Ten years later

Those who perished ten years ago remain America's greatest loss, and those who gave themselves to save them its greatest heroes; but the terror conducted in their names must be its greatest shame.

It is easy to forget that for the ruling classes to legitimise a war against another people, they must first wage war against their own, to the extent that no dishonesty or contempt lies beyond the depths to which they would stoop to rob ordinary people of their will.

Just as Americans do not deserve so harsh a symbol, the world deserves better than that symbol's legacy.

"An Urban Orchard" film trailer

Friends of the Earth Adelaide have just published a trailer on YouTube for their short film, An Urban Orchard. It looks at the "growing" culture (if you'll excuse the pun) of producing and sharing food locally, and it was produced right here in South Australia. Although I wasn't involved in the production of the film, I am producing the DVD for it.

Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to organise a screening of the film, and I'll pass your request on to FOE.

Video: "Transition Adelaide West presents Fresh! The Movie - 2010-02-26"

This is the second video I've uploaded for Transition Adelaide West. This is a short documentary film covering TAW's screening of Fresh! The Movie at Henley Square on 26 February 2010.

Watch the movie below, or use this link to see it on YouTube.

Video: "Transition Adelaide West photo slideshow - February 2010"

I've just uploaded two videos for Transition Adelaide West. The former is a slideshow of photos that illustrates TAW activities in the community. I put this together as a video backdrop, to play in the background at TAW events.

Watch the movie below, or use this link to see it on YouTube.

published article: "Peak Oil: Under The Radar"

This article was published in the 2010 issue of Projections magazine, conceived and compiled by Ewan Scott and Nick Petch. Many thanks to Ewan for his consideration, and to Cecilie Corless for recommending me.

Peak Oil: Under The Radar

While climate change has been in our consciousness for over a decade, another pressing issue remains largely untouched by the mainstream: peak oil.

In 1956, a Shell geophysicist called Marion King Hubbert presented a shocking revelation about the state of oil production in the United States. According to Hubbert's figures, oil production in the lower 48 states would peak within 15 years. His colleagues spent 14 of those 15 years dismissing his theory, until U.S. oil production did indeed peak right on cue, in 1970. Production levels have been in decline ever since.

Video: "Franco's permablitz"

Now that we've got Franco's place under control, it's time to put the video up. There was a lot of material there, shot over three afternoons, but I did manage to get the whole thing to fit just under YouTube's 10-minute limit. Enjoy!



YouTube link: "Franco's permablitz - October/November 2009"

Adelaide Greenies calendar - an update

In the few weeks since I launched the Adelaide Greenies calendar, I've received a large amount of feedback. Thankfully, most of this feedback has been positive. I thought I'd write about it again, just to clear up a few questions that people may have.

How can people read it?

While putting "Adelaide greenies" into Google presents the calendar as the #1 hit, and my original blog entry about it at #3, it doesn't really have a home. I have added links to my blog to the different ways of viewing the calendar (HTML, XML, ICS), as well as a little embedded widget with some of the upcoming events. I think that's good enough for now. Of course, you should feel free to share these links with others and add these links to your own page if you find them handy.

Incidentally, I don't have a problem with people adding the calendar to their own sites. The HTML version of the calendar is the easiest one to link to, and the XML version is the easiest one to embed in WordPress sites (the PEZ site already includes it). Google Calendar does have an application that can help you create widgets for your own web page, like the HTML version or the list version on my blog. However, the application is only available to people who have full access to the calendar, so for now, you have to ask me for help with that. This brings me to my next question.

How can people add or change events?

At the moment, I'm the only person with full access to the calendar, so nobody can change it but me. This hasn't been a problem so far, since people haven't minded just sending me the occasional bit of news, so it hasn't been a huge task to keep the calendar up to date.

(As an aside, I would appreciate it if people gave an approximate finishing time for their events. Sometimes, I will already know, or at least be able to take an educated guess based on the type of event. The starting time is usually the more important, though. If I've taken a guess at an end time and got it hopelessly wrong, let me know!)

