I live in a nice neighbourhood. The houses are big and gardens are tidy. However, if you visit now, it’s starting to look like a ghetto. There’s rubbish on all the lawns: old furniture, dead computers, carpets and cardboard boxes. You can feel it in the air — it’s Hard Rubbish Day!

The first piles of junk started appearing about two weeks ago. It began with just one or two items.

“What’s going on?” mum and dad asked. “Is Hard Rubbish Day coming? How come we didn’t get a notice about it?”

In the next week, piles of junk appeared in front of more houses.

“Do they know something we don’t know?” We were bewildered. Finally, we caved into social pressure and assembled our own pile in front of the house. Our pile has big branches, an old toilet and a broken cupboard.

You’ve got to keep up with the Joneses.

I’ve been visiting country bakeries. I’d say 20% of the reason I put my hand up for this job in Shepparton was because I wanted to buy baked goods from small country towns.

One of our favourites is the Nagambie Bakery. We’ve tried their apple cakes, carrot cakes, iced coffees, hot chocolates, foccacias and pizza bread, roast beef sandwiches, vanilla slices…

One day, Jamie recommended a particular sweet. It had a biscuit base, a lemon/vanilla cream cheese type-filling and a layer of red jelly.

“That’s a jelly slice, Joan,” Jamie said. “A great Australian treat. You’ve never had one? You should definitely try it, then.”

So we bought the jelly slice and it was, indeed, a treat.

That weekend when I got home from Shepparton, my mum and dad told me that Aunt Tuty was coming for dinner. Aunt Tuty grew up and studied in Indonesia. She came to Australia to do a Masters in Information Technology. She met a nice Australian bloke called Graham and they got married and bought a house in suburban Melbourne.

“Hello Joan,” Aunt Tuty said when she arrived. “How are you? When are you off overseas?” She was carrying a large white tray with a semi-transparent lid.

“What’s in there, Aunty?” I asked.

“I don’t know what it’s called,” she said. She placed it on the kitchen bench and lifted the lid. “Graham’s mother taught me how to make it. It’s very yummy and easy to make too.”

I looked inside to see an ordered array of cake squares with red jelly tops.

“I know what they are!” I cried. “Jelly slices! I had one the other day!”

“Jelly slices,” Aunt Tuty repeated. “Probably. I think Australians like them.”

My mum is working hard to learn how to type Chinese using pinyin. When I’m at home, she asks me things like, “How do you spell cē? What’s the difference between guàn and kuàn?”

When I’m in Shepparton, though, mum has no one to help her — until this week, that is, when she realised she could ask some of the students she helps at school.

When I came home this weekend, mum pounced on me. “Joan, do you know how to type nü in the computer?”

The word nü is Chinese Mandarin for ‘woman’.

I knew the answer to this one. “Um, nü is spelled n and u with the two dots at the top. It’s a special character for the ‘yu’ sound. If you used a normal u, it would sound like nu, as in ‘effort’. The only other word I know that uses ü is lü, as in ‘green’. You can’t type nǚ on the keyboard. You have to type ‘nv’ instead.”

“How did you know that!” mum exclaimed.

“Someone taught me, I guess,” I replied.

“I asked one of my students. He’s a little seven year old and he said, ‘I think you type ‘nv’. Now every time he sees me, he grins and shouts, ‘Did you find it, teacher? Did you find nü in the computer? It was ‘nv’, right?’ Told you so!

“The next day, I asked him how to spell another word.” Mum wrote out the word fēn, which means a ‘part’ or ‘portion’.

“The little boy looked at the word and shook his head. He said, ‘Um. I don’t… I’m not sure… But you can ask him.’ He pointed to one of his fellow classmates. ‘He’ll know! He’s got to Grade 5!’ “

Update 10:47 PM 31 July
For some reason, if you look at the Wikipedia article on pinyin, you can see the ü character with the caron accent (third tone in Chinese). When I copy and paste it into my blog entry, it doesn’t work in most browsers, even browsers where the Wikipedia article displays correctly. Can your browser see this or are they boxes? nǔ nǚ lǜ

The words display correctly on my desktop but not this laptop I’m using now or computers at work.

