Nothing to see here

Just to confirm that nothing the slightest bit interesting has happened in my life this past week.

Normal blogging will be resumed if and when something does.

It's that tram again.

Best comment yet

semaphore junction : life | studs | cafe: flying tram antics 1

Inspection time

We have an inspection by the agent tomorrow, so I have spent the afternoon cleaning up. Mind you, it's not "hide the car parts in the back yard" of the typical rental, rather it's "toothbrush to the bathroom grout" cleaning.

OK, so I am not the world's greatest housekeeper but that's not something I aim to be. The place is perfectly adequate for our needs and I really don't need some real estate agent telling me that (a) the balcony needs sweeping, or (b) the oven is due for a clean, or (c) the laundry is dusty in the corners.

I mean, I spend more time cleaning up for this woman than I did when my mum came to stay.

I'm almost expecting her to complain that my decaf is past its use-by date, or my wine is inferior or my ties lower the tone of the complex.

And this happens every three months!

Locked out!

This morning at about a quarter to 12 I decide to take my stunningly tedious microeconomics textbook with me while I pop across the road for my mid-morning cup of proper coffee. I step outside the door to my flat and as I hear the door click shut behind me, I suddenly think: where are my keys?

Wallet - check
Mobile phone - check
Pencil for taking notes - check
Keys - D'OH!

Last time I did this was at least 10 years ago when I was living in a cheap downstairs flat. On that occasion I found that my boss's business card was just the thing for jiggling open a window catch. This time I am living in an upstairs appartment in a security block so it's not so simple. I have a go at the door with a used Sydney ferry ticket, but no-go. I wander round the block and decide that not being an expert climber I am not going to try to get to the kitchen window above the neighbour's brick courtyard.

So, how to spend an afternoon before #1 comes home and I can get in again?

Coffee first (Ba Ba Black makes the best coffee in Perth, I reckon) then into the City for a bite to eat for lunch.

Sit in the library reading? Nah, too boring - instead I jump on a train on the Northern Suburbs (Clarkson) Line. It's always good fun on this line sitting on the train as it accellerates past the cars up the centre of the freeway. On a whim I get off at Greenwood Station. This station is newer than the others on the line, and it is interesting to compare it with the older stations. It has a side platforms rather than an island platform, but still has the overall roof design concept (although rather curvier than the chunky concrete of the older ones). Most notably, it doesn't have a covered walkway to the car park. The drying out of the Perth climate in the last decade has obviously had an impact on design here.

Rather unexpectedly there is a bus sitting at the station for Hillary's Marina. It seems on Saturdays every train is met by a bus. There are only two of us on the bus and off we go. 10 minutes down Hepburn Avenue and we are there. I wander along the boardwalk past the rather pointless tourist shops and stop for another coffee in one of the chain outlets. The girl at the machine is friendly, but the coffee is nothing to write home about either way.

Half an hour there then off to get another bus. It seems there is one down the coast to Scarborough Beach in a few minutes. It is a massive old articulated bus with only 3 of us on it. Transperth tends to do this - the older buses are reserved for routes with almost no one on them, and the oldest buses are the biggest! Another 10 minutes and we are at Scarborough. Far less touristy though no less busy than Hillary's. This is not a family place, more teens in boardshorts.

Wander round the shops for a bit, pick up a pair of boardshorts on special then grab a 400 bus back to the city, changing to an abolutely packed Yellow CAT at 5 O'Clock and then home just as #1 gets home.

Who knew getting locked out could be so enjoyable?

Oh yeah, I managed to read about 3/4 of a chapter of the textbook too!

Old Chinese proverb?

I don't suppose anyone reading this is an expert on Chinese or Chinese proverbs/

You see there is a tattoo that I have seen that I rather like.^* It has the characters

活在今天

(I hope that works in your browser)

My rather rusty Japanese would translate those characters as "Life is now heaven" which sounds like a proverb or quotation. Is it perhaps what Buddha said as he achieved enlightenment, or something like that? I tried Google but didn't achieve enlightenment myself.

It has been bugging me, so any suggestions from out there?