In the future, this will likely be a bigger job, and I will ultimately have to let other people in. There are two ways to do this: either give certain people full access to the calendar, or give certain people their own calendars. I think this caused a bit of confusion when I first launched the Adelaide Greenies calendar, so I'll explain in a bit more detail.

When I refer to a "calendar", I simply mean a sequence of events. At the moment, there's only one of these. What I had originally envisioned was that the individual groups around Adelaide might prefer to run their own calendars and manage their own events. For example, The Food Forest could just run a calendar of events hosted there, SCNPSP could list their community group meetings, and PEZ could list their workshops.

In case you were wondering, the HTML widget to display Google Calendar can handle several different sets of events on a single timeline. I've attached a picture to show the HTML widget with two calendars: the Adelaide Greenies calendar in green, and Australian public holidays in red. (I don't manage the latter; Google Calendar suggested it to me.) If you've got a dedicated calendar application on your computer - such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Lightning/Sunbird, or Apple iCal - it can already display multiple calendars simultaneously, as it typically would if you have separate personal and work calendars.


This would make things easier to manage, but it would also make things harder to find. Part of the goal of this exercise - and, indeed, a common theme among Transition Towns people in South Australia - is the coupling of the existing organisations, and splitting things up this way might not be as useful, since we haven't got a central directory of all things eco-friendly (yet) that would bring them all together and let people find them all in one easy trip.

There is another reason why the single calendar might not go away any time soon. As was very insightfully pointed out to me, even if there were separate calendars for separate groups, there might be events that don't fit them. Perhaps an event is organised by a group that doesn't have its own calendar yet, or perhaps the event is organised by several groups and no one of them really owns it. In such an occurrence, a single central calendar would still be useful, even if others exist.

For now, I'm happy to keep the one big calendar in place. That said, if anyone wants to know more of the details, would like to help edit the calendar, or would like to start their own, let me know. I'm still the gatekeeper, but I don't have to be the only one.

Which events should be there? Which shouldn't?

I got a question about whether there are boundaries or criteria to determine if there are certain types of events that shouldn't be included. I haven't thought too much about this, because for every event that I've seen so far, I've always known someone (or known of someone) who'd be interested.

That said, there might be closed events or minor things that people don't want publicised too broadly. Other events might be seen as off-topic; for example, I'm on a mailing list where some participants equate the response to 9/11 to a response to peak oil, but others take no interest. There might also be events or groups that not everyone wants to endorse - just as I've seen reputable journalism sites carry articles by climate change sceptics in the interests of balance but without vouching for their arguments.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what might exclude something from the calendar? What boundaries should be set? Are there certain things we should all be interested in and certain things about which we are neutral? Are certain issues off-topic? Remember, though, that we don't all have to believe in the same things for them to be relevant.

What personal information should be published?

Another issue that I'll bring up at the same time is privacy. People often host events at their own homes, and I've been hesitant to list private addresses in a public forum without permission. This isn't as much of an issue with our existing mailing lists, since they're usually closed-circle.

My policy so far is that you can list an address or you can say it's at someone's home, but not both. Phone numbers are OK, but I've been disguising email addresses in an attempt to stop spammers from harvesting them. What do people think of that policy? Similarly, please contact me if you would like any personal information added or removed.

Finally...

Couldn't you have come up with a better name?

I've never wanted to spend too long on the name, and this blog entry is no exception. Not everyone appreciates the label "greenies", but in truth, there isn't really a convenient term for everything that's going on that conveys that level of meaning.

There isn't a prize for coming up with a better name, but don't let that stop you having ideas about it. If all else fails, we can just call it Transition like everything else. :)

I hope that's cleared things up. Tell me your thoughts.

Adelaide Greenies on Google Calendar

Having found it very easy to lose track of all of the different events that Adelaide's environmental movement has organised, I have started a Google Calendar to remind me. It's called the Adelaide Greenies calendar, and it's an agglomeration of an array of different mailing lists that carry events that might interest fellow environmentalists. There's a little gadget (in list form) on the side of my blog that shows you what is there.

