Incidents and accidents

The bikes have been great. But there have been two recent incidents (or rather, one incident and one accident) that have dimmed their appeal.

The first is that the management company of our building is no longer allowing people to keep their bikes under the stairways in the courtyard. Under the stairways is a dead space, unused for anything else. No one has an apartment down there, and no access is blocked by bikes stored there. But management have decreed that bikes must not be kept there anymore, and they're going to take anything stored in any common areas. Now we have to lug our bikes up two stories every day, which makes them less appealing.

The accident occured as I was riding home from work on Friday. I was coming down a hill, and coming up to a red light. A taxi was stopped at the red light, but it wasn't pulled in or in any way indicating that it was about to disgorge passengers. Suddenly, the passenger opened his door into the bike lane, right in front of me. I was going at a resonable clip, downhill, and there was nowhere for me to swerve to avoid the door - there was a parked car to my left and the taxi to my right. I slammed smack into the door and flew off my bike, over the car door and landed in the street. Nothing is broken, but I have some pretty big bruises. The guy who hit me with the door was very apologetic and shaken up about the incident. I told him I was okay, but he better look the next time he's getting out of a car!

Last weekend we went down to the pub to watch an Australian rules football match. It's a hard game to follow - possession changes very quickly, and it's fast-paced all round. The ball is irregularly shaped, and it bounces all over the pitch in all sorts of crazy ways. When someone tries to pass, maybe the receiver will catch it, maybe the receiver will fall down (which seems to be the most common - they fall down an awful lot), maybe the other team will get it, or maybe it will bounce off in a completely different direction. I'm very impressed with the people who manage to play with such a greased watermelon and actually make it go where it's supposed to.

We also worked on pictures for Leslie's assignments. One was an assignment using multiple flashes, and he wanted to take a picture of himself singing under a bridge and himself on top of the bride pouring water on the singer. My job was to run in and flash light at him under and over the bridge during a long exposure. The only good source of water that was nearby was the ocean, so Leslie took off his shoes and socks and ran into the sea between takes to fill his bucket. As time went on, the pavement where he threw the water got wetter and wetter, so by the end he was sitting in a big puddle. The whole process lasted about 3 hours, ending at 1 am. He was stoic to the end, but I think he was happy to get home and put on the heat.

He also wanted to take a picture of flash showing motion, so we went out to the park and I turned cartwheels for him to photograph. I haven't done a cartwheel since I was in primary school, so while it was good to know I still have the ability, I don't remember being nearly that sore in my Nittany Gymnastics days. All my muscles were super sore the next day, and he wasn't happy with the way the picture turned out and didn't use it.

He also had to take a picture using a very fast film, so we went out to a bar that promised live music. Music was definitely a stretch, and live was a bit thin, too. It was a guy who leaned his guitar against an amp to create feedback, and then hit various buttons on the floor to make it sound even more intolerable. After such a "performance" I went home, and Les went to another bar, where he found an actual band playing real music, jazz and soul.

Today we went down to the St Kilda art market, where a bunch of artist sell their handmade crafts. We met a very interesting woodcarver who was born in Brooklyn, in East New York, and has been living in Melbourne for the last 34 years. He learned woodcarving as an apprentice to a woodcarver in Indonesia, and now makes stunning cutting boards. His accent was an interesting mix of Aussie and Brooklyn - even after all these years, the Brooklyn was still very apparent.

We also met a woman who makes clocks out of 50-year-old timber fence posts. Her clocks were absolutely beautiful. She's also a singer, and just came back from Ireland, where RTE put some of her CDs on the air. Her mother came over from Dublin when the clockmaker was just 3. The mother came over with £10 in her pocket and absolutely hated Australia. After a few months she wrote to DeValera and asked him to bring her home. She got a response, but Dev said the Irish government wasn't in the business of bringing people back from Australia.

It was a neat market, with leatherworkers, woodworkers, painters, photographers, ceramicists, jewelry-makers and all sorts of other crafts.

On our way home we saw a guy walking an alpaca on a leash. The alpaca seemed completely unfazed to be walked on one of the busiest streets in St Kilda, and was utterly unconcerned by the numerous dogs that barked at it. We stopped at one of the four bakeries on the street for cakes, and had hot chocolate and cake when we got home (it's a rainy, windy day). I have massive bruises all over, but life is still pretty damn good.