^* OK, the model who has the tatt I rather like ;-)

Yay cooler weather

Yay! It looks like Autumn is finally here. mmm rain on warm concrete. Open windows and no aircon.

Can you believe it hasn't been 30 degrees at all since 4pm on Tuesday?

I might be able to venture outside and go for a walk or something soon.

Lurgi Strikes again or The Goon Show Family Tree

The dreaded lurgi has me firmly in its grasp, and my head feels like nothing so much as wet cotton wool, so no witty post for today.

Instead, I am reproducing something I first posted online in 2002, a proposed Goon Show Family Tree. What I did was trawl through all the available scripts and other published material to try to make links between as many of the characters as I could. One or two leaps of logic and/or imagination, and I have come up with something I'm pretty proud of.

If you are a Goon Show fan (as I am, as my uncles are and as my grandfather was), this may interest you. All feedback welcomed, of course.

Old Scholars

Dang and blast. A virus that has been hovering for a week has decided to pounce. Let me tell you a head cold with a fever is no fun when the temperature outside is nudging the old century mark!

Being stuck inside and bored, I decided to follow up on yesterday's thoughts and see if I couldn't track down a few of the guys I went to school with using everyone's friend Google.

I'm not sure if they are actually the right people, but it appears that

* One of them is a university senior lecturer in artificial intelligence and neural networks
* One of them owns a high-end sound system components company
* One of them is a bass player in a professional jazz band
* One of them has disappeared altogether
* One of theim is either a partner in a real estate business or a pastor in a BAC-style pentacostal church.

The last of these is most confusing: when I last saw him he had just retired as state junior kickboxing championship or something :) Oh yes, and the first guy was probably the least geeky of all of us (although he probably was the smartest!)

Sunday morning miscellany

1. Had a bbq and booze up last night as a sort of birthday party. Always fun organising these things, especially in a place like Perth where everyone knows everyone else and that can be a problem when group A won't talk to Group B because ...

Anyway thanks to all those who came, thanks for the sweet messages on the cards, and I hope you all had a nice evening. Oh yeah, and a boo-hiss to the no shows (grin)

2. Been doing the random blog following thing, and would like to give a shout out for 'great stuff' to the following:

The Adventures of QueerPenguin

Urban Creatures

Semaphore Junction

Oikos ("Greenomics")

3. Been thinking: it's 20 years since I finished high school. I hated most of it at the time, but I knew some great people. I keep wondering what happened to them, and whether it is worth seeing the school is having a reunion this year. Is this a sign of getting old?

Finishing things

This week has definitely been a week for getting stuff finished

• Statistics assignment 1 completed and posted ✓
• RM data transfer completed, sent in and invoiced ✓
• Thesis typos fixed and sent in to be copied and bound ✓
• Canning Vale report, hanging around in final draft since December finalized and sent in ✓
• Read chapters 1-4 of Economics text book ✓
• Review questions for weeks 1-4 of Economics ... umm well maybe later

The Games

I'm not a great sports fanatic, so you probably won't find much written here about the Commonwealth Games.

Judging by her cracking start, the place to get all the news will be Jess at Ausculture.

You can read her take on the opening ceremony here, and I particularly liked her comments on the Queen's thoughts (which matched mine scarily).

Viewing Habits

I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but somehow I seem to have become a Channel 7 viewer.

It's funny how things change. A few years ago I was definitely part of the Channel 10 viewing public: Rove, Australian Idol, Big Brother, heck, I watched all the way through that appalling X-Factor.

Now things have changed, and 3 of my 5 favourite programmes are on 7: Desperate Housewives, Prison Break and (small voice) Dancing with the Stars. (For what it's worth, the other 2 are Spicks and Specks on Channel 2 and Shameless on SBS).

Incidentially, I find it interesting that two of these shows (Housewives and Shameless) although "comedies" have both become much darker in their second series. The most recent episode of both of them ended, literally, in tears with one of the main characters (Susan and Fiona, respectively) bawling their eyes out as the love of their life leaves. In series one, we would have been sure that Susan and Mike and Fiona and Steve would get back together. Now we are not so sure. I think both shows are the better for it.