At the moment, all of this should be considered a bit of an experiment. There will be information missing because not everyone knows the length of time that their events will last. I'm also making a policy that private addresses won't be included with events without the explicit permission of the people at that address; I realise that such a policy might make it a little more difficult to advertise permablitzes, but I do want to show a bit of respect for people's privacy.

For the moment, I am treating this as a stop-gap solution. It's quite a chore to enter all of this data for everyone, even so far, and not everyone will use this to stay abreast of what's happening around South Australia. However, I'm going to have a go at keeping it up to date for a month or two and see what happens. What I hope for people to do is to start their own calendars for their own groups, so that people can subscribe to what interests them or what is going on in their local area. Besides, any calendar program worth its salt - including the HTML widget on the side of this page - can combine several calendars of events onto a single timeline.

The calendar is available in a number of different formats, so that you should be able to read it from anywhere. At the moment, I'm the only person who can edit anything (I hope). I will list the ways you can subscribe to the calendar below.

• To view the calendar in your browser, just follow this link to the HTML version, or add it to your Bookmarks or Favourites.
• To view the calendar as an Atom or RSS feed, add this link to the XML version to your feed subscriptions. In many browsers, you should just be able to click on the link and go from there. Otherwise, look for this logo in your browser:
• To add the calendar using software such as iCal, Outlook 2007 or Mozilla Sunbird, add this link to the iCal version to your subscriptions or accounts. To add the calendar to Outlook 2003 or earlier, download the file from that link and import it manually. (Note that the older versions won't update iCal files automatically, so every so often, you'll have to delete the calendar and import it again.)
• If you like the widget I've got in the blog, let me know. Google Calendar does have a tool that lets you customise this widget, but only if you have private access to the calendar - that is, only if you're me. I know WordPress doesn't like the widget I'm using (it doesn't like iframe HTML tags), but you should be able to add the RSS feed above in the meantime; I haven't looked into this yet.

Whether you find this useful or have strong criticisms of it, please let me know. As I said, it's all fairly experimental at this stage.

UPDATE 2009-11-02: You can indeed use the XML version (Atom/RSS) of a calendar in the RSS widget in WordPress, but the formatting isn't ideal. I found this tutorial on Helen's Nerdy Blog for customising RSS feeds, and I've since created a more refined version of the XML feed for WordPress users. To incorporate this into WordPress, add an RSS widget for this link on feed43.com. There's an example of this on the Permaculture Education Zone blog (which I also set up).

Thanks to everyone for their input so far. There may be another update later to address the most important questions.

Monbiot loses the plot?

A few days ago, George Monbiot of The Guardian newspaper published an article entitled "The Population Myth". The article was circulated to me with the rather blunt title, "Monbiot loses the plot". Fearing that some on the mailing list had hypocritically missed the point, I wrote my own response.

I suspect that a lot of the controversy surrounding this article (at least here) could be averted simply be removing this tagline:

"People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor"

Among those of us who preach the significance of population growth, not all of us are taking out our frustrations on the very poor. Most of us can already see the hypocrisy of the most polluting countries, such as Australia and the USA, who blindly point the finger at poorer nations rising by housing our dirtiest industries. Some of us even understand the dependence - again, however forced via globalisation - of developing countries upon affluent foreign markets, and their consequent dependence on foreign money.

To this end, Monbiot has an excellent point, but he stops short of making it. (His suggestion of changing the I=PAT equation doesn't help either; in modern times, we already tend to measure the affluence of a population by its consumerism.) Whether by resource depletion or by rising sea levels, we are at risk of an apocalyptic population crash. The strategy of The Powers That Be is to centralise those dwindling resources so that they can outlast everyone else. It's like the old joke about trying to escape a river full of crocodiles with a pair of flippers: I still can't swim faster than a crocodile, but I can swim faster than you.

Think of the situation in Iraq. If the USA could reduce its dependence on oil, and could afford to buy it at wildly fluctuating prices, they wouldn't have to send the military around the world to steal it. This doesn't solve peak oil, but it does mean that the "non-negotiable American way of life" might last just long enough for them to see other countries depopulated first.

