All then pens here stink! Considering I’ve been through the office supply cabinets of three large Australian companies, I think I’m qualifed to make that statement. I even went to Kmart (not related to the Martha Stewart Kmart back home) to purchase pens, and they stink also.
This is the view of Sydney from the roof of my apartment. All I need to do is to figure out how to work my BBQ and I can actually have a party up here! Zoom out (hold the shift key down and drag down on the image) and look around. Harbor Bridge and the Opera House is all the way on the right Sydney CBD right smack in the middle. View of William Street and the start of Kings Cross on the bottom left.
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Melissa and I are cooking much more at home instead of eating out (don’t have my Chicago per diems anymore) and one of the dishes within my culinary reach (aka a dish I couldn’t screw up) is the salad. This combined with the fact that I’m still weaning myself off of all the Pizzeria-Uno deep dish pizzas and Hooter’s wings I’m used to from my last project in the States… what I make can’t be all that healthy. So, enter Ranch dressing – stage left.
Well, we have a problem. Couldn’t find any Ranch dressing anywhere. Strange, they had Italian, Caesar, and French but no Ranch. This oddity was confirmed when I met a fellow relocated American on my second project in Australia. She too is a fellow Ranch addict. It was funny to hear her story about how she scored 2 huge Costco sized Ranch dressing bottles on a visit back home and trying to sneak it past Australian customs. I won’t steal her thunder (ask her to tell you the story).
Does this entry have a happy ending? You betcha. Last week when I was trying to set up my blog, I stumbled onto Glenn Kentwell’s weblog. This Aussie has an entry about an Australian online retailer that specializes in American food (usafoods.com.au). He comments about some strange items (strange to Australians) he found in the catalog, specifically – ‘hush puppy mix’ and ‘Manwhich sauce’. I had a good laugh.
So here’s the happy ending. I told Amanda about the site and we’re planning to put in an order for some Ranch dressing, A1 Steak Sauce (my steaks still suck but costs too much to simply throw away), and Jolly Ranchers. The price is actually very reasonable and considering Amanda won’t have to pay any Australian custom ‘non-declaration’ fines, I’m sure she’ll think it is a steal.
Update Jan 25,04
The supermarket here (Coles) is now stocking Paul Newman’s Ranch. I’m happy. 
Finally, after a month of painstaking documentation of what my team (a development project’s infrastructure team) plans to implement, I think we’re almost done. We just submitted our ‘Solution Design’ document to the client for approval. Once we get the thumbs up, we will start ordering the equipment and proofing our design.
So, what does a month of work look like in the documentation world?
I swear I’ve written more since I transferred to Australia (6 months) than I have written throughout my 5 years in college.
All the documentation I’ve been doing over the past few months are completely wiping me out every evening. On top of that, my fellow cohorts at work has involved me in doing healthy stuff. During lunch time a few times a week, we go to the community center next door or the park down the street to play soccer. Ain’t that wussy soccer. We sometimes play against some really bad-ass 10-12 year olds from some local school. Not only can they play some serious soccer, they sure can talk some serious smack. Ok. Got to go to bed. I’m putting off my last document to tomorrow morning. Arg, hopefully one day I’ll actually start doing some of the stuff that I’m documenting. Probably won’t be til December. Yuck.
It is getting warmer and the days are longer also. Just incase you’re wondering, AUS is on the opposite season schedule than the States. We’re starting Spring while the folks back home are starting Fall. It was around 30C today. I’ll get the C>F conversion tool up on the site soon.
Yup, it has taken me almost 6 months to get my blog up. Don’t know why I’ve been so lazy since I got to Australia. It only took me the afternoon to get my DNS, webserver and blog app up. I’m blaming my lazyness on the diet. All this healthy stuff is making me lazy.
It is going to take me a while to get the blog application properly configured. My DSL (http://www.iinet.com.au) doesn’t give me a static IP so I just subscribed to a dynamic DNS provider a buddy of mine uses back in the states (http://www.easydns.com). Not sure how well this dynmaic DNS will work but we’ll see.
Enough of the technical details (I promise to go into it later on). It is getting rather late here - around 12:40am Monday morning – I have to be at work around 8:45. Getting old, can’t stay up as late as I used to. Boy, do I miss my college days (and Waffle House). Night.