It's all relative

Before we begin, I'll tell you that I'm a relief blogger this time. Leslie had a very good, very long blog entry written, and when he went to publish it Blogger ate it. He got frustrated, so I'm now filling in.

Two weekends ago we went to visit Louise Joy, a relative of some kind of Leslie's. She's a fifth cousin or fourth cousin many times removed, or something. She lives in a suburb about 30 miles from the city. We took a tram and two buses to get there, and walked the final half mile or so. It was a 2-hour Odyssey.

She's a very nice woman, and showed us around the grounds of where she lives and made us morning tea. She has an interesting history - she spent a good portion of her childhood in India, where her parents were missionaries. She showed us yearbooks from her time there. It's kind of strange the way Britain imposes Britishness on its colonies, with no regard for the local climate or culture. The yearbook could have been from any private school in England at the time - everyone was white, and they wore the same clothes that children would have been wearing in England, not taking into consideration that England and India have vastly different climates.

I have to admit, the concept of looking up very distant relations is something of a strange one to me. I'm glad people do it, as you meet very interesting people like Louise by doing so. But I don't think I'd feel any more connection to a very distant relation than I would by choosing someone at random from the phone book. Louise knows many members of Leslie's family, so this was not a cold call to a relative. But people do look up their distant family, and I wonder why. What draws them to look for them?

Louise has a daughter, Rosemary, who is an artist. As it happened, she had a show opening at a gallery very close to our house on Thursday of the same week. We headed along to that and met Rosemary, who is also very nice. She had created miniature percussion instruments. They were very beautiful, made of a rich wood. She said it was interesting to see people's reaction to them, because many people picked them up and played with them.

We were very artistically-inclined last week. The day before Rosemary's opening we went to a exhibition opening at the gallery two doors down (between us and it is a chocolate cafe, which makes beautiful cakes, scrumptious chocolates and excellent breakfast pastries - it's a rough life here, but we are stoic). This exhibition's centrepiece was a series of life-sized (or slightly smaller) kangaroos made of ceramic tiles carrying satchels on their backs. They were really cute (I don't know if cute is a word bandied about it Real Art circles, but I thought they were extremely cute), looking very friendly and sweet. I think the woman who opened the exhibition thought they were cute too, because she said they were travellers, and they collected food on their journeys and stored it in their satchels. She also said they were eager to share their food with friends or fellow-travellers.

It's getting a bit chillier, and we've been making soups to keep us warm. We've made tomato and basil, vegetable, mushroom and carrot and coriander. If anyone has any (vegetarian) soup recipes and want to give them to us, we'd be very grateful. The market is about a 15-minute bike ride from here, and it's nice to have so much fresh produce available to us to make our soups. The market also sell fresh orange juice, which is the best I've ever had outside Florida. Victoria is a citrus-producing territory, and now that the weather has gotten colder the oranges are extremely sweet and delicious. The orange juice is squeezed that day, and there's just nothing better.

Leslie has bunch of assignments due this week, and he's working hard to get them done. He works very hard, but I think he feels rewarded and that this course is teaching him a lot of very useful stuff.

A walk in the woods

Yesterday we drove up to Mt Macedon, a mountain about an hour's drive away from Melbourne. We didn't know how easy it would be to rent a car without Australian or international licences, but it was actually ridiculously easy. The guy didn't ask for any proof of any kind, and didn't even look at Leslie's licence. There were no restrictions on the car - I could have driven it, too, even though he'd never seen me and had no proof whatsoever that I wasn't a drunken 12-year-old. Google Maps are pretty good for Australia, so we didn't have any trouble finding the place.

The weather was decidedly inclement. It was extremely foggy, with very strong winds and periodic rain. I bought rain pants and a rain jacket last week (I think my jacket's in Ireland, the tourist board is very convincing with the whole Sunny Australia thing), so once I put them on and zipped and buttoned all up, it was fine. I had my New York Medical College sweatshirt on, and wore its hood and my rain jacket hood. I looked like an Eskimo (or do we say Innuit now?), but it kept out the wind and the rain, and I was warm and toasty when we started moving.

If you've gotten this far and said, "huh, Cassidy's voluntarily hiking in the rain? What has Australia done to her?", I'll fill you in on the real story. I got out of the car with a little help from my friends. When we parked and I looked out the window at the rain and the fog and the wind whipping around the trees, I thought the best plan of action was to stay in the car. Leslie convinced me that we should in fact leave our warm, dry car, but it wasn't an easy task.