I have no delusion that such a strategy would benefit anyone more than those already at the top of the pile. On mailing lists like this one, a more common strategy for resilient communities would be to concentrate on the resources you really need and to invest them wisely. A strategy to strut around the world taking these resources by force is no less cogent - provided, of course, that you first give up your last shred of human decency.

Cheers,

AN

New video: Dave's permablitz 2009-09-13

I've finally gotten around to uploading the video I put together from a permablitz I went to in Belair, just up the hill. It's not as long as the video I did for Soph's permablitz, but I think it's still OK.

There's more video on the way as well. I shot some video for the recent World Car-Free Day, and there's another permablitz happening on the long weekend.

To add a rating or comment to this video, you can visit its page on YouTube.

peak oil in transition

Update: This article was republished in On Line Opinion on 23 September 2009. Many thanks to Susan Prior for her consideration.

A couple of Wednesdays ago, I went to see a film entitled The Age Of Stupid (IMDB link), about the current state of the climate change debate. The movie only played in three cinema complexes in Adelaide, and two of them were in Westfield shopping centres - probably the wrong crowd for a movie about climate change. There's no word yet on whether our local Palace Nova cinemas will pick it up.

After paying 17 bucks to watch what appeared to be a copied Blu-ray disc, and to have an entire theatre all to myself, I came away from the movie with a mixed message. Most of the main characters in the film seemed to have conflicting ethics for their reliance on energy, but few actually showed any remorse. The oil rig worker who stayed in New Orleans throughout Hurricane Katrina sees the obvious connection between his work and his environment, but he has no remorse about it whatsoever. The lady in the Niger delta, having seen the massive pollution and the ravages of war that are brought to their nation by our greed for natural resources, sells petrol in bottles to make a bit of extra cash.

I don't know what the point of the movie was any more, but I still think I know what it was supposed to be. Climate change isn't just an environmental problem: it's a broad social, economic and political problem that will affect all of us to an extent that we cannot fully comprehend, even after seeing a film about it. This one got so close: people do understand that the drive for resource wealth does as much harm as good, but it never actually asked the question of whether it's worth devoting your lifestyle to it. (This point is raised directly by Michael Moore in The Corporation.)

After a decade-long hiatus, climate change is back on the agenda, and regardless of their position on the subject, everyone is back on message. The greenies want to save the planet. Big business doesn't want saving the planet to interfere with employment or economic growth. The politicians want to implement a trading scheme for greenhouse gas emissions, but want to set aside $11,700,000,000 in welfare for the mining industry.

Most importantly of all, everybody has an opinion that they can't wait to tell you about but that they can't live up to. I saw a bumper sticker the other day about doing something about climate change - on the back of a 20-year-old Ford Laser. To be fair, you could see through the brown exhaust fumes that it was at least carrying a full complement of passengers. Everyone gets climate change, and gets it well enough to talk about it, but nobody's doing anything to fix it. An Inconvenient Truth (IMDB link) was a bold step, and we had the impression of having come a long way since Kyoto; one wonders how far we have travelled since.

The previous weekend, I was back at The Food Forest for a weekend workshop on something called the Transition Towns initiative. The goal of transition is to make communities more self-sufficient, and therefore more robust to problems such as economic downturn, political dysfunction, or the disruption of utilities. Think of it as permaculture scaled up to a society level: the idea is to take similar tenets of environmental management and use them to plan entire communities. It stands to reason that climate change is a given in this philosophy, as is peak oil.

There are already hundreds of Transition groups all over the world, and each community is tackling the problems a little differently. It might start as modestly as a car pool or a sewing circle, or it could be as ambitious as a local currency or an activist group to fight against imposing businesses that, one way or another, do not act in the community's interest. Neighbourhoods become more productive and more closely knit, favouring local businesses and activities seeing their own well-being as prosperity in itself.

