My view and thoughts on everything!

"advised me to travel from Sydney to Ashfield (approx 15kms) via Broken Hill (approx 1,000kms). Naturally I took the short route...and, wait for it, bus spotting!!!" At this time of the year most media outlets do a review of the past twelve months for their readers. Well, I thought, why shouldn't I do one too? After all, since I have started writing blogs I have had hits from 37 countries (latest one - Guatemala thanks Rak!). Also, it will act as a nice filler while I get around to writing my next 'proper' blog. So without further ado, here is my blog review since I started writing them five months ago. Back in July I started my blog life with an introduction of myself. It is always a great idea to let your audience know a few things about you, the writer. Having said this I am not sure what riveting snippets of information a reader would have gleaned from the twenty facts about myself. July was also the time when I encountered my first bus ride to nowhere. For so

"Once the email has been received there is no getting out of participating. It is very much compulsory participation by peer pressure!....I, for one, always break out into a cold sweat when my hand reaches into the hat for that folded piece of paper" December is the time of year when office workers are faced with a serious challenge. Normally, it can lead to higher stress levels, and even major arguments. You see, it's all to do with a particular December deadline. You know which one I am on about - the Secret Santa (or Kris Kringle) present giving occasion! In all honesty any work related, or year end deadlines, take second, or even third priority, when it comes to Secret Santa! For the uninitiated out there in Blogland, Secret Santa is where an office worker pulls a name of a co-worker out of a hat and then has to buy them a present up to a certain value. The 'Secret' part comes into it as you are not supposed to reveal who you have bought a present for. What no

"My reply was very affirmative "oh, cool" I said, wondering what was being planned....I could become the first 'back of the head' supermodel!" If you are a regular visitor to my blog you will know that I work in the Sydney CBD. What you may not know is that I work out of two offices - lucky me! The main one is the head office which is situated in one of Sydney's tallest buildings. I refer to it as the 'Mothership' and this moniker has nothing to do with the excellent Led Zeppelin compilation of the same name. The other office is much smaller and located near the north side of Darling Harbour. It's actually an office we share with an eco-friendly tourism company. While it lacks a lot of the facilities and city views of the Mother Ship, it suits our needs well. The staff from the tourism company are great ,and we all have a good time sharing the office, even though the air-con can be cold at times. Well the other day I walked into the shared ki

"there was no staff around which seemed strange. Maybe they were eaten by the alien looking pods for brunch....I expected tentacles to come down from the ceiling of the pod and attach themselves to my head and suck out all of my memory and then eat my brain" Working in the Sydney CBD can be a great experience. Even greater than watching Big Brother or Australian Idol on television, and much better than listening to your old Bros or Bon Jovi albums! There are numerous café ’s, restaurants and drinking holes in this part of the city for us workers to frequent. Most of them offer a wide range of food and drinks for hungry and thirsty workers to try. Close by is the main shopping strip that revolves around Pitt Street Mall where workers can shop ‘til they drop during their lunch break. Anyway, one of my co-workers, Caramel – author of the mighty http://bunnobumpkin.blogspot.com/ mentioned that there is a place in Sydney where workers can have a have a twenty minute nap in a sl

"I was also not sure if Posh Spice is the sort of WAG we want at Ebbsfleet...That was until my 4 year old headbutted me in the stomach, and reality was restored!" A few weeks ago I was reading one of the free newspapers that you get in Sydney (in fact, there is only one, as the other two freebies are glossy magazines with trashy articles and job vacancies) when I came upon an interesting article. The article that caught my attention related to a soccer club that the newspaper had become a part owner of. The club in question was called Ebbsfleet United. When I read this my eyes nearly popped out of my head! Luckily they didn't otherwise I'd have lots of trouble writing this blog. Ebbsfleet United (or Gravesend & Northfleet as they used to be known to us locals) are one of the teams that I have supported since being a youngster. In fact, I was there in October to see the 'Fleet' beat Torquay United 2-1! The other thing that puzzled me was the fact that the n