Leslie had neither rain pants nor rain jacket, and no hat, though, so he should have been the one to lobby for staying in the car. He had a jumper and a winter jacket, but no hood or anything on his head, so he got wet from time to time. He also had jeans and no waterproof overpants, so his legs got wet. The jeans were also inadequate protection against the icky beasts of the forest, as we shall get to in a moment. He bore his wetness much more stoically than I would have.

The fog turned out to be really cool hiking weather. The woods were very dark and misty, and somewhat spooky. It was something like hiking through the rainforest (or what I imagine hiking through the rainforest would be like), but very quiet. There was the occasional songbird, but for the most part the only sound was our footsteps, and these were deadened by the mist and water.

Added bonus: it was far too cold for snakes.

At the top of the mountain is a memorial cross (like that at Bray Head) to commemorate the soldiers who died in WW I. The original cross was struck by lightening and had to be taken down, so this cross is from 1995.

At one point along the trail we came to a place where there had obviously been a fire. The outsides of the trees were black, but amazingly, they were still producing bright green leaves. Nature is really incredible, that these charred husks still contained life and were still surviving, and even thriving. The bright green provided a very striking contrast with the black bark, making the sight very visually arresting.

Now for the icky beasts of the forest. When we were entering the forest, we encountered two women standing by the car park (they were the only ones we saw the whole time) in shorts. They were leaning over and picking at their legs. It was far too cold for shorts, but that was about all I thought about them, until one of them said "be careful of the leeches!" Leeches? Like in Medieval swamps? And Medieval doctors' offices (and apparently modern doctors' offices, but these are things I do not like to consider)?

About halfway through our walk, Leslie cried out "aah! There's something on my leg!" He rolled up his trouser legs to find that four leeches had taken up residency on his calves. He got them off, but the bite of one of them bled for many, many hours - I think leeches produce an anti-coagulant. There was also one on the back of his jeans, and I got a picture of it before pulling it off (full disclosure again: I wasn't very brave about that, either, but I had to do it because he couldn't reach it). I hadn't thought that the leeches would get us because we were wearing long trousers and not shorts, but they were able to get under the bottoms of Leslie's jeans. My overpants have elastic at the bottom and are tight over the ankle, which is why I think I was spared the leeches. I found one on the outside of my rain pants at one point, but it couldn't hold onto the vinyl very well and brushed off easily.

We passed a "lookout point" on our way out, but it was far too foggy to see anything but a white blanket. On our way back, though, the mist had lifted somewhat so we went back to the lookout point to see if there was a view this time. We got there right at sunset, and the mist had cleared, allowing us a stunning view accross the valley. It only lasted a few minutes - thick mist rolled back in very quickly and covered it up again.

Leeches aside, though, the hike was beautiful and a very nice way to spend a foggy, windy, wet Saturday.

Slow news day

We don't have a lot of news, so this post will probably be pretty rambling.

Leslie's photographs were critiqued today. He was pleased with the way the critique went, which was good as he was wary going in. He didn't get much negative criticism, and he thinks many of the pictures told the stories he wanted them to. His next assignment is due Thursday, so there's no time for resting on laurels.

I'm still working an indeterminate number of days at the newspapers. I feel really lucky to have gotten this opportunity. Everyone I work with is really sound and kind, and I enjoy the work. I feel challenged and like I'm using much of what I learned at DCU. I look forward to going to work, which is a huge change from when I was occasionally answering the phones. My schedule is variable at the moment, and while I might like more hours or more consistent hours, I'm very happy with what I've got.

We had a possum in our courtyard the other night. It was an odd thing, since our courtyard is surrounded in all sides by buildings. It would have either had to walk through the front door and the vestibule into the courtyard or scale a building and climb over the roof. I don't know what it wanted, and it was gone by morning. But Leslie got a shot of it while it was visiting.