Computer+Me=drivelling idiot

Sometimes I believe computers have been put on this earth to test us.

I have just spend at least 5 hours yesterday and today trying to work out why
(a) my laptop wouldn't shutdown, and
(b) the wireless networking on it went erattic then stopped working altogether

After many fruitless hours trying to fix (a) I gave up and moved onto (b) where I discovered that the built-in (unused) network card had died: disabling it in the hardware profile and removing it from network properties fixed the shutdown problem. Sadly not the network problem.

I then tore my hair out trying to get wireless networking back. Installing new drivers, reinstalling old drivers, re-running setup wizards. Nada. Finally I draft a long explanation and post to Netgear support forum.

Then while waiting I decide to reinstall new drivers again. Um, it's working. Could it be that I just mistyped the passphrase for network security? Dimwit!

Oh yeah, now I find I can't send emails from a totally different machine. Was there ever a more useless error message than "connection closed by foreign host. (0)"?

Can I have a paper, pen and some stamps, please?

Saturday Morning

The plumber came round this morning to fix a dripping loo. Apparently he's a friend of the owner, so he can only come 'round on weekends and holidays. That's usually not a problem, except this morning I particularly wanted to go to the market to get fresh food.

They have an organic growers market at City Farm in East Perth on Saturday mornings. You have to be early to get the good stuff, and even on a normal Saturday I rarely manage to get there before 10am. This morning I didn't get there much before 11 and nearly all the good stuff was gone.

I like this market because it is about the only place in Perth that you can get decent fruit and veg that actually tastes like something. All the supermarkets and the few greengrocers in the city seem to get their stuff from the same few wholesalers. Generally the top level stuff goes to the supermarkets and the seconds to the greengrocers and markets - or that is what it seems. Either way, the fruit is always hard and tastless and the vegetables either hard or watery.

The market is not big, only half a dozen stalls or so. There is are a couple of growers selling odds and ends of vegetables, one orange grower who sells the best oranges, another that sells whatever fruit is in season (apples and pears, peaches, nectarines, plums...) and finally a big vege stall hosted by an old Vietnamese couple. Their stuff is sometimes imported from interstate but it is all good. They are great salespeople too. I always come away having bought more than I intended to. Today I came away with a bunch of green spinach-ish vegetable that tastes of mustard. I have no idea what I will do with it.

Not always cheap, but recommended.

When the average is below average

This article the other day (Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 3rd March 2006) caught my eye. Essentially, it is the NSW Government complaining that their grants from the Commonwealth are likely to be cut, because the Grants Commission reckons that they have (amongst other things) an above-average supply of buses.

This caught my eye for a number of reasons. The implication from the article was that NSW was being penalised for having too many buses - or at least more buses than they needed. This raised my hackles at first, since as a long term advocate for public transport I am convinced that what is needed is more buses (and bus services), not fewer.

However, setting that aside, the linguist in me finds it very interesting what is happening here with words. It is clear that what is happening at some level is a conflation of two different meanings of the word average - to the benefit of the Grants Commission beancounters!

In a statistical sense, averages are calculated values. The layperson's "average" is what the statistician would call a sample mean: the sum of observations divided by the count, although occasionally a median (middle value) may be calculated. In either case, it is a numerical construct that indicates a central tendency of a distribution.

I haven't seen the actual Grants Commission data, so I am hypothesising here, but they may have calculated the average number of buses per capita for Australian cities by going to each city that has a bus service, counting the number of buses and dividing by the population (to get per-capita figure for each city) then adding these figures together and dividing by the number of cities to obtain the Australian mean. This is a perfectly reasonable technique, from a statistical point of view.

With this sort of calculation, it is easy to see that Sydney, which has an extensive bus network (particularly in the inner-city) would have a higher number of buses per capita than Melbourne (where the inner city is serviced by tram) or a regional city like Port Lincoln where 1 bus serves 14,000 odd people. Clearly, also, one could expect that the figure for Sydney would be above the average and that for Port Lincoln below the average.

None of this is particularly problematic.

