I made fried rice! I made fried rice! All by myself! (except for Leonie telling me what to do.) Mum would be so proud. I’m so pleased. It looks like mum’s fried rice. I took photos to prove to show mum when she comes back.

Look mum! No recipes!

*wide grin*

Joan’s recipe for fried rice

• Leftover rice (up to one week old)
• Leftover bolognese sauce
• Leftover sausage
• Frozen peas
• Frozen corn
• Egg, beaten
• Leftover dumpling sauce (soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, chilli, sesame oil)

1. Fry sausage in a spoonful of oil.
2. Add peas and corn. Take mixture out of pan.
3. Fry beaten egg. Add to previous mixture.
4. Fry bolognese sauce.
5. Add rice.
6. Add egg/corn/peas/sausage mixture.
7. Taste. If too bland, add dumpling sauce to taste

1. Meet people through an extracurricular or extraworkular activity. Choose something you enjoy or are inspired by.
2. Join the committee.
3. Find the target boy.
4. Work on a project with him. Is he still interesting? Is he friend material too? If yes…
5. Slip in a social comment into official business emails or phone calls. If he responds in like, then the odds are looking better.
6. Make ambiguous comments that can be interpreted either way (ie. I’m flirting / I’m a friendly person).
7. Go on a group social outing. Maybe go out to celebrate the success of a committee project.
8. Find an excuse to invite him on a one-on-one outing. Maybe establish that you are a fan of (some cuisine / an obscure artist or film director / rock climbing / macrame) and pretend you happen to have voucher for a meal at (a restaurant that serves said cuisine / the Melbourne International Film Festival / a rock-climb-a-thon / a macrame short course). Whatever the excuse, make your sentiments ambiguous. It’s still too early to risk anything too much.
9. Go on “date”. Be yourself but at your best.
10. If he’s responded receptively but not declared his like for you, then repeat “dates”. Don’t try to define anything yet.
11. I’m not sure what happens now. Maybe up the ante by leaning into him or initiating casual physical closeness. If he doesn’t step back…
12. Ask him out on a Date. If he agrees, you are now going out.

Hooray! Now that you have obtained your boyfriend, you need to do some work to keep him. Keep an eye out for Joan’s tips on how to lay the foundations of a good relationship.

See you next time!

Now I’m going to the airport to say goodbye to Damjan.

“Wiki wiki wiki…!“
(spins the platters like a DJ)

My parents have gone on a holiday.

They’ve done this before, so irresponsible *grumble* *grumble*

The last time they did this, they left me two weeks worth of food, carefully packaged, labelled and frozen. This time, because now I’ve “grown up”, they’ve only left me one week of food.

They’ve been gone for four days. I’ve forgot to put the rubbish out yesterday. The house is getting messier and messier. I ate instant noodles for lunch instead of my usual gourmet lunchbox of home cooking (it was planned, I swear!). The laundry is waiting to be folded. There is a pile of unopened letters on the coffee table (at least I brought them in!). I left my umbrella at work. I left my keys at work. I had a field day disaster. I haven’t finished my homework. My head hurted.

Mummy!

*sob sob whimper*

Need chocolate. Lonely…

There, there, Joan. Don’t cry. Here, have some Panadol. Okay, now make a list of all the things you need to do.

1. Open letters.
2. Send letters.
3. Collect rubbish.
4. Bring in laundry.
5. Make lunch.
6. Tidy room.
7. Tidy house.
8. Plan meals, go shopping, cook.
9. Do homework.
10. Rig timesheet to hide the time wasted on field day diasaster.

See? Not so hard after all.

Since Kate started going out with Avi (of Indian Mauritius background), she’s become a fan of Bollywood. Bollywood films are fairy tale musical extravaganzas. They are epic (read: long), full of spontaneous singing and dancing. They are always love stories with happy endings — all without the audience ever seeing the lovebirds kiss, let alone “get it on”.

However, the new Bollywood film Salaam Namaste shows (or at least suggests) the main characters going all the way. The blatantcy is unprecedented.