"The subject of my laughter was because the bookmark was advertising, wait for it, the 'National Public Toilet Map'!!...After all, I was in Canberra, a city that has 'circuits' instead of roundabouts and a Parliament that has a lawn on its roof" A couple of days ago, my wife and I thought we would drive down to Canberra and attend an event held by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Our main reason for going was that a good friend of ours, Jia, was one of the keynote speakers at this event. We had a great time and got to talk to a number of ICRC members about their work across the globe. As we bade our farewell (we were driving back to Sydney the same day - 600 kms round trip), I noticed a stand that contained some informational leaflets. I decided to check them out while waiting for my wife. There was one in particular that drew my attention. It was shaped like a bookmark and had the Australian Government emblem on it. I decided to pick it up

"One can only hope that Santa has an air-conditioned sleigh, otherwise he is going to be reeking really bad in that fur lined red cloak!....Suddenly, you notice a passenger standing up holding onto a rail with armpit raised" Even though it’s not quite summer here in Sydney, it is certainly starting to feel like it. Already the temperatures are rising, and the nights are getting sticky (and that’s not because Justin Timberlake was in town recently he he he). This year it seems that the humidity has started earlier than normal, as we don’t often experience that humid, clammy feeling until January at the earliest. So for the vast majority of people living in Sydney, we can expect perspiration to be the order of the day for the next three months. One can only hope that Santa has an air-conditioned sleigh, otherwise he is going to be reeking really bad in that fur lined red cloak! With the possibility of reindeer droppings, the mind boggles as to what the combined smell would be l

"It is quite surreal to walk into a department store and see these 'winter images' ... Try cooking a roast turkey with all the trimmings when the mercury is nudging 40C! It's not a pleasurable experience at all!" This morning I took my two daughters to the local supermarket as we had to pick up a few odds and ends. Although it is our local supermarket I had not visited it for a few weeks. Partly because I had been overseas, and partly because, well, I hadn't! Anyway, as I walked into the store, straight away my eldest spotted some Christmas candy sticks (sort of striped walking sticks - but obviously not on the same scale!). Immediately she said 'Dad, I think we should get some for Christmas". My reply was "not today, Christmas is many weeks away yet." When we got home, I realised that Christmas is not a long way off at all but only five weeks away. My second realisation was that I need to start seriously thinking about the family Chri

"The milk only lasted 3 days! Yes, that is correct, just 72 hours!!...So far, no one has shown any signs of a milk addiction" This is a follow up to my two earlier blogs where has all the milk gone and looks like the milk is still disappearing where I mentioned that I must be living on top of a ‘Milk Triangle’ similar to that of the Bermuda Triangle. In this case it is our milk supply that is going missing and not planes or boats! Well, I can announce, rather frustratedly, that this problem has gone from bad to worse! Last Sunday we purchased 15 litres of milk for consumption by the family. At present our ‘family’ consists of three adults and two young children (aged 5 and 4). For a ‘normal’ family 15 litres of milk would probably last the best part of a week, or even longer. Alas, this is not the case in our household. The milk only lasted 3 days! Yes, that is correct, just 72 hours!! Putting on my mathematical hat that means 1 litre was being consumed every 4.8 hours. Sin

"The class, oops introduction night, started with….a prayer! I began to think, in my groggy food poisoning state, that maybe I had turned up to the wrong place!....Then the Principal asked if there were any more comments while fixing me with a steely glare. I looked away and pretended I hadn’t heard the question." A couple of weeks ago my wife and I attended an introduction night for a local Catholic school. The reason for this was because we are thinking on enrolling our eldest daughter into it when the new school term starts in late January 2008. This school would represent the first year of ‘big school’ for her. Since mentioning the words ‘big school’ our eldest has suddenly become ‘grown up’ and even started to boss around our youngest! It’s amazing how children change their habits so quickly (even quicker than what a Nun could do – very bad joke!) when they think they are growing up. Anyway, there were a few issues about attending this introduction night. Firstly, my wif

"Workmates also suffered my powers of persuasion and I managed to influence Jia and the Bunno Bumpkin to take up blog writing!....I am popular in the US city of Tulsa as it is my 6th most popular city! " When I started writing blogs I didn't really think that anyone would be remotely interested in them. To my surprise I soon found out that people all around the globe were clicking on to my blog to read my tales of catching buses to Kellyville, watching Fairy DVD's with my daughters, discovering a Milk triangle (Bermuda Triangle for our milk supply) in the house, travelling to Ashfield from Sydney via Broken Hill! and so on. Even more surprising, especially to myself, was that I have continued to write blogs at fairly regular intervals. I honestly believed that I would be able to write 6, or maybe 7, and then that would be it. I also thought that the novelty of having a blog site would wear off. How wrong could I be! This blog is my 24th effort since mid July. I soon r

