{yawn, blinkblink, stretch}

what, is it next year already?

told you i wasn't dead.

someone stole the front of my gay bike yesterday night. forks, mudguard and wheel, tried to get the handlebars but they didn't get that far.
very upsetting, esp. as the mudguard is designed for that silly bike, i probably wont find another one. expensive too.
I took up walking yesterday...

last week i was in charming hobart, installing experimenta's touring show; climbing up ladders, cordless drill in hand, that sort of stuff. In the bits of time between doing this I got to see some of hobart;

back in the olden days when jeff was premier in victoria, he went on a trip to NYC and on his return he decreed that all taxis should be yellow. In Hobart they just seem to choose whatever colour appeals to them; red, dark green, white, it doesn't matter, this laissez faire attitude is not limited to taxis; I saw at least three different colours of police car cruising around pretending not to know eachother.

I added a new spoon to my international $2 shop souvenir rack; Chickenfeed. Chickenfeed is a shop that had such an effect on Hobart that people speak of life pre and post-chickenfeed. They have the finest cheap tool selection of any $2 shop i have yet visited, not quite as good as Arthur Daley's or In Touch Imports for electronic and AV stuff, but Matt and I spent up enough to end up overweight on our luggage.

While hobart is not renowned as an entertainment mecca Matt and i did manage to find a little amusement here and there; when we tried to order food and coffee at zum cafe, the look of abject terror in the eyes of the workers was worth every cent, it was like they were just happily lounging in air-conditioned comfort, surrounded by tasty food without a care in the world, when all of a sudden, these people just come in and start asking for stuff- How am I supposed to know what's in that roll. how does the register work again? what price is all this stuff anyway? why wont they just go away? "umm...hold on, i'll just write this down on a bit of paper...what did you want again?"

In Kaos [we should have known...] the staff were a little more self-assured; we eventually realised that this was because they spend all their time practising walking around looking busy. Matt and I ordered burgers, thinking that they seemed fairly straightforward and have traditionally been thought of as fast food... about 35 minutes after ordering I saw the chips going into the deep fryer and could not help but see it as a bad omen, i could understand that the two other tables that had ordered food before us might want fed also but i still couldn't see why it was taking so long.

When the food did finally arrive [50 min post order] I understood the delay; the recipe for the burgers was such a closely kept secret that no single person was allowed to know the whole thing, instead a team of highly skilled professionals worked on it, one after the other working on a single element, never meeting or knowing each others identity, it is only at the last moment that the individual components are slotted together and assembled into a meal. The unfortunate result of this, apart from the wait, is a burger that has all the ingredients of a burger but none of the practical, pick-up-and-eat qualities we have come to expect. What arrived was something resembling a barbell; two wide, flat bits of toasted bun on either end of a skinny and precariously balanced tower of burger, tomato, egg and sundry other ingredients, surrounded by frightened chips.

When i had the misfortune to end up there again at least i knew what to expect, i waited patiently while they dried out my fish to chewy perfection.