The NBN is coming to the bush

 

The NBN is coming to Nelligen and I'd better get used to all the new terminology:

LOGON: Adding wood to make the barbie hotter

LOG OFF: Not adding any more wood to the barbie.

MONITOR: Keeping an eye on the barbie.

DOWNLOAD: Getting the firewood off the ute.

HARD DRIVE: Making the trip back home without any cold tinnies.

KEYBOARD: Where you hang the ute keys.

WINDOWS: What you shut when the weather's cold.

SCREEN: What you shut in the mozzie season..

BYTE: What mozzies do

MEGABYTE: What Townsville mozzies do.

CHIP: A pub snack.

MICROCHIP: What's left in the bag after you've eaten the chips.

MODEM: What you did to the lawns.

LAPTOP: Where the cat sleeps.

SOFTWARE: Plastic knives and forks you get at Red Rooster.

HARDWARE: Stainless steel knives and forks - from K-Mart.

MOUSE: The small rodent that eats the grain in the shed.

MAINFRAME: What holds the shed up.

WEB: What spiders make.

WEBSITE: Usually in the shed or under the verandah.

SEARCH ENGINE: What you do when the ute won't go.

CURSOR: What you say when the ute won't go.

YAHOO: What you say when the ute does go.

UPGRADE: A steep hill.

SERVER: The person at the pub who brings out the counter lunch.

MAIL SERVER: The bloke at the pub who brings out the counter lunch.

USER: The neighbour who keeps borrowing things.

NETWORK:What you do when you need to repair the fishing net.

INTERNET: Where you want the fish to go.

NETSCAPE: What the fish do when they discover a hole in the net.

ONLINE: Where you hang the washing.

OFFLINE: Where the washing ends up when the pegs aren't strong enough.

 

Time for a beer (or two)

 

An acquaintance from my days in Rabaul emailed me, "Peter, I will be travelling through your area en route to Canberra with Ida on Saturday 7th May and hope you can make time for us to meet up after all these years. Cheers Peter Logan".

Apart from the same first name and having lived in the same donga at the Public Works Department mess hall on Malaguna Road, we had very little in common as I, night after night, was studying for my accounting exams while the other Peter, night after night, was out on the town.

His partner-in-crime was Grahame Ward - see this blog entry - whose two passions in life were beer and billiard - in fact, he was known as 'Felson' (remember The Hustler ?)

Maybe Peter and I didn't have much in common but there's always the shared bond of New Guinea and I look forward to sharing a beer (or two) with him while reminiscing about the good ol' days; indeed, it already prompted me to re-read Malaguna Road.

 

Is it time again for some Big City therapy?

The Olympic Pool in North Sydney

 

When putting out the garbage bin on a Thursday night has become the highlight of the week, it may be time to gain some new perspective on life.

Sydney is a mere 275 km from Riverbend but it seems a lot more when you're stuck on a bus for five-and-a-half hours. The trick is to find a five-and-a-half-hour-thick book, curl up in your seat, and not look up until Sydney Central Station hoves into sight.

The rest is easy: check into my old watering-hole, the Blues Point Hotel, which offers accommodation at a reasonable price - see here - , and do a quick lap in the Olympic Pool before deciding what to do for the rest of the day.

I 'stole' this photo from GOOGLE so ignore the white arrow even though it conveniently
points in the general direction of the Blues Point Hotel and where I used to live in 1985.
Across Lavender Bay is Luna Park and just before the bridge pylon is the Olympic Pool

Sydney is far too big a city to call home. So when I tried to settle there in 1985 after my return from overseas - not very successfully, I might add - I carved out my own little niche on this promontory overlooking Sydney Harbour and next to the Harbour Bridge and Luna Park (which is free to enter but if you want to buy a ticket for a joy ride, you'd better wear flat shoes as you'll be charged by your height ☺)

McMahons Point (or Blues Point as the lower part is called), with its many outdoor cafés, bottle shops, wine bistros, restaurants, delicatessens, fashion boutiques and antique shops, might as well be called 'Petite Paris' (or should that be 'petit'? is Paris feminine or masculine?), as Sydney is as expensive as Paris although there are still some affordable attractions around.

It's a perfect base from which to set out to conquer the Big City and to retreat to at the end of a hectic day.

Blues Point looking towards the Opera House through the Harbour Bridge
(but don't be fooled: you're looking east and with perfect eye-sight you
might just be able to see a Kiwi chasing a sheep as the sun comes UP )

 

Check with your mate!

 

Brian just phoned to say he'll come up from the Bay again to play chess with me. Over the months, this has become something of a routine and so, once a week, we sit by the river, hunched over the chessboard, and make our moves.

Often our lips move more than the pieces on the board and I am reminded of my time at the Al-Harithy Hotel in Jeddah where I lived for a couple of years while working in the world's largest sandbox.

Our group of lonely expats would sit around the pool during the long midday break and, while sheltering from the sandblastingly hot winds coming out of the desert and sipping Saudi champagne, play chess.

Saudi Arabia was a lonely place and it didn't take much to tip one over the edge as everything that made life bearable was lacking - or, as some wit put it crudely, the four Ps: Piss, Pork, Porn, and Prostitutes.

And so it could happen that late at night there was a knock on the door and the chap with whom you had played chess at midday feebly asked, "Feel like a game of chess?"

Feel like a game of chess??? At a quarter to midnight??? You've got to be kidding!!!

But you didn't say that. Instead, you invited him in, put on the kettle, set up the board, and played chess at a quarter to midnight.

You did so because you knew that it might be your turn next. That you might receive a 'Dear John' letter or other bad news from home. And that you might be in desperate need of companionship before the four walls of your hotel room, however five-star, closed in on you.

Your visitor would lose the game but win the day by getting through it.

 

The sameness continues

TRITON LODGE in Port Douglas

 

... and the thought of my friend Ian Paterson relocating to Port Douglas where he will take up residence in the Triton Lodge doesn't help. When I think back to those relatively short twenty years during which I relocated some fifty times across a dozen different countries, only to now be sitting here like a shag on a rock for the last twenty years. Twenty years! I would've got less for murder!

I am reading "A Very Brief History of Eternity" by Carlos Eire. Interesting, thought-provoking and sometimes unsettling. It's about eternity (as opposed to immortality) and it's all about philosophy and a bit of religion which, as he puts it, "... is all about finding more in life than meets the eye."

The writer, Carlos Eire, came to the USA from Cuba as a child as part of "Operation Peter Pan" which I had never heard of until I GOOGLEd for it. We learn something every day!

Well, it's almost 9 a.m. and the ennui (best said with a stuffy nose) continues. To paraphrase Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness", "The sameness! The sameness!"

 

At $180 a week, electricity included, TRITON LODGE, just a skip and a jump away from the famous Four Mile Beach, is probably the best value-for-money in town. I had first heard about it through another friend (another riches-to-rags story) who moved into it some years ago, and so I recommended it to Ian. The things I do to get myself a free bed for my next trip up North! ☺

 

... and here's Ian's message before he hit the road: "Mate, it's onwards and upwards - as explained I become restless with the sameness of life. Port Douglas probably will be little different to Coolangatta, however will be meeting different people and experiencing interesting places to explore. That might take six to eighteen months to wear off, and then hooroo again. Australia is a big country! Have a feeling Darwin will be next."