We have a parking space in our apartment building, which we don’t use. So we put up an ad online for someone to rent it.
Peter emailed us. ‘Hello, I live in Adelaide. I’m coming to Melbourne to busk with a piano. Can I keep the piano in the carpark? The piano is an Kawai upright piano on a small trolley and I push it into the CBD/Southbank each day. Would having a piano on a small trolley instead of a car in the carpark be okay?”
So here it is — the piano parked in our car spot.
This is getting to be a bit of a theme, after my line up of dead things in September last year.
Why am I doing this? They look like they’re sleeping. It’s a Sleeping Beauty kind of surrealism. The duck is particularly striking. It’s still plump.
I love forms. There’s just something about boxes. Seven years ago, I was crushed by missing out on Australia’s 2006 census. My disappointment was finally wiped by my participation as Person 1 in the 2011 census.
So you’ll understand my joy when on a work trip in New Zealand, I found these forms tucked under the door of my hotel room.
You may be thinking, ‘That’s ridiculous. How many people in the hotel are actually going to fill in the form?’
I’ll have you know that the next morning, I walked into the lift and there were two other people. All three of us had the white census envelope, ready to give to the reception staff.
They’re almost finished — two tall apartment buildings across the road from us, which have been under construction since we moved to our home almost two years ago.
I had the vague notion that once people start moving in, our whole street would be lit up with activity and cars. Thinking a bit more, though, I realise that this probably won’t happen.
My brother moved into his new apartment building just a few weeks ago. When we visit him, we hardly run into anyone. At street level, it’s as quiet as ever.
Even our own apartment complex, which is more than 20 years old and well and truly populated –Â four out of five times that I leave my front door, I don’t meet anyone.
Strange, isn’t it?
I guess it means that even at high home densities (say, 60+ dwellings per hectare), the actual people density is still low. It’s not like Hong Kong or the Melbourne CBD at lunch time. You need to pack people into a restaurant or office before you start to feel the urban buzz. Two people every 70 square metres for an apartment is just not busy.
I’m not an idiot but I’ve ‘failed’ the Australian passport interview twice now.
The first time, I didn’t bring my birth certificate. There’s small print on the form saying that if my Citizenship papers don’t have my place of birth and sex on it, then I need a birth certificate (and if the birth certificate isn’t in English, then it needs to be officially translated).
Today, I was knocked back straight away for having my form printed double-sided. Now this really annoyed me. Why didn’t the first interviewer tell me this? Why doesn’t it say on the form to print single sided?
Two other missteps averted: again in small print on the form, you have to bring photocopies of some (but not all) your original certificates. Also, your passport photo can’t have shadows. So I went to Officeworks to get photocopies and redid my passport photos on the weekend.
So. Why is the process for getting a new passport so hard? Unnecessarily hard, is my view.
Late last year, we visited Sydney for the bright lights and the wild life.
We saw this poster very close to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Someone has expressed his or her genuine appreciation for the tip off.
The centre of Sydney’s CBD is marked with the City Wilderness Trail. After seeing signs for birds, rats and insects, the final sign we saw was for a human. Click the photo to read.
Small things such as this sign in the Blue Mountains bring us much amusement. As you can see, Damjan and I can be inexpensive to entertain.
This is a simple interactive website that lets you zoom in to micro and nano, all the way to yocto scales and smaller! Then you can go the other way to the whole observable universe.
Really fantastic — The Scale of the Universe.
‘Okay, Joan, we’re coming over to the city to see the flower!’
My mum was on the phone. Last night, I had excitedly called her to say that the world’s biggest flower had started blooming in the Botanic Gardens. It was the first time in the seven years that the Gardens had been looking after it.
The flower is the Amorphophallus titanum. Wikipedia describes how the shorter and more widely used name, Titan Arum, was coined.
The popular name “titan arum” was invented by the broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough for his BBC series The Private Life of Plants, in which the flowering and pollination of the plant were filmed for the first time. Attenborough felt that constantly referring to the plant as Amorphophallus on a popular TV documentary would be inappropriate.
It is also called the ‘corpse flower’ because it smells like rotting flesh. That makes it attractive to beetles and flies, which help it to pollinate.
Such is the difficulty of getting Titan Arum to bloom that Wikipedia has a list of publicised titan arum blooms in cultivation. When I looked at Wikipedia on Boxing Day, the Melbourne bloom wasn’t listed yet. It’s now there and I feel proud that I knew about it before Wikipedia and the news media.
See? You don’t need to be constantly on Twitter to get the scoop. You just need to live next door to the news action and stumble across it by accident on a public holiday.
We arrived at 10:30 and waited around 25 minutes to get in. Our family and friends who came later in the day and the following day had a one hour wait.
Here is the bloom. You see the green stalk-and-leaf plant to the left of it? That’s another Titan Arum plant. I understand that each plant can take one of two forms: the stalk or the flower (inflorescence). We’re lucky that one of them decided to be a flower.
Sunrise and Channel 10 were in the glasshouse the whole time we were there. The Age went one better and put together a time lapse video of the flower opening up overnight.
‘Hello, what would you like today?’ asked the teenage girl behind the counter.
‘The roast chicken with potato salad,’ said the man before me in the cafe queue.
The girl took out the plate, spooned on a pile of potato salad, then hovered a pair of tongs above the tray of chicken.
‘Um, is there a particular piece you want?’ she asked.
‘I’d like a thigh piece,’ the man replied.
The girl lowered her tongs, uncertain. She turned around to her manager and asked ‘Which one is the thigh?’
‘The triangle one.’
‘Oh, okay.’
Sometimes when I get to a pedestrian crossing, I press the button for the crossing signal without thinking about it.
At this stage, there is a lone car slowing down to stop as I walk across. I realise that I could have let the driver go, then slipped over the road without a green ‘walk’ signal.
‘I feel guilty about pressing the button,’ I said to Damjan. ‘We didn’t have to stop the car.’
‘Well, you’re entitled to use the pedestrian lights,’ Damjan said.
I thought about it then added, ‘In fact, I’m actually legally obliged to use the lights.’
‘True,’ Damjan agreed.