I was woken from a deep sleep at 10am on Sunday by the dulcit tones of Rainnie's voice coming through my bedroom door! She was on her way home from a morning shift at the cafe she works in. Fiona had let her in, saying "everyone's asleep, but make yourself at home". Rainnie was apparently tempted to just stick the kettle on and sit alone in our kitchen, but then she decided to wake me up to make her tea for her - fair enough, I was on host duty, I suppose. Rainnie is a pseudo-housemate for us, and being given free rein to wander about the place confirmed this for her I think.

I forgot to mention a few things that happened during the day last week. It's tempting to turn one's mind off for the duration of the wage slave portion of one's journey through life, but I try to notice things even when at work or thereabouts.

One thing that struck me as comical - apart from the shambolic state of Melbourne's bus services in general - was a special attribute of one seriously shitty bus that I was riding into work one morning with Sixto, the cool Filipino placement student at work who gets on the same bus as me. Apart from it being about thirty years old and smelling like the inside of a diesel engine, it had a most amusing buzzer for alerting the driver that you want to get off. Most of them go beep or perhaps dzzzz, but this one sounded like a wannabe elephant trumpety-trump! Truly the runt of the bus herd, judging by the way it sounded its feeble note.

Another thing that amused me but also pleased me I noticed whilst having a walk up the shore towards the Westgate Bridge, that icon of transportation architecture that sweeps across the Yarra River estuary not 500m from our office. Anyway, along the waterfront there is a greened area with walkways and lawns and scrubland. I notice that they have been making a bit of an effort with this area, and in particular they have planted out some native tree saplings:

I am loving the fact that, to protect these young trees from being inadvertently squashed, the gardeners have placed a used 1-litre tall square milk carton around each one! It looks like they're expecting milk trees to grow, but I have to respect the recycling (or at least multi-use) aspect of what they're doing with the cartons. Cool, man.

And have I mentioned Aussie sockets yet? Every time I go to plug something in, I mean to write about it. Australian plugs have either two or three pins. The two-pin ones look like US plugs only the bars are set not parallel but at a 30 angle, so that they lean in towards each other at the top. The three-pin plugs have this same / \ arrangement, plus another vertical pin below. But what makes me smile each time is that the resulting socket shape looks exactly like the face in Edvard Munch's The Scream! All it needs is a couple of mini ectoplasmic hands to grip either side of the socket and you'd have depression flowing into every appliance!

So anyway, this week has been super sporty. Monday was mad: I had bikram yoga in the morning, a massage with my teacher Michelle in the afternoon, and a monster badminton session in the evening. For some reason, not many people had turned up so instead of the normal 20 minutes on, 20 minutes off routine we were playing all night. It was great!

I had another big badders night on Wednesday, but now I'm feeling the ill effects of all this exercise. My right arm feels like somebody's punched me in the biceps, and I have somehow trapped a nerve in my left arm so that the top of my hand feels like a dentist has injected it with anaesthetic: you know, that puffy gum feeling. I'm off for some acupuncture today, so we'll see what happens.

Wow, and I've found a to-die-for Korean restaurant called (predictably enough) Kimchi House - but bizarrely there's no kimchi on the menu! There is, however, really tasty BBQ beef and lots of yummy other stuff, including these rice noodles that are as thick as your thumb and are great for soaking up all the scrumptious juices. AND the restaurant has really cool design features too: there are little kneely tables with a barbie recessed into the middle of them, and each table has a spotlessly shiny stainless steel extractor hood hanging over it. It looks so cool. I will definitely be eating there again.

There you go, a short blog entry for a change!