However, words have meaning, and the term "average" has another meaning apart from the statistical. Checking the thesaurus, we find the following entry:

Synonyms: boilerplate, common, commonplace, customary, everyday, fair, familiar, garden, garden-variety, general, humdrum, intermediate, mainstream, mediocre, medium, middling, moderate, nowhere, ordinary, passable, plastic, regular, run-of-the-mill, so-so, standard, tolerable, typical, undistinguished, unexceptional, usual, vanilla, white bread

Using this definition, having an "average" bus service would imply not that the number of buses on the road equalled the arithmetic mean of services around the country, but rather that the service was "moderate", "unexceptional" or "passable". That is to say, the service was nothing to write home about, but at the same time nothing too much to complain about: it is "okay".

Thus we move to the the following statement:

"The Federal Government has been advised to consider NSW as above average in public transport service when it allocates the state's $13 billion GST." (Daily Telegraph, as above - my emphasis) [1].

The economists in the Grants Commission have been able to use the double meaning of "average" to imply that as the number of buses in Sydney is greater than average (above the Australian mean) then the number of buses must be "good" (because "good" is better than "average").

Clearly they are not the same thing at all!

Now it just so happens that my research does show that there is basic, "good enough" level of service for public transport in Australia, where "good enough" means that there are sufficient services to make an impact on car use. It is nothing to write home about (quarter hourly during the day, half hourly at nights and on weekends) and I expect many people would consider it adequate - "average", if you like.

So from a policy point of view, which would you prefer to see? A reduction in services in the big cities to some statistical national "average" level, or an improvment so that everyone gets at least an "average" level of service quality?

I know which I prefer.

[1]This statement also manages to switch from "number of buses" to "level of service". I think this is an acceptable correlation to make, as it is reasonable to assume that the bus companies will have a sufficent number of buses to operate their peak service levels, and not many more. Thus the number of buses is a good first-estimation of services provided.

Statistics

Previously promised intelligent article has been delayed again, to allow me to complete Assignment 1 for QM161 Business Statistics.

In the meantime, I urge my loyal reader to ponder the implications of the various meanings of the word "average".

P.S. UNE, it would be nice to get the study guide for this subject some time this semester. Grr.

Tasteless Tourism Campaign backfires

A sensible post is coming soon, but in the meantime this just cracks me up.

Official openings

I have just come back from attending the official opening of the "North Quay Freight Rail Terminal and Rail Loop" in Fremantle.

It's a very worthwhile project: it is a new rail line and freight terminal designed to bring freight trains from the south of Fremantle directly into the inner harbour port. It replaces an inconveniently located life-expired freight marshalling yard to the north (Leighton) which can now be redeveloped for housing. Unusually for this type of project it is dual gauge and caters for both WA local narrow (3'6") and interstate standard (4'8.5") gauge trains.

It is doubly important because it is one of the few rail projects in Australia today that I can think of that arose out of a decision not to build a road that the engineers and planners had been expecting for years. After a lot of debate, the Minister (the amazingly capable Alannah MacTiernan, MLA) said no to the Fremantle Eastern Bypass and Roe Highway Extension, saying that freight would be transferred between the freight terminals (Kewdale and Forrestfield) and the Port of Fremantle by rail instead.

I've been to a number of these launches over the years, and they are all the same. A marquee is set up somewhere (road, station, freight yard) and caterers hand round orange juice and sandwiches. A lot of blokes in suits stand around (usually in pairs, two from each company) wondering what on earth to talk about. What can you say? "The bitumen is very nice"? There is usually one group talking about football of one code or another. The CEO of the project then gets up and introduces the Minister who makes a speech and unveils a plaque. Then we all go home.

This one was slightly different in that there were two ministers (state and federal) so there were two speeches, one unveilling and one ribbon cutting in front of a freight train. I spoke briefly to a manager of the construction company, a consulting engineer, a manager of a railway company and two blokes from Consolidated Bulk Handling - until they started talking about rugby.

Oh yes, the ribbon cutting was delayed by about half an hour as the train had broken down.

Brillant.

The Author as Idiot

just had to share this with you. It's the official webpage of one of my favourite authors, Matt Beaumont.