As much as I find a lot of the environmental debate quite tiring, I found the Transition Towns weekend very uplifting. The difference was that the people who attended this workshop seemed more like the sorts of people who might actually do something to make their lives better. Naturally, such a weekend involves a lot of talk, but it's positive and enthusiastic talk, and those of us who were already doing something were more interested in networking and marketing what was there than the minutiae of establishing something new. Suddenly, the confidence was there among us, the right courses of action were obvious, and everything else seemed irrelevant, distant, archaic.

I wondered, then, whether the environmental debate could truly be taking this direction, and, if it were not, whether this might be an opportune time to turn it this way. It was nearly five years ago that I discovered the peak oil debate, and at the time, it was all doom and gloom. In fact, Matt Savinar's primer, The Oil Age Is Over (sadly now out of print), ends with a discussion about the depression one typically suffers after the penny drops about peak oil. Arguably, though, the debate is still one of doom and gloom today, and the purists among us are only too ready to howl down anything touted as a solution.

We can do better.

I can vouch for the concept of post-peak depression. I remember when I ran out of both questions and answers, and I remember how helpless I felt at the time, as if the only way not to lose was not to play. The best way out of this funk is to do something positive. For me, getting around my oil dependency meant less car travel, working out public transport again, and getting a bicycle. I'm still going with that.

When you consider most problems so fundamentally, the solutions are simple too. If you're worried about food miles, buy local produce from suburban markets. The dominance of large supermarkets and department stores can be mitigated by shopping elsewhere, even if you can't buy everything in the one place. Learn to turn things off when you're not using them, and not to buy things you don't need. Even questions about money - from the siphoning off of local investment by major banks, to the very nature of fiat currency itself - seem tractable when considered the same way.

The point of these individual tasks is twofold. Firstly, you participate less and less in a system that will break off in massive chunks in the coming decades and crumble into the sea. (With that mental image, you and Antarctica are in this together. Secondly, the more you think about this, the more you learn and understand the way things really are in the world. New challenges will come along in our current convention, and current conventional thinking won't solve them; you will need a new paradigm. Either way, you're doing something positive about the world's plethora of problems, and coming shocks won't be quite so shocking.

It's a lot more easily said than done, of course. For example, buying food is easier and quicker than growing it, and there will be no shortage of people telling you so. That said, it's all about believing in what you're doing. If you believe that growing food is important - and with good enough reasons - you should do it anyway. Every person who attended the Transition weekend, I conjectured, probably knows someone who isn't interested in climate change, peak oil, permaculture and the like, but that hasn't stopped us getting together anyway, and it won't stop us trying to do the right thing.

This is perhaps the real key. Just give it a go. Buy a rainwater tank. Walk somewhere that you normally would have driven. Repair something you would otherwise have thrown away. Whatever form a collapse of civilisation may take, you are far worse off afraid or ignorant than you would be armed with options.

Above all, the Transition concept has given me a sense of hope that I haven't had for years. It hasn't assured me at all that we won't see major societal upheaval in the next decade or so, but it has motivated me, with neither fear nor rage, to do something more constructive to prepare for it. Furthermore, it's also given me a better way to talk about to those ordinary people I know who imagine me in sandwich boards telling them how nigh the end of the world is.

I mentioned The Age Of Stupid as merely the most recent Chicken Little, and despite its good intentions, I wonder how much films like this are really helping. Then again, even if people are tiring of hearing about the problems, they need more in the way of solutions than superficial gesture of buying a CFL and a green shopping bag (that is, in all probability, made of plastic anyway). I sense a valid opportunity here, to engage interested people not to panic but to empower themselves, and to make peace (or at least neutrality) with the non-believers who may never notice your conviction. You don't even need to talk about a crash; at least, what you want is to make the world a better place.

Think about a low-energy future. Food without chemicals. Transport without pollution. Austerity without exploitation.

Think about a human-energy future. Motivation without badgering. Urgency without panic. Darkness without fear.

We can do better.

Weaving An Orb - an experiment in small-scale demountable permaculture

In January and February 2009, I attended the Permaculture Design Certificate course at The Food Forest in Gawler, South Australia. As part of our course project, we prepared a Powerpoint slide show entitled Weaving An Orb - an experiment in small-scale demountable permaculture, where we apply permaculture principles - perhaps only temporarily - to a suburban flat with very little territory of its own.

