Oil, sweat and tears

I borrowed “Holding the Man” from the library on the weekend. I am only half way through it but it has already had me in tears three times so I’m not actually sure if I would recommend it to anyone. A bit heart wrenching.Met Robbie at Mars on Saturday night and had an unusual time there in that I spent a total of only about ten minutes on the dance floor. A few of us sat out in the beer garden being witty instead. Fun. Then we drove over to a very straight club called Rise and contemplated entering but couldn’t be bothered lining up probably only to get beaten up in there anyway. So we chilled at sweet bar staff boy Shannon’s place instead and sat laughing at stuff like the fact that for the $4.50 it costs to buy a 500mL bottle of spring water at Mars you could buy a ten litre cask of the stuff from Coles. And that it cost eight dollars to get in even when the air conditioning doesn’t work. And the time Julian Clary was there and Beejay refused to play any trashy music in case we humble Adelaidians were looked down upon. It’s probably worth me mentioning that while people in Sydney talk about real estate at dinner parties and the like (“Oooh Gillian, do you think the market has leveled out yet?”), people in Adelaide talk about bottled water and air conditioning. True.I was planning to fix my car on the weekend as well. It sort of needed attention. This was the sight I was greeted with last Monday morning.Repairing it properly would have involved removing the old damaged oil sump and replacing it with a new one that I would hopefully get from some wrecking yard. I borrowed some car ramps from a colleague, got the fucker up onto them……took one look at the maze underneath and realised that getting the sump out would be harder than I thought……and decided it was most definitely a job for someone else. Will just try and seal it with silicon in the mean time. And hope for the best. And stay off dirt roads.With this job abandoned my weekend was freed up for other things like attacking the weeks worth of dirty dishes that had built up around my sink and threatened to take over my while unit, if not the whole suburb. I also made a trip to the snobbiest public pool in Australia, Burnside Swimming Centre. Sure it’s nice but what sort of public pool charges five dollars for entry? It’s like expecting people to fork out four dollars at a sausage sizzle – it was always a buck fifty in my day.I went looking at new laptops as well. I made sure no-one I knew saw me go into the Apple Centre at Norwood. When I enquired about this thing called Virtual PC, the application designed to emulate Windows and therefore run Windows-only programmes, the salesman told me just that and also that “Windows stays in a window, where it belongs”. I wonder how many times he had rehearsed that line. He seemed very proud of it. The highlight at work this week was when we got an invoice for zero dollars. You’d think it was the public service. Otherwise there has been little worthy of note. The number of large, never-ending, boring tasks for me to do has gone from two to four. Thankfully though there have been some lighter moments.Colleague One: “I think you left your coffee here.”Colleague Two: “Oh thanks, do you know where my three course lunch is as well?”Me: “Yeah, and my new Audi?”Amusingly, a few company branded corporate gifts have made their way into the office. I was given a screwdriver and stubby holder. Good-o. Michelle scored one of those backpacks with the padded slot for a laptop. Pity that massive Dell they’ve given her to use doesn’t fit. How that thing could be regarded as portable is beyond me. And the fan slows down when the hard drive runs – perhaps Dell’s power supply people should revise their basic circuit theory, paying particular attention to Thevenin’s equivalent circuit model. Fuck, did I just remember something from first year? Yeah that’d be two things in one day from first year actually - had to use FTP to upload those pictures and it’s been a while since I touched that. Must be time for bed.