYONE IN LOVE WITH YOU OR HAS A CRUSH ON YOU?

I believe my girlfriend is in love with me. I might have to check since that fart I dropped next to her on the lounge this morning...

9) WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU KISSED?

My girlfriend. In fact, apart from my niece, and occasionally my cat, she's been the only person I've kissed in a long time.

10) WHAT IS YOUR MIDDLE NAME?

Not even the tax department knows that one.

11) THE BEST TV SHOW EVER CREATED?

Bones. She's smart, awkward, incredibly gorgeous, and did I mention that combination of smart and incredibly gorgeous?

I kind of killed my enthusiasm for this one after watching DVDs of the entire series one episode after another over several nights and weekends. The writers have so much fun with that character - any chance to dress her up and put her into a weird situation and it happens. One episode has her running around dressed up as Wonder Woman, diverted from a dressup party and off to solve some crime or another.

Second is Masterchef Australia - purely because the judge Matt Preston is briliant. He is witty, sauve, a great food journalist and has an impeccable sense of style.

Here's a quote from an interview with him:

If you were having any three people, alive or dead, over for dinner, who would they be and what would you cook for them?

If I was working it would be:

Catherine de Medici, Jesus and my great (x8) grandmother whose hand-penned 1765 recipe book is one of my most treasured possessions. Together they could solve so many of the “big questions” that I have when it comes to food.

I’d cook them Balinese style roast suckling pig (obviously there’d be some Peking Duck, steamed barramundi or Sichuan style roast lamb belly for Jesus in case he felt more Jewish than Christian), Thai salads and stir fried Chinese noodles because it would be unlike anything they had tried before although great (x8) does have a recipe for oyster sauce and uses a lot of ginger and coriander seed.

If it was about having fun it would have to be:

Oliver Reed to drink with, Nico from the Velvet Underground to sing with and Sophia Loren to make pasta with. We‘d eat the pasta.

On that note, I'm off to watch an episode.

Surf's Up!

Head down the road a couple of blocks and you're at the pub.

If you manage to make it past the tempting wafts of the pub, move on to the little tunnel under the road. After a few dodgey murals, some bad attempts at stencilling - and not to mention the odd suspicious smell - you will pop your head out at the ocean.

Being winter, it's been spectacularly huge the last few days.



As well as the two brave buggers that took it on, you can see one of the ever present line-up of ships waiting to get into the harbour to grab our wares on the cheap and piss off with them. Oh, except when a storm blows up and they miss the entrance and hit the main beach instead.

Archaeology...

Here is just one of the reasons I am not so much a fan of being a surveyor's assistant. One of the rail companies will eventually put a train refuelling station on this lovely patch, so that even more coal trains can run their loads more frequently.

Currently, though, there are significant items of "Aboriginal and European heritage" littered all over the site. They'll have to document these and then piss them off anyway, rather than leave them there, and that's where we came into the picture.



Three hundred and fifteen pegs. In a ten metre square grid. Never mind that the site has already been bulldozed some time ago, and that there are smashed old bits of stuff littered everywhere, really of not cultural significance any more at all. And guess who hammered those pegs in?

I'm going back to mining.