Unsuspecting, Kate and Avi went to the Thursday night showing of Salaam Namaste. Kate described it to me. “The movie is set in Australia. The main characters are like, kissing, which was shocking enough. But then they go into a white gauzy tent on top of a hill. You can’t see anything but you can see the shadows! You could see what was going on. CONTROVERSY! I hissed to Avi, ‘Close your eyes! Close your eyes! …Otherwise, take notes.’ It was so romantic…”

Damjan and I made up a word about a year ago.

trooble n. pl. troobles: a word having the same sequence of numbers as another word when typed on a telephone keypad. eg. Good is a trooble of home. Joan is a trooble of loan.

Why trooble? Because a carelessly used trooble can result in trouble.

It’s a handy word. I’ve decided to immortalise it on my blog because if ‘trooble’ starts appearing in the English language, the etymologists can unequivocally assert its origins.

That’s right, folks. You heard it here first.

Imagine a large major hazard facility with lots of pipes. Now imagine you have to do a environmental and health risk assessment on the site. Think of all the ways chemicals can enter the environment — groundwater, air, soil, marine, freshwater. Think of all the different effects it can have on ecosystems, people’s health, irrigation, animal drinking water, industrial water use.

Okay. Now draw a picture of these pathways and impacts.

This is what I’ve been doing for the past week. I’ve been doing conceptual modelling of one of the biggest chemical processing plants in the southern hemisphere. These flowcharts have taken up maybe 20 A3 pieces of paper.

The logic and breadth of the task has hurt my brain but finally I have settled on seven exposure pathways.

Now I have to translate my pencil scribblings into something pretty for a report. I called the IT department to ask if the company had any flowcharting software. “Well, some people use Microsoft Visio,” they told me, “but we’ve run out of licences for it.”

Oh.

I hopped on the internet to look for open source or freeware flowcharting programs. If someone had programmed The Gimp (graphics editor), Inkscape (vector drawing program) and Freemind (mind mapping software) — all of which are installed on my computer at work — surely someone had put together something that lets me connect boxes together, right?

Well, no. I spent two hours looking for something, anything that would help me avoid the hell of creating diagrams in Microsoft Word. It turns out any satisfactory software out requires purchase (the trials create advertising watermarks on the flowcharts). There is the open source Dia for Windows, which I was excited to discover. However, the program resizes text in unpredictable ways. The errors in the latest version was far more trouble that it was worth.

In the end, I bashed my way through Microsoft Word. It’s not the most efficient way to create flowcharts but at least I know how it behaves.

Sigh.

The irony is that because I’m charged out to clients at almost $100 an hour, the two hours I spent looking for efficient software was $200 that could have been spent on buying a Visio licence or other software, which I could have used in future risk assessments.

Apologies for the dull post.

Our company arranged for us an eight hour training session with RMIT‘s School of Geological Engineering. We environmental specialists were to learn how to classify soil consistently. We would get hands-on experience reading geological maps and differentiating between silty clay with sand inclusions, and sandy silt with gravel inclusions.

Our lecturer, Paulino, greeted us with abrupt enthusiasm. Seventeen of us sat in the soils laboratory, our legs dangling from high chairs. Paulino introduced himself and turned on his Powerpoint presentation.

“Look! I have new gadget!” he announced in his occasionally incomprehensible (Italian? Portuguese?) accent. With a flourish, he waved in front of us a stubby metallic wand. “See? It’s laser pointer and… Ah ha! Changes slides too.” The presentation jumped ahead. He clicked backwards then forwards.

We were suitably impressed.

“I only got it yesterday,” he said. He looked at us all slyly. “I charged it to you guys, you know.”

There was silence as we absorbed this news.

“Don’t look at me like that!” he cried in glee. “I know your type! Always charging things to jobs. Consultants! That’s what you do. Well — now I charge you!”

It was true and we knew it. We all began laughing.

“Of course, Paulino,” Sherri affirmed. Sherri is the team leader for contaminated land in the Environment Group. “Of course you should charge your new gadget to the company. In fact, you should have bought an even more expensive one!”

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

George Bernard Shaw