One thing we have been doing a lot of is bike-riding. Leslie commutes to college on the bike and I commute to work (when I work in the city) and to the train station (when I work in the 'burbs) on the bike. I've noticed several good changes since I got the bike. I'm still not very fit, and I still weigh more than I'd like, and I'm still the slowest rider on the roads (some of these lads seem to think they're biking the Tour de France to work), but welcome changes nonetheless. When I first got the bike, it hurt my bum so much that I couldn't sit down. I'd come back from riding and lie on my stomach. Now I don't notice any discomfort, so I guess you get used to it. Our first ride was 10 minutes from the bike shop to the train station, and I thought I was going to die. I was huffing and puffing and red-faced and cursing Leslie for being so much more fit than I was. He's still much fitter than I, but I can ride 45 minutes to work without too much of a problem. I now enjoy the bike ride to work, and it's vastly prefereable to being crammed in a rush-hour tram. I've dropped a dress size, which is particularly good because Australian sizes are two sizes smaller than American ones. It was bad enough in Britain and Ireland - a British 10 is an American 8. But Australia's worse - an Australian 10 is a US 6. And for those of us who don't wear 6s, it's pretty demoralising to have to buy clothes that are two sizes bigger.

The casino in Melbourne was celebrating its 10th anniversary over the weekend and they celebrated it the way things should be celebrated - with fireworks. We went out with some of Leslie's friends and got some fun night shots.

The Huntsman spider is still in our apartment building. It's remarkably non-fazing now. We've named it (okay, I've named it) Francis Xavier, and it's not all that creepy to walk by it anymore. The creepiest times are when it's hiding, because if you don't know where it is, it could be anywhere.

We saw two Marx Brothers movies last night at the Astor - A Night at the Opera and At the Circus. Leslie says they "weren't hectic," but I enjoyed them. An entertaining evening, at any rate.

And anyone who wants us to post more often should leave comments. It's a give-and-take.

Gettin' by

We went to see another show in the comedy festival a few days ago. It was the second show of UK comedian Dan Willis, whose first show we saw a few weeks ago. The man is a workaholic - he was running two one-hour shows on the same nights in venues half an hour's travel from each other. And he only gave himself half an hour between shows.

His first show was more story-telling than belly laughs, but it was enjoyable. His second show, "Ferris Bueller's Way Of," was a much more traditional stand-up show. We went with Ryan and Sara to both. Willis is a good comedian with a very naturalistic stage presence and good crowd control. He shoots down hecklers immediately and mercilessly and asserts his authority over a crowd without being belligerent.

The boys met up for dinner before the show, but Sara and I arrived right before the show was due to start (she had class and I was working WAAAAY the hell out in the 'burbs). The pub was British-style and served food, so we ordered food at the bar before we went upstairs to the room where the comedy was being held. They gave us these plastic things that look like mobile phones and vibrate and beep when your food arrives. We ordered it about twenty minutes before the show was to start, so we figured we'd have it by the time we got upstairs, but it wasn't ready when we were told to go into Willis' room. The room was completely packed full, with people standing. The seats were in straight rows facing forward, rather than with tables as in a normal bar set-up. We were on the inside of a row, about five seats in.

Midway through the set, our plastic food alerts start vibrating and beeping loudly. Willis looks straight at us, thinking it's our mobiles, and says "what did I tell you about mobile phones? Oh, it's dinner..." The entire room then looks at us as we slink out (as well as you can slink past five seated people and a bunch of standing people). Willis continued "why does it take two of you to carry a plate of chips?"

When we got our food from the donwstairs bar, Sara and I weren't sure if we should go back. We were both terrified of being made fun of by the comedian again and were aware that everyone would turn and look at us as we went back to our seats. But there was nothing else for it, so we took deep breaths and braved going back in.

Dan Willis completely ignored us when we came back and kept going with his set. Most people in the audience probably didn't notice us coming back, and our disruption was minimal. My face had been on fire since the beeping thing had gone off, so I was finally able to breathe normally again.

After the show I thanked Willis for not being mean to us on our way back. He was really sweet about it. He said "I was in the zone," looking for hecklers, "and I thought at first 'mobile phones, I'm really gonna get them.' But then I realised it was the dinner things, but I'd already gone there so I had to say something. I know you had to go get your dinner though, I didn't want to make it worse for you."

I'm working all of this week in the city office. Everyone there is lovely and I really enjoy the work I'm doing. I also really like the office - the view is really fantastic, with huge windows all around and a view of the bay on one side and a view of the mountains on the other past the city.

My favourite headline that I wrote this week was for a story about a charity that is taking donated refrigerators and revamping them to make them more environmentally sound and then giving them to low-income families. My headline: "Making refrigerators cool again, and green."