At the start of the course, I shot some video footage from the site and incorporated some of it into our final presentation. More recently, however, our host held a "permablitz" to implement some of the ideas we had during the course, and I got some footage during that afternoon as well.

All of this is now available as a YouTube playlist for your viewing pleasure. Naturally, there may be more chapters to add to this story as the site evolves, so stay tuned.

plus ça change

Half-way around the world, another country embraces change. Upstairs at my place, things are more the same than ever.

The upstairs rooms are still in a state. I've been meaning to tidy up the bathrooms, but I got gastro a couple of weeks ago and I didn't feel like doing much for a few days. That set everything else back, so I'm only just getting back to it now. Admittedly, I've only got a few odd jobs left to do before I set upon my own bedroom, but getting back to them has been a bit of a struggle.

My parents and my brother are coming down for Christmas and New Year and not much else. They're only getting here the day before Christmas itself (so I'll miss Dad's birthday), and they're only here for a few days after New Year. Now that I've got plenty of places to put them up, that's not going to be an issue. Plus, I won't have many days to fill up with things to do. Still, I only get to see them in person once a year, an experience sadly not available on Skype.

I invited a few friends and relatives out to celebrate my birthday - not on my birthday, because nobody could go, but still, the celebration's the thing. I wanted to bring together people from different circles but that I knew would get along, so I invited them all out for dinner at one of the local restaurants. It all went off pretty well. Not everyone could turn up, including my lady friend who isn't my girlfriend; she did drunk-dial me to invite me out afterwards, though.

Since someone has already asked, I should mention that this time was much easier and much less awkward than two weeks prior. Sure, she got nearly as drunk and I was even more sober, but the pressure came off: the expectations were much more subdued, and having learnt what she gets like, I understand a bit better how I should treat her. Even the weird things drunk people say - which might be insightful unspoken truths, or which might be random crap - don't affect me as much any more. (Actually, they affect me a lot more than I care to admit, but I'm getting more graceful about it.)

Actually, on that note, I did meet someone a week ago. I was at a presentation about the limits to economic growth, organised by Economic Reform Australia. It was an excellent discussion - the presenter just about wore himself out with his own enthusiasm, and everyone seemed to hang on his every word. I hung around afterwards to join in the afterglow, and in the process, I met a young lady who had come from China to do her PhD in environmental accounting. We got to talking about climate change and peak oil - normally a good way to end conversations with the uninitiated, but not in this case. It was actually something of a novelty for me to talk to someone both intellectual and open-minded about the subject: most of the people I know either worry themselves sick about peak oil or refuse to acknowledge the problems in any way. I've sent her a couple of emails on the subject, so she's got plenty of homework to do, but I can't help but wonder if she'll get back to me. I mean, I'm happy enough to network for now, but I wonder if she'd like to continue the conversation over a coffee. Oh well, we'll see.

* * * * * *

The thing that's really bothering me at the moment is work. Things are going from the sublime to the ridiculous, and I'm still bored out of my mind. However, it has taken a turn for the worse in the past week or two.

We are working on a task that has turned sour before it has even started. I suspect my boss doesn't know what we're doing either and is just making it up as he goes along. This wouldn't worry me, normally, but not only is he holding me up by our not knowing, but he's working hard to pretend both that we do and that I can't see through it. Every time we talk about what's happening, I learn something fundamental about the project that I should have been told weeks ago, certainly before we started submitting documents about it.

I spent some time writing my boss an email, in which I collated the whole array of things I hadn't been told in a timely fashion, or hadn't been told at all, that have gotten this project on the wrong foot so early. The email turned pretty nasty pretty quickly, though, and I wasn't sure it wouldn't do more harm than good to send it. Normally, I prefer to write something a bit more positive and a lot more constructive, even if the nasty version says things that really need to be said. I don't know whether I can hold back this time. Maybe my patient really is at an end.

