Here's a bizarre thing: duvets. You know how everyone has one, but you never actually see anyone buying the things? Well here in Melbourne I've been quietly astonished at the number of people I've seen dragging duvets around with them on the trams! What is more, these duvet buyers have all been ethnic Chinese. Either the Chinese community of Melbourne has a real thing about fresh bedding and the rest of us have really skanky duvets without realising it, or something even more mysterious is going on, the depths of which I shall seek to fathom in coming weeks.

Another week, another twist in the job story. Thinking I had a job that started on Wednesday, I was going to have a quiet one on Tuesday night, when I was due to meet up with Emily & Pete, the couple Dan & I met in Fiji. But then, at the close of play on Tuesday, I get a call from the telemarketing people to say that actually they don't have any work to give me, so I won't be needed for another month. Bollocks! Luckily, I was in a pub and with nice people, so I went straight into self-pitying commiseration mode and drank lots of tasty beers (mmm, Mountain Goat rocks!) and stuffed my face with a huge steak with garlic sauce, because I just don't care!

Aside from that, in the first part of this week I've been mostly doing cultural stuff, in the belief that when I have a full-time job I won't have time to do galleries during the week and I might be doing other stuff at weekends. So I've finished off the rest of the National Gallery of Victoria - including in their 20th Century Modern Media room a gross set of photos entitled 'Stretched Skin Through 360 Degrees' of a guy hanging at various angles from several thin ropes which are attached to him by huge fishhooks sunk into his skin and out again, with trails of blood pouring from some of the wounds.

Next door at the Arts Centre, there's currently an exhibition of some 160 of Kylie Minogue's 300-odd dresses. She, a Melburnian, has recently donated her wardrobe to the city, along with various items pertaining to her career as an entertainer - things like MTV Awards, platinum discs, and other knick-knacks she has picked up along the path of international divahood. I'm sorry to admit that I actually quite enjoyed the Behind-the-Scenes film of her recent 2002 World Tour. It is fascinating to see huge stages being built, and to see the person behind the personality (of course, the person we see on film is just another personality, but at least it's a different one).

Wednesday was a bit of a turning point for me. The disappointment of not having a job I thought I had - although tempered by a secret relief at not having to cold-call random people and try to get them to agree to something they didn't want in the first place - made me lose the plot somewhat. Back to square one again!

And as is so often the case, my mood cycles were in tune with the weather. Wednesday was just crap in my head because change was in the air: on Thursday we finally had the break in the hot spell that has been long overdue. From exactly midnight it rained for exactly twelve hours. I awoke to the gloom of a sky full of grey clouds, oozing not only raindrops but also foreboding, and oppressively sitting on the city, squashing the enthusiasm out of even the birdsong. But after my frustration and after the rain came a better spell and a new course of action. I did what in my heart of hearts I knew I should have done right from the start, and went visiting temping agencies in person.

I decided to call on three big ones to see what happened. The other 32 I had sent my CV to I kept in reserve for a possible second wave. The people at Adecco were friendly but too busy to deal with me straight away. The people at Hudson loved themselves too much and I am sure treat their clients like hunks of meat. The people at Select were friendly and immediately made an appointment for me to go in the next morning for an assessment.

Which I duly did on Friday, including an Occupational Health & Safety video (yawn), some computer tests (wahey, I can type 65 words a minute at 100% accuracy!) and a bit of a chat (my interviewer's parents are Croatian, and she spent six months in Europe last year). All we have to hope now is that she can find me some work...

I met up with Rainnie after work on Thursday. We had chai (thankfully not with soy milk though) in Smith Street and then we bought food & wine and cooked at hers. It was a chilly night, so I decided to do a carbonara pasta with lots of yummy cream. The deal was, Rainnie could go and have a shower to get all the tiny bits of metal out of her skin - occupational hazard for a blacksmith who spends most of the day welding - while I cooked. That suited me fine. We hooked up my MP3 player to a set of really tinny sounding naff speakers and spent the evening finding tunes we hadn't heard in ages.

I like Melbourne! There are so many cool bars and places to chill in. On Friday afternoon, after all my excitement at Select, I got a surprise call from Rainnie saying she had been given the afternoon off work, and did I want to have a coffee in town. This fitted perfectly with my utterly empty agenda, so we met up, did a spot of shopping (it's a Melbourne must) and then stopped in a really trendy grunge bar down a back alley that stank of piss (also SO Melbourne - the bar's location, not the piss smell). After a few beers there and elsewhere (so many places to choose from in this cool town!) we called it a night. I had to gather my energies for tomorrow's massage training.

And the training was SO cool as well! This week we got to work in pairs and do each other's backs. What in me was once precocious talent but lacking structure is fast becoming a professional touch: my massage diamond has gained new sparkle. Ooh yeah, baby! I am hot!

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!