Even authors can be idiots

http://www.letstalkaboutme.com/

Don't forget to check out the FAQs

Brokeback: brilliant, boring or bad?

Now that the uproar at Brokeback Mountain missing out in the "Oscars" is slowly dying down, I thought this might be an appropriate time for me to add my two-cents worth on the movie. I actually only saw it last Friday (deep in the dungeons of Greater Union George Street, Sydney) and I must say I was looking forward to it.

I came out of it disappointed and a little bit disturbed.

The movie was promoted, unofficially if not officially, as a "gay love story". Well, it was in a way, but it was not a gay romance, it was a romantic tragedy: a very different thing indeed.

In any tragedy, whether a novel or a movie, the plot hinges around a decision made early in the piece. At a critical juncture the hero/protaganist is forced to undertake an action or make a choice, and for one reason or another takes the wrong one. Very often the choice made is hushing up a crime - or committing one. From then on things spiral out of control as one thing after another fails to make up for that first wrong decision, until their destruction is the only possible ending.

In this context the word wrong is important, because it carries two connotations. The first is simply that the choice is incorrect (in that an alternative choice would have led to a more satisfactory outcome), but more importantly it implies morally wrong.

This is where Brokeback Mountain becomes problematic, because the action that Jack and Ennis "undertake" is to fall in love. As a tragedy all further actions follow from this decision which must therefore be considered the wrong one - if it were the right thing to do, how could things have (not) worked out the way they did? Therefore, although a charitable interpretation might be that the choice was "wrong" in a soft way ("wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time"), the stigma of moral wrong-ness still remains.

American writer/director Don Roos, interviewed in the Sydney Star Observer (2 March 2005) makes the comment that he feels Brokeback Mountain is an "anti-gay" movie because it reinforces the notion that to be gay is to be miserable and lonely. While I wouldn't use those words, I think I do agree with him.

On another level, Roos and others have commented that the movie is pretty much a copy of an earlier movie Same Time Next Year, except with gay leads. While I have not seen that particular movie, I do feel Brokeback is very derivative. For example, the shirt scene towards the very end, while certainly tugging at the heart strings, has definitely been done before. The example that springs to my mind is the scene "Name Removed" in the musical "Quilt" (when all that is left of a relationship is shirt material that a court has ordered be removed from the AIDS memorial quilt). I also get regular echoes of Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. In a slightly clunky flashback late in the movie where a young Ennis riding off on horseback into the mountains morphs into a middle aged Ennis pointing his ute along a gravel road, I hear Olive's cry of "I want what I had before ... give me back what you've taken" as another 17-year periodic romance crumbles to dust. It works emotionally, but in 2006 is melodramatic and hardly original.

The actors I must say I don't mind at all - although admittedly I do have a bit of a soft spot as far as Heath Ledger is concerned, and personally I felt the aging/time going by changes were handled well. Still, this is not enough to save the movie.

I have come to the conclusion that I'm not a fan of director Ang Lee. I remember being absorbed by The Ice Storm, but since then I have found Crouching Tiger - Hidden Dragon boring and Hulk a load of tosh. I'm afraid I have to add Brokeback Mountain to the list of disappointments.

So is Brokeback brilliant, boring or bad? I'd definitely say it isn't brilliant, it is sometimes boring, but I wouldn't go so far as to say bad.

Borderline I think.

Perth is Hot (but not Hawt)

God I hate hot weather. Going out makes me collapse with exhaustion, and staying in with the aircon and fan on just gives me a headache.

Yesterday it was 37, today expected max 36, Wednesday max 38. Trend for the rest of the week mid 30's.

I might have a lie down now.

Mardi Gras Wrap Up

I'm writing this up from the Virgin Blue departure lounge at Sydney Airport. I had been meaning to post various interesting thoughts as they came along this past week. Unfortunately several things worked to stop this:

1. Telstra wireless? ha! After trying various config options I finally got it to work - sort of (ignore the blurb - it isn't automatic). The logon page managed to crash my computer, twice. And I mean crash the computer, not just the browser. Then they have the affront to SMS me with a 'thank you for using Telstra wireless. $1.80 will be charged to your mobile account'. 20c a minute. I don't think so!