For all the time I've had wasted by having nothing to do at work, you'd think I'd be welcoming this with open arms. However, that's not the point. I'm sick and tired of being treated like a mushroom in this job. I've been so patient with him, and I've been consistently let down. This has to change now. The question remains: even if this will make things better for me, do I have the guts to do it?

Tim Flannery proposes voluntary global dimming

I'm a regular reader of a Yahoo group called Running On Empty Australia (ROEOZ), which is primarily concerned with environmental sustainability in a post-peak-oil world.

A few days ago, I posted some links conveying the news that Tim Flannery - yes, the 2007 Australian Of The Year - was actually advocating covering the atmosphere with soot as a possible solution to global warming. It seems that Flannery has gone quite mad - or, at least, he hasn't realised that we're already doing this, with fairly adverse consequences to humans and hardly any effect at all on global warming.

I was going to make a video about this, but a fellow ROEOZ reader has posted a pretty good summary of the discussion here.

Video: An open letter to Ireland regarding the Lisbon Treaty

As I promised myself, I've recorded a brief video about why the people of Ireland should vote No to the Treaty of Lisbon on Thursday, 12 June. I don't know whether this will get through to anyone, but I really need to warn people about how important it is to stop this going ahead.

Watch it here.

UPDATE 2010-02-14: I have deleted this video because it's no longer newsworthy. Ireland was forced to vote again and conceded to the EU. However, I haven't removed the link because I don't know how "deleted" the video is; perhaps there is still a way to watch it.

It's been a long couple of weeks

I haven't posted for a few weeks, partly because I haven't had a lot of time. I've had two eBay auctions go through, both of which worked out pretty well. I've had my first performance review in my current job, and I'm really happy with how that went. I've got a few things to sort out with my fabulous wealth (which is really neither), but things are going OK.

One thing I want to do is get a message to the people of Ireland regarding the Lisbon Treaty. Ireland is the only country that is having a popular vote on ratifying the Treaty; the other 26 countries in the European Union aren't going to because they don't care what ordinary people think. These are dangerous changes to the way the EU works; these are major constitutional changes that threaten democracy for all Europe, the previous EU Constitution disguised as a mere Treaty so the voice of the people won't be heard. There may be a video in this, but with the vote happening in less than two weeks, time is running out. I would recommend any swinging voters watch End Of Nations, which describes in great (but admittedly laborious) detail the changes that the Lisbon Treaty are forcing on the sovereign nations of Europe. Get this message out to everyone you know in the EU, whether they get a vote or not.

I went to the Eco Living Expo at the Adelaide Showgrounds yesterday. It's good to see something a bit more practical that I can do for the environment, if only for my (rented) piece of the world to be setting a good example. I think I'm getting close to the point where there is very little more that I can do for the environment in my current living situation; I need to treat my imagination to something more hands-on. I didn't see much of Earth-repairing significance at the Expo, but it's clear to me that when I eventually need to ask questions about the shape and form of my own place, the answers will be waiting for me.

One more working week without a car

About a month ago, I wrote about trying to get to work for a whole week without using my car. With a renewed sense of adventure, and with convenient new bus timetable coming into effect, I thought it was time to up the ante.

There would be a few important differences this time. For example, instead of subjecting myself in the worst heat wave in recorded history, I'm now facing the onset of the South Australian winter, with random showers and sea breezes sending the temperature to the floor at a moment's notice. I also don't have any public holidays this time around: I've got to keep this up for the full five days.

More importantly, I made liberal use of the trains last time, so I would have less riding to work in the morning (although I still rode home afterwards). Now that I've finally found somewhere I can have a shower at work, I want to work up to riding all the way from home to work by the end of the week.

This is going to take a bit of planning. I'm not going to take food and clothes to work on the bike every day, so I'm taking the bus on Monday to take some clothes to work, and again on Friday to take them home again. Tuesday through Thursday, I'll be riding, but I'll still have to pack food for the day. On the Sunday night, I already had everything packed: deodorant, clothes for the week, soap and towel for the shower, leftovers in the fridge for lunch; and my umbrella, of course, for the walking in between.