Today was the second day of our negotiation workshop and the teacher introduced us to a class observer, Ann. Ann was visiting to see how the course could fit into a training program for school teachers.

During the morning break, Ann walked over to me. “Joan, I have to ask… Did you go to this Primary School?” She named a little suburban Roman Catholic primary school.

“Yes!” I was taken aback.

“I taught you!” she said excitedly.

“What?! What’s your surname?” She told me and my jaw dropped. “Mrs F? You taught me in Grade 1! Oh my god, that’s so amazing! You remember me?”

“I remembered your name.” Ann pointed to my name badge. Everyone in the workshop wore a name badge. “Oh, I remember how little and clever you were. You used to love writing poems. Do you still write?”

“I do! I have a website, a blog, which people seem to like reading.” I was delighted.

“And how about your brother, Jason? He was so cute,” she laughed, “and so shy. Is he still shy?”

I was so floored that she remembered both of us and our names from seventeen years ago. “Jason’s doing really well for himself. He’s not shy anymore, he’s very outgoing.”

“The stories I could tell!” Ann said. “I remember when we were at camp and at the concert, everyone had to go on stage and dance. Jason was huddled at the back, so scared. I thought he was going to have an asthma attack, he was that anxious!”

“And another time, we were learning about money. When I got the jar of coins back, just 5 and 10 cent coins, half the jar was empty! I looked at little Jason and his pockets were full and hanging so low. He had take all the coins!”

“I remember that!” I nodded. “Don’t know how I heard about it…”

“Well, it happened once and I thought, ‘Hmm, okay.’ But when it happened a second time, I had to talk to your father.” We both laughed.

“Oh my god, I can’t get over it. That’s so amazing. I was so little and you were huge, and now I’m an adult…”

“And I’m still an adult…” Ann added.

“I’m calling you Ann and not Mrs F…” I shook my head. “Unbelievable. And somehow, we’ve both ended up in the Negotiation class in the conflict resolution program. It’s such a small world.”

Sometimes, before I go to sleep, I think of all the yummy things I could eat for breakfast the next day.

“Oh, I can try cheese and toast…I’ll have some of that apple bake mum made today…I can fry an egg and tomatoes…”

But I wake up and I always crave the same thing: muesli, milk and a banana. This combination has prepared me to face the world most days for the past five or six years. But no longer.

Mum and dad came home from their weekly shopping trip with sad faces. “Joan,” she said, “There will be fewer bananas.” She pointed to the two lonely unripe bananas in our fruit bowl. “Those are the last ones for a while.”

Since Cyclone Larry hit northern Queensland in March this year, the price of bananas has soared. Eighty percent of Australia’s banana crop has been wiped out.

“They’re $7 a kilo now!” Mum exclaimed.

“How much did they used to cost?” I asked.

“Well, I used to get them at the market for as low as 79 cents a kilo. The normal price was about a dollar and even the worst case was $2.99 a kilo.”

I am now seeking alternative fruits to accompany my muesli but I can’t imagine anything satisfactorily replacing the squishy sweet goodness of the banana.

“What’s this?” Dad picked up a thin 2.5 cm long cylinder next to the letter holder. Inside the clear glass tube was a tiny stem of tightly coiled copper wire.

“We don’t know,” I answerd. “It’s been there for a while.”

“It’s got…a solenoid in it.” He looked perplexed. “This is an important component of something.”

“That’s why I didn’t throw it away. It looked important,” Mum said cheerfully.

When mum and I left to go shopping, dad was still studying at the piece in puzzlement.

It was a blue moon on Tuesday. My parents and I went out to dinner then to the 6:40 PM showing of Memoirs of a Geisha. My mum was enthralled by how visually beautiful it was. I ended up with tears that I couldn’t wipe away because I was wearing eye liner.

I am very sad to think of parents having to sell their children.

