I've just realised that I promised you all details of my job hunting in my last update, and then didn't deliver. How naughty of me! So here is the whole story:

I saw telemarketing ads in the special jobs pullout of The Age newspaper that Rainnie & I bought at the weekend, and decided I should try to get one of these jobs, if only so that I can see for myself how god-awful telemarketing is. Plenty of people have warned me to stay away from the industry - not least people working there themselves - but a) I'm desperate for an income, and b) a lesson learned the hard way stays with you; you won't catch me doing labouring again in a hurry!

So I rang a few companies, and secured a few interviews. The first one was a five-minute face to face chat. They haven't called me back. The next two were supposedly assessment centre hour-long types. But that's not how they turned out:

Interview Two was for an evening job begging money for charities. After a ten-minute run-through of their basic work method, the team leader (who, by the way, had the most extraordinarily hideous teeth I've ever seen - and that's saying something) shoved the four of us straight on the phones. Talk about in at the deep end! The guy next to me managed to get a $60 donation within five minutes; he got the job. The girl behind me got $120 after fifteen minutes; she got the job. I managed to call 28 answerphones, 8 people who said they were already giving enough to other charities (fair enough in my view) and one religious nutter who started quoting the Book of Revelations at me saying all medical treatment is sorcery! But, bizarrely, I still got offered the job, because I have a nice voice!

Interview Three was for a full-time job doing more sales-related telemarketing. The setup seemed more professional, but my suspicion is that it's all a thin veneer of respectability over an otherwise dodgy enterprise. They called what they do "lead generation" and they said used the example of mortgages to illustrate their business model: they get phone numbers, ring people to tell them about the competitive mortgage market, and ask them if they would like to meet a consultant who could help them to save money; they sell the telephone numbers of people who said yes to mortgage consultants. They have generated a lead for the consultant. This sounds slightly less revolting than actually trying to sell somebody something they don't want, so I think I could bring myself to do it.

After a delay of a couple of days (apparently their systems crashed, so they were up to their ears and couldn't call me - which bodes well for a job there) they rang me on Friday afternoon to tell me I was successful and would start next week! Hurray! Another job! I rang scary teeth bird and told her where she could stick her job - but in the nicest possible way, so as not to burn any boats unnecessarily, and then went out to celebrate with Rainnie & the German girls again.

We met at a pub in town, then had Vietnamese food on Victoria Street in Richmond, a mad Southeast Asian quarter with stacks of super cheap shops and eateries. Then we went down to St Kilda for a drink and a nighttime walk along the beach - it was a sultry night, and there were firedancers performing on the sand - before heading to a bar with dancing called Robarta. We got chatting with a really friendly Kiwi couple there, and spent a few hours chatting & dancing before heading home.

My other big excitement this week - apart from finding gainful employment - has been the start of a massage training course. This is an introductory course I'll be doing over three Saturdays. It was great!! It is a reasonably small group - just eight students - at Victoria University's King Street campus in the centre of town. It was a bit awkward practising the techniques we learned on a bunch of complete strangers; still, at least next week won't be strangers any more. Good job too, because that's when we actually do some clothes-off massage.

The teacher, Michelle, is wonderfully hippie & alternative, even though she is not allowed to be by the rules of the university (which I find bizarre). For instance, she told us she is not permitted to mention "intuition" in relation to any aspect of massage, even though in my view it is central to any kind of hands-on treatment. Be that as it may, her slightly cosmic view of things is impossible to repress. Cool. And it turns out she's not just a pretty face either: she has a black belt in karate, and when she's not doing private remedial massage she does fire dancing on the side!

I met up with Rainnie after the training. We went for a bite to eat and then went swimming in Brunswick, at the heated outdoor pool there - which was so not heated enough that after five minutes we sought refuge in the much hotter indoor pool. There was a ball floating in the water there, and we had a game of two-man polo, managing to hit the heads of pretty much everyone else in the pool!

In the evening I watched the live coverage of the wedding of Charles & Camilla on the telly, sipping on red wine and nibbling cheese toasties, then called it a night. My energies were sapped by the heat - it was like a sauna, even after dark!

I spent most of Sunday with Rainnie too. We met for lunch at the Victoria Markets. It was a baking hot morning, so much so that I actually put suncream on for the first time in ages. But of course this was exactly the wrong thing to have done: after half an hour of glaring sun and oppressive heat, a weather front moved in and the heavens opened. The temperature was recorded as dropping 15 degrees in just a quarter of an hour! Luckily we were out of the worst of the rain in the market, and it cleared up quite quickly, but that I think was the end of summer (hmm, let's see if this time my prediction is right!).

After traipsing round all the shops - I needed to get a sports bag for my badminton stuff and a pair of tracksuit trousers - we had a coffee, a chat, and another wander. We were met in a bar called e55 (cunningly located at 55 Elizabeth Street) by Michael who used to work with Rainnie and who we were out with at Cherry Bar. (As a small footnote, I was amused and Rainnie embarrassed when Michael pointed out that Rainnie's top was appropriate, since it had the number 55 emblazoned on it in huge silver figures!) And once again the three of us found ourselves in a really cool bar playing really old-school rock classics. AND they had tasty beer on tap - Squires Pilsner - and in bottles - Monteiths from over in NZ. I was loving it!

