Conventional wisdom

The hardest thing about blogging consistently is not the sitting down each week to tap it out, but the going back to it a fortnight later when when you miss one. Apologies.
Two of our house mates - Ili and Conrad, have got their own place round the corner and have moved out of our Besant Street house in Brisbane, so we are only sharing the place with Marina & Co. - which has immediately made it feel less like a student shared house and more like the poor man's pied à terre that it is.
C's extended contract finished on the 26th with doughnuts but sadly, no beer, given she's 7 months pregnant.
My long-anticipated weekend in Nimbin was not to be, as an unexpected offer of a bursary to attend the ASTC's Novacon in Sydney was impossible to turn down. With only a few days to arrange everything, I booked the cheapest flights and room I could find. I ended up not only flying from the Gold Coast rather than Brisbane airport, but also at inhuman times - I had to set my alarm for 2.45am to catch the return flight. The conference was smaller scale than I expected but with several high-calibre speakers from industry and academia, and excellent opportunities to chat with communications professionals from other parts of Australia. The conference also helped me develop a clearer idea of the tertiary courses in communications studies on offer in Oz - I'm considering enrolling in a communications course over the next year or two.
The art of conference attendance, of course, is skipping the right sessions to maximise your free time. I didn't get it quite right, but still managed to check out a good chunk of Sydney's China Town, Liverpool, Surry Hills and King's Cross districts. I also made my way back to Circular Quay, where C and I spent New Year's Eve 2006/2007 with Dom and Michi, and this time I made it into the Museum of Contemporary Art! Ah Xian's remarkable busts which had delighted me in Brisbane were on display here, alongside some new ones. MCA's highlight for me though, had to be Julie Rrap's Body Double - a great, memorable, un-hectoring, political exhibition!
Gold Coast airport is next to the motorway as you drive South from Brisbane. C picked me up on Sunday morning en-route from Brisbane to Nimbin, and I had my first full week in Nimbin - which seems to have passed in blur of work, except for the two wonderful thunderstorms which we enjoyed from the deck, and the friendly young wallaby joey who joined us for lunch most days.
Somehow this week ended up being a "tie up loose ends" week, so on top of my two day-jobs, I caught up with the stuff I'd promised to do for my Kiwi mate's website, got my mum's B&B website back online and finally got around to installing the IDE and source control software on my PC that I've been meaning to install since August.
The bathroom project continues apace - a snail's pace that is - and as I write, we've got to the point where we can begin sanding the floor tomorrow. I'm still getting a lot of satisfaction out of getting the details right, and the fact of doing work that's less abstract than my day job. Nonetheless, it's starting to feel like the project that will not die.
Its been a great week in Nimbin, and best of all I've got another ten days straight here.

Dub Hammer

After an eight hour day at work, and a three hour antenatal class, the three hour drive back to Brisbane left me absolutely shattered on Monday night. Unfortunately, I had a relatively busy week lined up - I met up with Oscar at Lock'n'Load on Thursday night for some tapas and beers (and to pick up a rather crucial supply of warez). We also went out for a meal at Jazzy Cat and then on for beers at the West End pool hall with Rod and Cherdina (who was our London housemate back in '02) on the Friday night.

We decided to take it very easy on Saturday morning, and had a lie in before bumming round west end buying tropical fruit, drinking flat whites and putting up adverts for our old car. By happy chance, our neighbours across the street were having a yard sale, and we got talking to them as we browsed amongst their cool T shirts and other stuff - it turned out that the T shirt seller (Chad) is also a proprietor of the reggae cafe at the end of the street, which is called Rudekat Records, which is in turn one of the promoters of the Island Time reggae festival on Stradbroke Island in two weeks' time. We'd been hoping to go, but couldn't really afford the tickets. Chad said there were some volunteering places left, so it looks like I have a free ticket for some dogsbody work, some fire-juggling, or perhaps both.
Back in Nimbin, having stopped off en-route to pick up a jackhammer, a tent and a bicycle, we saw that our mama wallaby was back in the garden to feed. She now has a little joey in the pouch, and as she hid behind the sheets on our washing line and picked off the tastiest leaves from the trees, the little guy would occasionally pop his head out to have a look around. Thanks to the zoom lens Alex sent me, I was able to get a shot of the joey, doing "watching me watching you".
When not wildlife watching, we got busy with the bathroom renos, having hired a pneumatic jackhammer, which I used to break up and remove the cement slab which had supported the tiles in the bathroom. This was tiring, dusty, unpleasant work, but a big part of a job which the plumbers had quoted us $3000 for in total - and which we should finish ourselves for $500 and bit of sweat!

Boing boing dot not

We've had a few more wallaby visitors this week. Two of them are the same mum and joey we saw six weeks ago - except that the little guy is definitely too big to hop back in now! You slowly get blasé about these creatures, but they really are great - like jackrabbits on steroids and pogo sticks. They're nervous, like rabbits or deer, and can be persuaded to ignore you even though they know you're there - if you're quiet and still. As soon as you move or make a noise, they startle as if they hadn't seen you in the first place, which can be disconcerting if you're up close - that first startled hop is like a six-foot tall spring going off.
I suspect the reason we've had more pouched visitors is that we're looking after Suzie from downstairs's dog, Bruce. Bruce is so lazy that he's hardly ever wandered downstairs into the front garden while we've been looking after him, so the wallabies feel it's a safe place to bring their joeys for a feed. He's an often dumb, often irritating, and always predictable beast, but he's also loyal and affectionate, and his (sometimes pathetic, but incredibly earnest) attempts to understand what you want him to do have reminded me how much I miss having a dog around the house. Must. Get. Puppy.
We thought the region's biggest monthly craft market at The Channon, 20 minutes' drive South would be a good day out with Bruce. We've been along most months since we moved here, but hadn't noticed was the strict "no pets" rule (it's a good idea, but I think it's the first outdoor market I've ever been to that does not allow pets) so we drove there, but missed out on the market, and poor Bruce had to jump back in the car and sit in the back seat again all the way home with us casting him resentful glances. Next time we go I'll post some photos from the Channon - it's a unique place.
The rest of my Nimbin time was spent pottering and being generally unproductive. This week's DIY SNAFU was my attempt to build a simple step from garden path to patio - after a couple of false starts and quite a bit of head-scratching, I ended up leaving the job and setting aside time to think about it instead: Even the smallest jobs can be harder than it seems to do well, and a step is no exception. I can think of ugly solutions, expensive solutions, and very longwinded solutions - but thus far no simple, cheap, elegant solution.
We are at a difficult stage as we struggle to transition from monolithic full time jobs to multiple smaller sources of income, where we have to remember to budget time for all the additional factors involved - the networking, the tax and compliance crap, and the time-juggling between different clients and jobs. All my other pieces of work (put together) are about to overtake the time I spend doing my "day job", which is a crucial psychological milestone for me - even though it would pull the rug out from under me if I were made redundant tomorrow, it somehow opens up possibilities and options that weren't there before, from the obvious (I can work more hours some weeks, less others if I want) to things I hadn't previously considered (if I'm doing work for six clients at any one time, the chances of making interesting contacts through work are about six times greater - and if the average duration of a piece of work is only a third as long as I used to stay with one employer, it's about 18 times greater).
There is a related factor I didn't foresee about my current weekly commute to Brisbane too - basically I'm jealous of C; because she's in the village all week, she is more involved in local life, and she's making connections and getting involved with local groups and clubs... while I still feel like I'm a commuter-belt villain. But I'm working on it!