While I was walking yesterday morning, I spotted a small scrap of white in a garden bed beside the footpath. I was in a hurry so I bent down and scooped it up. As I continued walking, I looked at it. It was a bunny rabbit toy, covered in loose soil and twigs. I brushed the twigs away and it revealed a cute, clean, soft Mashimaro (aka “half-eaten marshmallow”).

Now usually, I’m not at all inspired by Japanese/Korean toons but Korean Rabbit is just soooo cute! If it was any less cute, I’d give him away but I’m going to keep him. I like patting his head and pushing his ears back. He fits nicely in my hand when I wrap my palm around its head.

My brother and I grew up with soft toys. Our ‘Cutie Family’ includes seven smurfs, Tweety and Sylvester Junior. There are some distant relatives in the form of Kiwi toys (the fruit, not the bird or human variety). All our toys have back stories, personalities and voices. Jason and I don’t like getting new toys because it’s a lot of effort integrating them into the family. We have to invent personalities and introduce them to the others with appropriate histories. The last addition to the family was Liddle Smurf, who turned out to be a cunning, nasty piece of work. He’s always picking on Big Smurf (who is unfortunately a bit slow), bouncing on his tummy.

I don’t think Korean Rabbit will be joining the Cutie Family. I’ll just keep him separate and use him as a sort of stress ball. Sorry KR, no personality for you.

I’m entertaining friends in the rumpus room when I hear mum’s call.

“Joan!”

“What, mum?”

Dad rushes down the stairs, holding the phone before him. “It’s Jason,” he says grimly. “He says it’s an emergency.”

I put the phone to my ear.

“Joan!” comes Jason’s frantic voice. “You need to do some emergency programming!”

“Huh?!”

“There’s a problem in Western Australia. Go up to my room and turn on my laptop.”

Confused, I run upstairs.

“What’s going on, Jason?”

“Is the laptop on? You need to open up muvision. It’s a black and yellow icon. Now find the file called ‘main.c’. Go up to the top and scroll down until you reach the function called ‘main’.”

“Function?” I reach back into my hazy past and recall ‘Engineering Programming’ (ie. Java for Dummies).

“Find the ‘while’ loop… It’ll have the word ‘while’ in it.”

“Jason, I have a bunch of computer scientists, mathematicians and electrical engineers downstairs. Do you want to talk to them?”

“No, Joan. You can do it.” He believes in me.

“There’s a line with 2000 or 20000 in it. Do you see it?”

“Yes.”

“Read it to me, every character.”

I hear the intense concentration of silence as I read each letter, square bracket and space. After my litany, he instructs me to make changes.

“Now compile it, Joan.”

“Compile,” I murmur. I look for the ‘compile’ button.

“It’s in the top left. It looks like a pile of paper.”

I click it cautiously. Suddenly, a stream of sentences fills the window at the bottom of the screen. Thankfully, there are none of these “bugs” of which Jason tells me. Jason then leads me through finding the file on the hard disk, renaming it, then compressing it.

As I do this, I think of my guests downstairs, who are probably wondering where their host has disappeared to.

“Now put it on a USB disk and email it from the main computer.”

I fumble with my USB disk (which I normally use to transfer Microsoft Word files), then finally email it to Western Australia.

“Thanks, Joan. I hope that works. Bye.” The dial tone tells me it is over.

Jana showed me the frog pyjamas her mum had bought her.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah,” she agreed.

“Did she think they was cute or something?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess you can wear them at home…”

“This is why I can’t wear anything that mum ever buys me.”

“That’s a shame,” I said. “Mum buys all my clothes. Mum bought all this…” I pointed out my new mohair jumper, my form-fitting black pants, my cute black Mary Jane shoes, my sparkly blue headband. “This is my favourite coat,” I continued. I modelled my hooded black woollen winter coat. “The other day, a random girl ran up to me at Melbourne Central. She said, “Excuse me! Could I ask where you bought your coat from?” and I had to say, “Sorry, my mum bought it for me.” “

“So, your mum dresses you?” Jana asked, fascinated and skeptical.

“No,” I corrected her. “She puts a department store in my wardrobe then I dress me.”