I was introduced to a new part of Southbank yesterday, when I went salsa dancing at Alumbra. Southbank is one of my favourite parts of the city.

	Here’s one way to beat the heat.
	Surprise!
	Forrest Gump: And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath.
	Looking eastwards from South Side Wharf, Southbank.
	Cheers!

I went to my first ever cricket match yesterday. The scene for this milestone event was day 3 of the Boxing Day Test Match, Australia versus South Africa.

I went with Kate (also a cricket match virgin) and her boyfriend, Avi. Avi was my patient guide through the cricket maze.

“Avi, what does R/M/B stand for? What are ‘extras’? Under what circumstances do they swap batspeople? Was that a ’six’? How come all the rowdy people are over there (in Bay 13)? Why is everyone getting up?”

Everyone was getting up because it was time for ‘drinks’. The strangest thing about the game was this oddly regimented series of intervals throughout the match. There was drinks (I think at 11:30 AM), lunch (12:30 PM), drinks (again, at 2:30 PM) and tea. It was all very civilised.

It was hot and I was losing interest. I kept missing the exciting bits, which happened maybe every 10 minutes. I would be talking to Kate, eating or staring into space, then suddenly there would be a collective stadium gasp or cheer. I ended up watching more of the match on the replay screen than on the pitch.

That night, I met Joel and Vera for some salsa dancing. Joel said, “I heard you went to the cricket, Joan. What was the score when you left?”

I looked at him blankly.

“How many wickets and runs?” he added, helpfully.

“Erm. There are 11 batspeople, right? They were up to Mister 8 or 9. I think they had about 275 runs. Something like that.”

Joel nodded kindly.

Fifteen minutes later when Tony and Karen arrived, Joel said, “You’re probably a more reliable source, Tony. What was the cricket score?”

“It was 175 for 2 last I heard.”

Joel looked perplexed. “What did Joan say?”

I realised the source of confusion. “That was South Africa’s score,” I explained.

“You left before Australia batted? You must have left before tea!” Tony was incredulous.

I shrugged. “I left a bit after Drinks Part 2, actually. Didn’t get to find out what time tea was.”

Tony says that next time I should go to a One Day Match. They are reputedly more exciting — although Vera tells me that she fell asleep at one once.

Crowd swarms towards the MCG on a hot day.

Great Southern Land, er, I mean, Stand.

Escaping the heat.

Forty minutes at Chadstone Shopping Centre on Boxing Day and I was already worn down. Needing to refuel, I walked to the counter at a café-like store in the food court and asked for a banana milkshake.

I took my first sip, then pulled the straw out of my mouth in horror. For some crazy reason, I expected there to be a banana in my banana milkshake. This, however, was a banana-flavoured milkshake. It tasted exactly like one of those soft banana lollies.

I’ve been spoiled these past few years, drinking juices and smoothies from juice bars. I had forgotten what the old school dairy fruit drinks were like. Having paid big bucks, you take it for granted that you’ll get real fruit.

I’ll never buy a milkshake or thickshake again.

My family is more a New Years family than a Christmas family, which is why I had a quiet Christmas Eve. I went on my first photo safari for the break and spent most of the time at a primary school playground. There were some kids playing there. They would have made good photos but I didn’t want to be “a scary woman”.

My photos are in my Flickr album, ‘Around the neighbourhood‘.

The only one I wanted to put up here is ‘326‘. I’ve wanted to take this photo for a long time. There is something diverting about an empty block still guarded by its letterbox.

Who would post letters to an empty block?

In our particular corporation, emails are ‘flicked’. “Could you flick me an email to summarise that?” “I’ll just flick this invoice to you.”

Flick! Flick! Flick!

But corporate-speak does not withstand the tide of evolution! Guess what I heard today?

“Why don’t you buzz me an email to remind me.” “I’m waiting for him to buzz it through.”

Buzz!…Buzzzzzz!

Flick

Buzz

I was half listening to the TV on the weekend and this is what I heard on the British show, ‘What not to wear‘:

You don’t make the clothes look bad — the clothes make you look bad.

I was flabbergasted. Of course! Here I was, feeling inadequate because I felt fat and ugly, but it’s all the clothes’ fault!

The truth of such a simple statement bowled me over.

One of the things I re-learned about myself while in Brisbane is that I’m a klutz.

We spent much of the time doing building surveys. I picked up the knowledge part pretty quickly (“Bathroom? Check the partitions. Laminated cement sheeting, I see. Could be Tilux and contain asbestos fibres.”) but when it came to sampling the material, I reverted to the Primeval Klutz.

Awkwardly holding my shiny new hammer and chisel, I would timidly tap at the sheeting, barely making a scratch in the wall. Or, as it happened once, gouging a big hole in a verandah awning (“Wah! I made a hole!”).