Leslie's been running around for the past two weeks getting two big sets of assignments done. He's got a lot of really ambitious, really creative ideas. They're so ambitious that they take a lot of work and don't always turn out the way the perfectionist in him wants. He's using me as a prop in several, including one for which he took me down to the pier at dawn to stand in a red dress and 3" heels. A short-sleeved dress. And standing on one foot. Now he's not thrilled with the composition, having gotten his film back, so tomorrow morning we're going back to the pier at sunrise to try it again. But when it works I'm sure it'll be great. He really is getting a lot of great stuff. We'll post some eventually if he scans them, but they're all on slide film at the moment.

Our neighbour's cat, Megsy, comes to visit a lot. We know her name because it says it on her collar. She strolls in like she owns the place if we're coming or going. She's a weird cat, though - I tried to give her some tuna today and she didn't eat it. But it's like a little timeshare of a cat, which is about all we can have right now until my job situation gets more stable (and we ask the landlord if we can have a cat of our own).

These two dogs were lying outside a restaurant when we walked down to the beach the other day. The big one had a vest over it, and the little one's face was buried under the vest. I thought it was a cute picture, so now you can see for yourself.

Bringin' home the bacon

Last week I started doing trial shifts at a community newspaper group as a sub. They have two offices, one in the city and one in a suburb about 30 miles from here. I started in the office in the city on Wednesday, and everyone was very nice and helpful. I was very nervous going in, and the person I was there to see (the publisher) was not in, he was at the other office. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, because since he wasn't there to have a preliminary chat with me about what was expected of me and where this might go, I was put straight onto a computer and given copy to edit. Once I had things to do, I was no longer nervous.

They use a text-based programme for the initial word-subbing, and then the copy goes to the designers, who lay it out in InDesign and return it to the subs for a second edit. I am familiar with InDesign, and the whole thing felt like a college excercise. DCU prepared me very well for this kind of work, because it's exactly what we did in class for a year. My internship at Newsday involved a different kind of programme and a different kind of editing, so I was unsure if I was really up to the task. Once there, though, I realised that I am prepared for this and I do know how to do it, and I have no call to be nervous. I may not be a great sub, but I know the basics.

I was there on Thursday as well, and on Friday I went to their suburban office. It is not as attractive for many reasons. The commute (bike to train to bike) is an hour and 45 minutes. The city centre office is on the 8th floor of a building with lots of light and a great view of Melbourne harbour. The suburban office is in a low, squat warehouse by the side of a highway with all the blinds shut and no natural light. They work 4-day weeks, which sounds good until you realise that means two 11-hour days. When you add almost four hours of commuting onto that, it makes for very long days indeed.

But while the aesthetics and shifts are better at the city office, both would be great places to work, and the suburban office is the most pressed for help. They are using a lot of casuals there at the moment, and I would be very happy to do casual shifts at both offices. I'm going back to the suburban office tomorrow and the city office on Monday, Thursday and Friday. Maybe at the end of this week I'll have a better sense of how many shifts I might get from this and what it's going to entail. For now, to use an old newspaper cliche to be avoided in headlines, the future is uncertain.

Last weekend was full of comedy festival stuff. On Thursday night we went to see Ardal O'Hanlon do stand-up. He referenced his "Father Ted" days a few times, and told jokes with the kind of wide-eyed dopiness that makes him such a funny comedian. It was an excellent show.

Friday we went to see PuppetUp!, an improv show using puppets. The show's creative director is Brian Henson, Jim's son, and while the Muppets we all know and love are all licensed to Disney and weren't in the show, these puppets were good too. It worked like a standard intro show - the MC would ask the audience for a situation, a place, a job, a fairy tale, whatever, and the actors would play the scene. Except that the actors were puppeteers who held their puppets above their heads to a video camera, which broadcast the puppets' movements onto two big screens. It was a very strange, and funny, show.

On Saturday night we went to a pub in our neighbourhood with some friends to see a comic we'd seen a teaser for a few nights before. His style wasn't so much belly-laughs as story-telling, but it was a good show and everyone had a good time.

There aren't any pictures with this blog entry with the exception of this spider, sorry. The spider was on the wall above one of the windows in our hallway. The picture isn't taken with a zoom lens - this is how big the spider was. I think it was almost as big as my hand. It's our first encounter with the giant spiders of Astralia, and I'm told they get way bigger than this.