"In fact, the amount of milk purchased would have been enough to feed all the starving children of Africa!...Could it be that when I am sleeping my daughters are tiptoeing downstairs, using the telephone to call their toddler friends and inviting them over for a midnight party A couple of months ago I wrote a blog called 'where has all the milk gone?' //http://dw-perspectives.blogspot.com/2007/09/where-has-all-milk-gone.html The premis of this was that despite buying copious amounts of milk it always seemed to vanish. In fact, the amount of milk purchased would have been enough to feed all the starving children of Africa! Anyway, things settled down soon after I published that blog and I thought that, maybe, it was just a blip on the radar. After all, not every plane disappears over the Bermuda Triangle. So it seemed that my very own 'milk triangle' had decided not to make all our milk disappear every time. Naturally my two daughters (and even my wife) seem t

'I apologised and handed him a $10 note only to find the shop assistant still looking bemused. I then realised that I had given him 10 Hong Kong dollars and not Aussie ones!...you can be assured a 5 and 4 year old will not let you sleep, especially when they are continuing with the rugby tackles' Well I've been back in the land 'Down Under' for just over a week now and I really feel like I never went on an overseas trip. I guess that is the thing with reality. Once you arrive back home your holiday, trip abroad or whatever the reason was that you ventured overseas for seems very surreal. I suppose there's always the photographs for you to look at to remind you of your 'great adventure across the ocean'. One of the things all travellers have to get over, especially when flying half way around the world, is jet lag. Now jet lag is not just the fact that you are in a different time zone. It is also about having to deal with a different climate; culture; lan

"As any English person will tell you Heathrow is one of those places that you simply detest, and is on par with Milton Keynes.....However, with my Lewis Hamilton driving skills, I managed to get to the check in counter really quickly" The time had come for me to head back to Australia after my 5 week stay in good ol' Blighty. The downside to this, aside from saying goodbye to family and friends, was the fact that I would have to head to Heathrow to catch my flight. As any English person will tell you Heathrow is one of those places that you simply detest, and is on par with Milton Keynes and, for the Aussies, Canberra in the 'detesting stakes'. The reason being is that Heathrow is always hard to get to if there are traffic delays on any of the connecting roads and, once inside one of the 4 huge terminals (number 5 is nearly operational), it is always quite difficult to get to your departure gate on time. Naturally my trip to Heathrow was always going to be stre

"At one stage I had doubled my money to 40p. Wow, I thought, I am rich!...we thought one of the spotters would have a cardiac arrest as three different types of buses all arrived at the same time " Saturday I had the chance to do something very quintessentially English. A trip to the Kent seaside. So off I traipsed with my mother and sister in tow to the exotically named coastal town of Herne Bay. For the uninitiated Herne Bay is situated on the North Kent coast and is sort of where the Thames Estuary starts. It also has a wind farm clearly visible in the distance. The turbines certainly look like something form a Jules Verne novel. Unlike other resorts around the world (Ibiza, Hawaii, Malta, Gold Coast etc) you don't really go to the beach at Herne Bay to get a suntan. That's not to say the sun doesn't shine as it does on the rare hot and sunny summer days. It's just that the beach is typically English and has pebbles instead of sand! Many foreigners find it

"maybe Doctor Who put me in the Tardis and, voila, its back to the Seventies....to take out a second mortgage on your house to buy a ticket to see your old faves" Since being back in the UK I have been experiencing feelings of deja vu. Naturally, deja vu can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what it is. Well in this case I feel that I have been transported back to the late Seventies. The funny thing is I don't remember being teleported back approximately 28 years. Maybe Captain Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise did it while I was sleeping, or maybe Doctor Who put me in the Tardis and, voila, its back to the Seventies. Strange thing is I didn't need my passport! Despite my youthful age(?) I do remember a fair bit of the Seventies as I was still at school and going through the growing pains of being a teenager. I recall quite clearly that I was a music and sports fan as were all of my fellow friends and schoolmates. In fact I still am. I do recall being