I would spend many minutes trying to angle my pliers so that I could twist off a bit of sheeting.

I’m so clumsy when I have to do anything practical.

This is why I’ve decided to take up woodwork.

This Christmas holiday, I’m going to obtain some wood and begin making something. I don’t know what. I think I’ll have to visit the library.

I’ve just come home from a week in Brisbane — my first business trip!

It was a really good week. I went with a colleague, Nuno. Nuno looked after me: he trained me while we tramped around military bases; he navigated our car through the obstacle course that was the hotel carpark; he made me go to the doctor when my toe had a severe reaction to the bandage. Nuno and I became good friends after the week.

Brisbane is a lovely city, cleaner than Melbourne, a bit quieter. It is a city of bridges. I like the way the Brisbane River snakes through the city. The one-way streets are sometimes frustrating, though.

I spent most of the week working so I didn’t get to be a tourist. We did, however, get a daily allowance for food, so Nuno and I ate our way around the city. Hot breakfasts were the highlight.

(I also saw a salsa class being conducted in a community hall. It’s funny how beginner salsa classes look the same everywhere you go.)

	On the flight to Brisbane. As you can tell, I sat on the right side of the plane.
	Nuno is silly.
	Joan in the car.
	Joan takes drugs in an Indian restaurant.
	The view from my hotel room on the 20th floor. I was in room 2005.
	Flying home. I was on the left side this time.

I am a climber.

I never stand on escalators. I always climb.

This morning, as I climbed the escalators from the station, I tripped and fell forward onto my hands. It must have been a spectacular fall. I pushed myself up and stepped off the escalator. No one said anything. My recovery must have been convincing.

It hurt. It felt like the hurt from the impact from falling — tingly pain that would go away when I got used to the idea I wasn’t injured.

I kept walking and by the time I was waiting at an intersection to cross the road, I was wondering why the pain hadn’t gone away. I looked down at my heeled sandals. A flap of skin was hanging from my left toe.

A scrape! So I wasn’t unscathed. That explained the pain. I lifted my toes from the sandal and saw a pool of blood sitting in the shoe. Oh. This looked bad. That was a lot of blood.

As I stumped across the road, I wondered what to do when I got to work. At high school, I would have gone to the nurse’s office. There was no such place at work.

The problem was solved when I pushed the glass doors to enter the office. Margaret, our company’s librarian and the most grandmotherly figure I know, greeted me.

“Margaret, I fell!” I replied.

She accompanied me to my desk, sat me down and took off my shoe. Blood immediately flowed down my foot and dripped onto the carpet.

“Take these tissues, Joan, and put pressure on it,” Margaret said. “Now, this may seem silly but I’m going to take your shoe and go wash it.”

Paul, my boss, came over with some papers. “Joan!” he said, startled. “What happened? I was coming here to give you work to do but I can’t now. I’ll look for some first aiders.”

There is a system of designated first aid officers at work but at 8:20 AM, most of them hadn’t yet arrived. Later, someone told me that Paul had run through the eighth level calling for first aid. I wondered whether or not I should mention that I was a qualified first aider. Eventually, three first aiders rushed into the pod carrying a very big first aid kit.

The first order of business was to prop my leg up on a filing cabinet. Kristy and Heidi cleaned my foot to reveal a large but shallow gash in my toe. They sterilised and bandaged it, while Barry hovered around watchfully. He brought me a towel and a box to keep my foot elevated through the day as I sat at the computer.

“All better!” they declared, packed up the kit, filled in an incident report and waved goodbye.

I spent the day hopping through the office barefoot. All day, environment group people were asking me what happened. I even got a call from someone in our Morwell (Gippsland) office who had heard about my accident. In the evening, when I schmoozed at the Young Engineers Australia’s Christmas drinks, I found out that even the water engineers and materials engineers had heard the news. I was a declared a hobblit.

My toe is still numb, bleeding and wrapped up like a Christmas present. The progress I have made in overcoming my fear of escalators may have just been set back.

My dance class:

“I don’t like it. It’s weird.”
“There’s no beat there, you’re making it up!”
“Can’t we do it like this? It’s easier.”
“I don’t want to do that dance at the concert. I don’t like it. I just don’t. Let’s do ‘Don’t Cha’ or ‘Bitty’.”
“I don’t want to dance — the other class looks better!”

FREAKING HELL. You don’t like it — like that matters! I’m here to learn and you’re wasting my time. Why should it be easy? Why should it be ‘normal’? Why don’t you challenge yourself? You’re being lazy. Dance over the beat. Make it look good. The teacher can do it, it’s not impossible. Stop whinging and just get on with it!