Comedy; intentional and otherwise

This month is Melbourne's Comedy Festival. Every night of the month there are several kinds of stand-up shows or performances going on all over the city. On Sunday we went out to a bar in Brunswick with Ryan and Sara to see something called "Insert Name Here" which promised to be a screening of a bunch of comedy movie shorts all parodying mainstream movies. I'm a little vague on the content because reading the description on the web-site is as close as we got. When we got there, the inappropriately titled "Bar Open" was...closed. We hung around outside for about half an hour with the band who were supposed to be playing later that evening. Eventually someone arrived to open and explained that the guy who was supposed to open at 2pm that day had gotten drunk and forgot all about it. We may go back and try it again next week, phoning ahead this time.

Luckily we had plans for later so we went for dinner and a few drinks before heading back into the city. Every night of the festival there is what they call "The After Party" in the bar at the hotel Exeter. It's basically a two hour show where people who are performing elsewhere during the festival can come and do a 10-15 minute segment from their routine, presumably in the hopes of enticing spectators to come down and pay to see the rest of it at a later date. The show is free and the comics are basically given free drink and the opportunity to promote their show as an incentive. Since the more well established comics don't really need the additional advertisement, you're understandably left with a kind of bottom of the barrel set. It was a very much hit and miss mix, heavily weighted toward the miss. Several of the comics (term used loosely) died painfully, unable to coax more than sympathetic smiles from a cringing crowd. A couple looked on the verge of tears.

Still every now and then there was a decent act that provoked genuine laughter and we were able to get some free tickets for the full show of one of the best. We'll probably see him next week. Ardal O'Hanlon (forever Father Dougal Maguire) is also playing here for about a week. Since he's not really known here, tickets are a lot cheaper than in Ireland. We're going to go see him tomorrow.

In keeping with the comedy spirit of the month, we went to see a double feature of 50’s B movies at the Astor. One of them was Ed Wood Jr.’s Plan Nine from Outer Space and does indeed deserve its reputation as one of the worst films of all time. Apparently actor Bela Lugosi died before Wood had shot more than a handful of scenes with him, none with dialogue or any plot purpose. Undeterred, Wood went on to use the scenes and cast a replacement for the remainder. In a futile effort to conceal the fact that it’s not Bela Legosi, he had him hold his cloak over the lower half of his face for the duration of the movie.

It was a lot of fun though, with cheap sets that fell over when the cast brushed against them, horrendous acting and some unintentionally hilarious dialogue. Police Chief to Sergeant: “It’s murder alright (cue close-up) and SOMEBODY'S RESPONSIBLE!” Incidentally, whatever happened to the term “buster”? Back in the day that was a highly effective insult. Someone needs to bring it back.

Making Plan Nine look like Gone With The Wind, Robot Monster was the second movie in the double feature. Looking for all the world as though it had been shot on location in some one’s back garden it told the story of Ro-Man, (ostensibly a gorilla in a diving-helmet) who came from space to destroy the last 5 people on earth.

Made on a budget that can’t have been much more than $50 and a free gorilla suit, it had to resort to throwing in a lot of stock studio footage to up the excitement. Of course the problem with stock footage is that it may not be that relevant to your movie. But such practicalities obviously didn’t faze director Phil Tucker who clearly wasn’t one to pass up on some footage of rubber lizards wrestling and so, periodically we were treated to some truly bizarre scenes that appeared to have been stolen from the floor of the studio’s cutting room and inserted apropos nothing. In the end someone must have noticed that logic had exited a long time ago and a “Thank God it was all a dream”-ending was tacked on. To be fair it was the only way it would make any sense anymore.

Equally classic dialogue though. In an ill-judged attempt at Shakespearean pathos, Ro-Man, ordered to destroy the female earthling he loves, turns to the camera to exclaim, “I cannot, yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do must and cannot meet? Yet I must, but I cannot.” Beautiful.

Yesterday we went cycled the 30 miles out to Dandenong where Cassidy may be working if she gets the newspaper job that she's been after. The idea was to see how far the work-place is from the local train station (not too far, less than two miles). Today, however, the guy called and said that she'd be trying out in South Melbourne before they decide if they want to move her out there, so it may have been a little unnecessary, but he seemed impressed that she was showing such interest so it probably wasn't a complete waste. Anyway, it's good training for a cycle to Philip Island which we're planning for sometime next week.