"there are more choices of lotteries than there are of breakfast cereal....I can imagine a collective sigh from the anorak brigade" Every time I come back to the UK I always notice a few a few changes to the culture of the country. On the plus side, for example, it's easier to get a nice cup of coffee in virtually any town or village. A few years ago to get a cappuccino (aka frothy coffee) meant putting a plastic disposable cup under a machine and pushing the correct coffee button. What you would end up with, however, was a watered down coffee with hardly any froth on it. In fact, it probably tasted like washing up water after all the cutlery and crockery from a Sunday roast had been cleaned! One of the last bastions that the UK had resisted for ages (apart from sushi) was that of holding a national lottery. From memory, I cannot remember when it was initiated but having done a quick search on the Internet my friend Mr Google advises me that it was 1994. In contrast, Aust

"I have often thought about offering my services as a 'drought breaker'.....they always have facial expressions akin to a child opening presents on Christmas Day!" For the first time in the past fortnight the weather here in England has actually been superb for more than one consecutive day. Now I know to a lot of people around the world, especially in Australia, that might be surprising. Indeed it is to me as well. Normally when I am back here in the Old Dart it rains on virtually every day of my stay. For example, a couple of years ago it rained on 28 of the 36 days I was here. Even last year during the English summer it rained on more than 20 days of my five week visit. At the beginning of my holiday the country was in drought, by the end of it the dams and reservoirs were virtually full! I have often thought about offering my services as a 'drought breaker' as it always seems to rain when I am away from Australia! I imagine that I could charge large

“It could be said, however, that one of our greatest antiquities is indeed the Australian Prime Minister!….. or launching a midnight military style raid on Auntie Ethel’s home looking for that one item that could be worth a lot of money” During the past seven days or so I have had the pleasure (or not) of having watched a large number of television shows. I often find it amazing, that when I am in England, how the variety of programmes differ from that which is seen in Australia. For example, there are more quiz and cooking shows in England than compared to Australia. Chefs such as Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay and Ainsley Harriott are far better known than members of the British government! In fact, every single day of the week there would have to be at least two or three cookery shows on offer to us the viewer. Obviously, the public must be following the recipes judging by the widening waistlines of the vast majority of Britons! However, there is another category of shows that are extr

"I decided to ask an official (who were rarer to spot than the Loch Ness Monster).....I thought 'great' trust me to get the lunatic!!" It's amazing what a difference 72 hours can make. One minute you are literally in Sydney and the next you are in England! Well this is something that I have experienced in the last few days. On last Tuesday I received an urgent phone call that required me to travel to the Mother Country as soon as possible. By Friday morning I was in Kent having a cup of tea with my mother and sister! If anyone has had to travel at the last minute they will know that there are a lot of things that you need to do. First thing is to book a flight. Simple enough, really. However, in practice not as easy as it may seem. Virtually all airline websites will not let you book a flight within 72 hours notice. However, there are a few that will. With some great help from a work colleague (Jia) I was able to book a flight with Virgin Atlantic. My first minor

"she was the only leader who could spell ‘existentialism’....he made Vladimir Putin and our Johnny streak down the corridors of the Intercontinental Hotel while singing ‘achy break heart’! At last the APEC circus has departed good ol’ Sydney town and we can now get back to normal. All bar one of the leaders have paid their $4 for an airport trolley, loaded up their luggage, submitted the departure tax and have left Australia with their cuddly koalas, kangaroos and beef jerky. The leader who has pulled the short straw, however, is the Canadian PM who has stayed on for more talks with our PM John Howard, and also to collect more Australian soft toys (I recommend the wombat!). The main conversational topic around the hot water urn in most offices revolves around what happened during the last couple of days of the APEC summit. The reason for this is that all the meetings were held behind closed doors. Well, my avid readers, I can divulge what went on as I was privy to some confiden

"is the house situated in the middle of a milk Bermuda Triangle?.....the other suspect is the family pet a 14 year old cockatiel" One of the great things about being at home for an extended weekend (courtesy of the APEC summit - good onya lads!), is that you get an extra day to do whatever you want. Obviously that depends on what plans you have with other members of your family. At present my father in law is staying with us so that makes 5 people in the one household. I mention the number of people living in our household for a very good reason that will become obvious later on. As the long weekend was starting on Friday my father in law and I thought we would go to the nearest shopping centre on Thursday night and purchase some milk and cheese as we were not sure if any shops would be open on Friday. As it was late night shopping we didn't get to the supermarket until 8.30pm. Once there we were in and out in a flash. Well, not quite a flash, but more like 15 minut