Verbosities

Managed to snag a phone number in a bar last night. Haven’t done that in awhile, but somehow was able to ask without my voice cracking or giving her too many easy outs.

Yay.

The hardest parts of my days don’t have anything to do with work. I get home around 530pm local, which translates back to 230am Chicago, and leaves me without anyone (Lydia) to talk to on IM. I didn’t really realize how much I depended on the IM and instant Twitter gratification, but I do. Really does make those evenings feel terribly isolating at times.

I need a crew.

Not likely to happen overnight, but mixing it up with a meal that isn’t eaten alone or with a coworker (delightful people, but you know what I mean) every now and again might be nice.

Part of this is probably that I’m in Brisbane for my longest stretch so far without shipping off to Jabiru. It is a little easier to forget loneliness when the scenery keeps changing, you know?

Still no regrets. Just knowledge that it’s self investment and improvement that is going to make the difference in the long run. Online dating, approaching people in public (hello anxiety), and not worrying on rejection represent a good start.

And hey, if I can get an attractive woman to give me her phone number instead of an excuse, I might do alright at this.

(side note: T-Minus eight days until I have broadband wifi again. Praise Jeebus.)

There are things I’m going to miss about this temp housing hookup.

Last night, I slept with both slider doors to both of my balconies (bedroom and living room – both south-facing) wide open, and caught the cool breeze all night long. This morning I’m out on my living room balcony with my coffee and my iPad, watching the city wake up around me.

It’s been delightful to have this outdoor space available to me, and even better that the weather here is so damn pleasant that I can take advantage of the outdoors twelve months out of twelve.

That being said, I have a tentatively confirmed delivery date for my stuff on 21-April. Yay indeed.

My employee didn’t quit yesterday, which was a surprise. I think she’s running tight with money, though, and is looking to suck a paycheck for as long as possible. Until then, there’s some uncomfortable tension. She won’t even look me in the eye, which is crazy to me, but whatever.

I’m hoping I can get this resolved by Easter weekend, which is a five day break here in Australia this year. Somehow, the phases of the moon aligned with Anzac Day, which is like our Memorial Day, and we got an extended weekend out of the deal. If I can go into five days off without a looming employee crisis over my head, that’ll be helpful.

I think I might hire a car and drive to Ikea this weekend. I need lamps and outdoor furniture (want an outdoor couch, actually), and that need trumps my self-imposed moratorium on driving, which I’ve held steady since early January. Was hoping to stretch that into a year or more, but our next site deployments are going to make that unrealistic quickly.

And yes, I am a little freaked about driving on the wrong side of the road.

And no, I’m well over the fear that might have turned that last statement into an extended metaphor.

So, in about three hours I find out if my employee here in Brisbane is going to quit on me or not.

I won’t give anything away as to which way I’m hoping this goes, but I think her panic attack last week and fear of trying to communicate with me (oy) bodes well for one direction over the other.

Whatever.

So, this apartment I’ve rented a couple neighborhoods away is sitting as an empty box at $475/wk until I can get my shit through customs. That can’t happen a moment too soon, as I’ve been living off (what is marketed as) a 3G air card since January. Can’t download, get throttled near the end of my billing cycle, and can barely use the damn thing at all from about 5p-7p.

That’s alright, as you’re all sleeping then anyway.

In my apartment there’s a tv bench built into the wall (or, built off of the wall) which has some shelving, presumably for components, underneath. This would be fine, except that the craftsman who designed this thing didn’t leave any open space behind the bench to string cords. So, I’m either going to have a bunch of components sitting on top of the tv bench with my tv in an already tight space, or I’m spending a few hundred on some sort of wireless hd solution. I’m expecting the first few months I’ll just stack the components and handle it that way. Who cares if it’s ugly? Cable tv!