2. The hotel room had an old fashioned phone plug and some sort of filter that stopped dial up from working through.

3. I hardly had the time to stop and write anyway.

So here goes what I can remember. Please excuse the stream of consciousness style.

Dramatis Personae

Chubby#1: better half and obsessed bear lover
Chubby#2: yours truly and not particularly a bear lover
N: old friend of #1 from Melbourne. Definitely not a bear lover
J, M, R, MII: from Perth. Bears and bear lovers. Except J who isn't really.

Locale

Sydney, especially Oxford Street, Darlinghurst and surrounds.

The Time

28 Feb - 5th March 2006
Sydney Mardi Gras festival closing week and Bear EssentialsX festival.

The Story

Tuesday

Flight on Virgin Blue fine. Swap seats with elderly couple to be behind M and J. Get stuck into reading transport economic papers. Aha! I finally get it. Yay. Do little happy dance in the seat. Flight Attendant smiles. Can't really explain why I'm happy - too embarassing.

Tuesday night

Oxford Hotel. Bears bears and more bears. Never mind, $2 schooners to midnight helps soften the blow. Bearmail is fun - everyone gets a sticker with a number on entry. If you see someone you like, put their number on a message and stick it in the mail box. Arrivals notified by number projected on the big screen. Number 243, I'd have sent you a message, but you were far to popular already.

Scary scary. Reading all the numbers and just seeing bus routes. 213 City to Carousel. 60 Morley. 109 Fremantle via Canning Highway. I need a new hobby.

Wednesday

Sleep in.

What's the plan? More bears? OK, I think I might do something intelligent. A visit to the state library to check interesting papers is in order. Anyone have a map? No? Let's ask the front desk. Receptionist has no idea, checks computer and rings number given. Library gives address: cnr Hunter and Macquarie. Gets out street map: still no idea. Service man fixing computer on desk "allow me". He knows the city pretty well and has no problem circling the clearly marked "State Library" on the tourist map.

Off I go to do boring academic stuff.

Wednesday night.

Dinner for J's birthday. I see a theme happening here. Red leather collar? Dog chain? Misc other leather ornaments. I had no idea

Chubby#1 and bear friends off to the bears' underwear party. Not for me thank you.

Time for the theatre now. Bugger - why does everything in Sydney start at 8 pm? This was supposed to be my night of culture. Oh well, time for a wander, I guess.
. . .

Did I really drink away $200 by myself between 9pm and 1.30 am? How many Pimms and lemonade (thanks for the recommendation, Justin) did I drink at the Beauchamp Hotel? Did Fifi at the Brighton get her divorce OK? What exactly did I do at the Stonewall? Answers on the back of a postcard please.

Thursday

one big blur, or is that bleiough?

Please do not smoke near me when I have a hangover.

N arrives for a visit. What did we do? Oh, that's right tried to find something down by Circular Quay or in the rocks for a coffee. Why is it so hard? No we don't want an expensive meal. Only cafe we find is closing (at 4pm). Italian pizza place will have us for a coffee. Oh well, might as well share a pizza as well. Drink weak-as-piss postmix ginger ale. Pizza OK.

Bears' Dinner. Did we really have to congregate in a squishy place for drinks and natter *again*?

I think I ate something.

Bugger, Monorail has finished by 9 pm. Walkies.

Friday am

Time to find the bank. Definitely no Bendigo Bank in the City. So how to get to Balmain? It's over there --> somewhere. Does reception have a street directory? Ha! again. She can look it up on the internet. Long complicated printout from Sydney Buses (sans map). Finally find bus 441 to Balmain Wharf. Crikey! $2.80 per person one way! Darling Street Balmain. Number 300-ish. Bit of a walk to 591 then.

Now we have money again, and I am not going to drink again, this holiday might start moving smoothly again.

Friday pm.

Feeling a little better. Movie after lunch. Brokeback Mountain (see separate review, if I can get around to writing it). Arrange dinner date first.

Why does my mobile phone turn off whenever the signal drops out? Surely that is not supposed to happen?