The weather change had a profound effect on Rainnie and me, inasmuch as it made me knackered - or was that all the walking? - so after a couple there and a last drink off Brunswick Street at a pub with live jazz the three of us went home. It had been a lovely day, and a lovely evening. May there be many more to come!

Well, it shows how much I know about meteorology: the last few days have been just as sunny and warm as it was last week! Well, okay, in my defence, Sunday was cloudy and a bit cooler, but since Monday it's been gorgeous again. So all my bollocks about frenzied end-of-summer mass hysteria was just that, bollocks. But am I repentant? No! Will I desist from writing this drivel? Never!

On Sunday afternoon Jackie brought a couple of friends back to the house, Amy and Tom. Despite what I said above, I'm sure there was something funny in the air at the weekend, because we sat in the living room and talked about nothing in particular, only everything was hilariously funny! We had a good couple of hours of rapid-fire amusing stories flying hither & thither.

The most enduring image I have from that conversation is the story Jackie told us about a woman who came into her pub one evening, sat in the middle of the pub, took off her boots and began to massage her own feet. Which is in itself a bit bizarre. But then Jackie told us that under the boots she was wearing not tights, not socks, but lacy "toe-ettes" that looked like G strings for the feet! (Hm, on re-reading this, I feel something of the magic of the original story has been lost. Oh well, just trust me, it was damn funny at the time.)

That evening we reconvened in the living room to watch Shaun Of The Dead on DVD. What a hilarious film! I felt I could identify with the location (oh so suburban London), the characters (late twenty-somethings) and the plotline (no, not the zombies bit but the I'm-nearly-thirty-where's-my-life-going bit). I highly recommend.

As you will see below, this week's been all about finding work. But before I go into that I'll tell you about some of the fun things I did:

I had another feast of comedy on Tuesday night. I started with Gamarjobat, a Japanese duo who do silent comedy. It was hilarious! Very very good indeed. If they are ever in your part of the world, dear reader, go and see them!

Second I saw the Umbilical Brothers, who (unfortunately for me) do a similar kind of physical comedy, but with commentary. Straight after Gamarjobat they weren't as funny as otherwise I might have found them to be, but there was some very good material there.

Third was Mr Methane, who describes himself as an expert of Controlled Anal Voicing. Need I say more? Well, yes I do: the funniest part of his routine was where he farted a dart from a small blowpipe into a balloon tied to a volunteer's head. Only, as Mr Methane explained, dart farting is a "contact sport"; he had to drop his trousers and insert the tube up his arse, affording the young female volunteer (and indeed the whole audience) a magnificent view of his crack and sack!

On Wednesday night I played badminton again. It is still feeling so good to be back on court after such a long absence! And I'm getting to know a few people in the club now, so it's cool.

Thursday was a return to backpacker form: I spent the afternoon soaking up culture in Melbourne's wonderful National Gallery of Victoria. There is so much there! I'm going to have to "do a British Library" with it and visit several times. This time around I took in their collection of Antiquities (which deftly juxtaposes Egyptian and Aztec statuary, among others) and, after lunch, the Aboriginal modern art section. And on Friday, I went back for even more, soaking up the many delights of their European 16th - 19th century collection.

At lunchtime on Thursday, after an excellent masala dosa on Swanston Street just like the ones I enjoyed so much in Penang, Malaysia, I popped out to a camera shop. Becaue I have an admission to make, folks: I was a silly billy. I foolishly put my water bottle into my rucksack the other night without the lid on properly. By the time I realised my mistake - ie the water was dripping out of the bottom of my bag - my camera case was soaked. And sadly, so was the camera.

I took it out to dry, which has worked for me for waterlogged cameras in the past, but that's one (for me) unforeseen consequence of the move to digital: cameras don't like water any more. So, much saddened, I went to a shop where they confirmed that to repair would cost more than a new one. But thankfully they had exactly the same camera on special, and it was cheaper than what I paid for it back in August in Canada. Still $300 dollars though.

In the evening I met up with Rainnie and her friend Linda the Freaky German (who has been in Sydney for a week or so) and Linda's German friend Claudia for a few beers and a bite to eat. Linda & Claudia are setting off around Australia for three months at the weekend, so it was a preliminary goodbye drinks session. We were at the Grace Darling on Brunswick Street, sitting outside, and for the first time in ages I felt cold. Maybe the weather is turning now after all.

We ate next door to where Linda & Rainnie used to work, at the Cafe El Greco in the casino building. The food was remarkably good: I had veal scaloppini with roast sweet potato and snow peas. Then Rainnie introduced us to vodka shots taken with lemon, coffee grounds and sugar. Kind of weird: you coat one side of the lemon slice in coffee, the other in sugar, neck the vodka, then bite down on the lemon.

We walked back into town after a nice cup of tea, then headed our separate ways home. Although it was cold out, there were lots of people on the streets, and I took a few photos to try to capture the nighttime atmosphere. We'll see how they turn out on the big screen at some stage.