By the way, I get six real channels here, with one of those essentially a public access channel. Well, I say “essentially,” as it has roughly the worst and most amateur production you’ve ever seen. Guitar Gods is the only show worth staying with when grazing, and even that gets insufferable when they inject local shredders in between Zeppelin videos. My seventh channel is a silent security cam feed of my front door. Yes, I’ve watched that for more than twenty straight minutes. Beats netball.

So, cable and Internet get hooked up on the 15th, and current projections have my stuff available for delivery on the 20th. Fingers crossed, as I only have the 21st available personally that week to take delivery (Jabiru for training sessions all week leading up), and I’m desperate to have my couch, bed, and mixer for my five-day Easter/Anzac weekend. If I have to stay in a hotel all weekend (my temp apt lease will be up), I’m going to be miserable.

It’s not too wrong that all I want to do with my holiday is sit on my couch with my feet on my coffee table watching my choice of more than seven channels in hd while waiting for my baguettes to proof, right?

This thing is pretty nifty. Yes, I was a Droid owner, and yes, I did work with Motorola, but I wasn’t about to pay extra for an Android tablet with an immature app market.

Anyway, WordPress app is loaded, and I can now blog from my iPad. Whee!

$22 here buys you one beer and four anemic drumsticks in something resembling a bbq sauce.

I mention this for a couple of reasons. First, QA Hotel, if you’re going to call these things “Buffalo legs,” let’s get with the Frank’s or at least the tabasco. Second, it costs a lot to live here.

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday about my ex-pat/relo package, then dinner with my team’s recruiter and her husband. In both conversations, the topic of money came up, and…

I have to buy a refrigerator and a washing machine for my apartment. I’m annoyed that I didn’t know this was standard Aussie rental practice, in that you’ll get an oven, a dishwasher, and a dryer, but neither a fridge nor a washing machine. That’s going to run me anywhere from $500 (used & cheap) to $2k (new & decent-not-exceptional). Add to that all the things I have to replace due to voltage issues (anything with a motor like my coffee grinder, although I’m keeping my mixer), and the things I had to buy to get my entertainment center set for Aussie use (a transformer and a PAL-to-NTSC converter – retail price combined $500, which is cheaper than buying a new TV), and I’m out of pocket $1500-$2k minimum for shit I wouldn’t have had to buy had I stayed in the States.

Without getting into the details, I did ask for a relo bonus, but was told my salary increase was plenty. I didn’t push my luck at that point. I worked hard to come up with a rough cost-of-living number, but wasn’t properly prepared to understand the cost of the ramp up to that steady-state rent/bills/groceries total I had put together.

This stuff is really small potatoes, though. I’m an adult, I have money in the bank, and I can buy a refrigerator if I have to.

I’ve always used exaggerated anger on minor indignities as a coping mechanism for dealing with the bigger stuff. For example, it wouldn’t be too far from the truth if I said to you, “Nothing makes me angrier than having to pick something up off the floor that I just accidentally dropped.*” I can channel that anger in the moment, release it, and have more room in my soul to handle the big ticket items. Whoever said “don’t sweat the small stuff” doesn’t have to spend time living inside my head.

*You can add “hourglass/spinning wheel for more than three seconds on my computer,” “the extended WinXP boot cycle,” “realizing just after the door shuts behind me that I have forgotten something and need to take four whole steps back to fetch it,” and many, many others to that list of frustrations.

When something larger is bothering me, then, it has tended to live in this sort of zen purgatory, where what should be constructive thought towards resolution is instead replaced in a sort of surrogate sense by an active search for whatever I can get angry about instead.

I can’t really talk about money right now, and I’m in no danger of running out of it. But between cost of living and poor preparation, I’ve got a potential problem looming, and I’m curious how it’s all going to turn out.

Frankly, it’s even odds right now that I’m going to have a difficult decision to make before the year is up. If you see me getting angry about the lack of meat on a drumstick, you’ll just have to trust that I need that quick burn to settle the rest of it back down to a steady simmer.