Chubby#1 and friends off to the bears pool party. Me, I'm off to meet an old work friend.

Thanks for the sushi, Bridie, nice to see you. Sam looks scrumptious, from the camera pics at least. Next time we must make sure we get together properly. Hope your party went well.

Anything happening now? Bugger! It's after 8 o'clock again. What's worth doing for an hour or two. Let's see if anything is open? Kinokuniya? Nope, closes at 7 pm. Borders' surely. Nope 7 pm also. Virgin Megastore. closed. What is it with this city?

Circular Quay. Oh! the inner harbour ferries are still running. I thought they went to bed early. 10.10 pm to North Sydney/Neutral Bay. $5 one way. Reasonable load. They do move at quite a clip, don't they? Kirribilli. Good heavens, a dozen or so people getting off. Who says nice people don't take public transport.

North Sydney (High Street). I think I'll get off here and take a train back. Only two others get off. Hmm. This is High Street? More like a little lane. Thank heavens, a main road. Should I walk back across the bridge? Not tonight, I think. What's this? Cars on a freeway on-ramp giving way to pedestrians crossing. Never would happen in Perth.

Closed offices, fast food, pedestrian mall. Underpass to station: closed. Where on earth? Maybe if I follow this woman (hi! whoever you are) I can find the station. Good-oh. What $2.80 *again*. I really should have bought the "expensive" all day ticket this morning at $15.

Hotel. Shower. Oxford Hotel. More bears. One vodka then onto softies.

Ooh cute but very drunk young man is cracking onto me. Pinches my cheek and gives me a big snog. Oh. He wants a beer and will I buy him one? Bugger, if only he were a little more sober and I were a little more single . Why couldn't there be bearmail this evening?

2.30 am. I'm tired. Home time please. OK, pop into Midnight Shift for a p. Full of ciggie smoke and young asian men. Not me really.

Hotel.

Sleep.

Saturday.

Up reasonably early. Back to Kinokuniya to buy books. Tea. Woolies for food.

Quick trip to Manly for the 3 of us. Fresh air on ferry is, well, refreshing.

Bears' picnic in the park. What a shambles! Just people milling about everywhere and some sandwiches maybe. Am I going to march tonight. Hmm, maybe not. Bears here are not "our crowd". I'm sorry but bum hanging out of leather chaps is not my scene. Legs are killing me anyway (so much standing around). Back to hotel for Ice Rub and rest.

Parade time. We're cutting it fine. Chubby#1 wants to meet mates in front of Midnight Shift so he can go dancing right afterwards. Oops wrong side of street. Maybe if we walk along a bit there'll be a gap in barriers? No. No. Taylor Square? No. South Dowling Street? Aargh. N and I stay, #1 goes back to Oxford Street to be right opp MNS for when barriers come down.

N gets street side barrier. I get to share kerb with friendly drag thing, drunk rugby boys from Penrith (1xgay 1xstraight I think) and an Irish family. Dad has sexy voice, but I am not going there.

Dykes on bikes

Red headlights

Orange headlights

Yellow

you get the story

god how many are there?

Purple

and we're away

Sparkle. Pretty things. Country boys? Very nice...

Getting too dark for camera.

Marching Police in Uniform. Cheers. Tears in eyes of at least one cop.

Fun but ooh so tiring on legs. God, 10 pm already? Time to fight back through crowds to hotel to rest.

Midnight. Hungry. Haymarket. Chinese. Big serves. Drunk girl at next table keeps calling chinese waiter with "sumimasen". Let's pay the bill and leave.

God how many 'tired and emotional' teenagers are there here on the streets at 2 am? Queues for buses everywhere. We're walking.

Hotel. SMS - #1 is still partying. N and I crash.

Sunday am

9.00 alarm. Erk. Up. Bills, Taxi. Airport.

Summary

#1 wants to go to Hibernation in Melbourne in June. Oookay.

I just want to sleep for a week to recover. Next time: more time, only 1 or 2 activities a week not every day.

Next time, who can I march with? Thought: I wonder if there will be enough LPTC people in Syd. to make a float. Keep that in mind.

Chubby#2 signing off