That's not to say, though, that I couldn't also suffer a minor setback before the week started: it was bucketing down with rain outside. Before I could take a 15-minute drive to work, I had to endure a 15-minute walk to the train stop; if it's still raining like this in the morning, I'm going to wonder how I ever survived it. For now, there's little more I can do but hope for the weather to ease before tomorrow morning.

Monday

It's always a shock when my mobile phone wakes me up at 6:15 in the morning. Let me sleep in until 6:20, at least. Make it 6:25.

With a quick twist of the blinds, I peer outside to what appears to be a break in the weather. Hopefully, this will hold until I get to work. Despite not having wanted to leave the warmth of the shower, I collected my backpack and my travel bag and headed off.

My daily detour to the local bakery was met with a few spots of rain, which I hardly noticed at all. By the time I'd bought breakfast, the rain had started anew, and with umbrella in hand, I braced myself for the walk to the interchange. When I reached the footpath, I saw a bus coming - the only bus that runs from the shops to the train at that hour of the morning, no less. I hadn't planned on catching this, given the reliable tardiness of buses - particularly when I need to catch one at a particular time to make a transfer further down the road - but it stopped right in front of me and was going the right way.

The Mawson Lakes railway station itself does its best to shield waiting passengers from the elements, with wide metal roofs and an enclosed lounge for city-bound passengers. The elements were winning today, though: with the strong easterly wind, you had to stick to the west side of the stairs not to get wet. Across the track, the city-bound passengers anxiously awaited their vessel, a rainbow to the south marking its destination.

There seems to be a marked difference between the people travelling north and those travelling into the city, with the latter group seemingly better endowed with attractive women. Sure, they have nicer clothes and accessories - or, at least, more expensive clothes and accessories - but they have nicer faces as well, or at least there is a greater proportion of nice faces. Do these people have good jobs in the city because of a better genetic predisposition? And what does that even mean? Perhaps it's my longing gaze across the tracks, my wondering about the inner-city lifestyle only matched by my disappointment that they best-looking ones are never going the same way as I am.

Then again, perhaps I'm also disappointed that I'm going the same way I am. The defence sites can be pretty drab, especially if your office is as isolated as mine. I'm glad I don't work for the Department any more, but working in a private company for the same industry is often just as taxing on one's moral compass. My current project is at something of a crossroads, but since none of us knows with path to take, the whole thing has come to a grinding halt. I've got a few things to work on today, but I can't help the impression that I'll be entertaining myself for half the day.

Getting ready to go home, I had a quick glance at the news. This morning's cold snap broke temperature records across the state, and it wasn't so long ago that South Australia was suffering the longest heat wave in national recorded history. I also noted that the crew from The Chaser's War On Everything have all had the charges against them dropped, news which brought a knowing smile to my face. I grabbed my backpack and headed home.

I've certainly appreciated the change in bus timetable, which got me arriving at work ten minutes earlier and leaving five minutes later - just enough leeway to put in a full eight-hour day. Outside, the intermittent rain has made way to sunshine so brilliant that it almost hurts to look where I'm going. Not that I need to, mind: there's not much traffic to dodge, and I've only got Muse on my iPod to keep me company until I get to the bus.

Tomorrow will be interesting. I took the bike out tonight to get some food to bring home. The bike's still going strong, but the evening air was freezing. It's going to be worse at 8:00 tomorrow morning. Fortunately, I won't have anything to carry except food, since all my work clothes are already at work.

Tuesday

The plan today was to ride my bike to the train, take the train to Elizabeth, and ride back to work. I've done this a few times before, and both stretches on the bike are pretty leisurely.

I once saw someone riding across the bridge at Elizabeth at the same time as me. He was riding on the road, and I stuck to riding on the footpath. Now that I've ridden on the road, I don't know how anyone ever put up with it. On top of the constant flirting with rush-hour traffic, the bitumen is cracking at the seams, which makes for one hell of a bumpy ride on a bike. Next time, I think I'll stay on the footpath.

The good part about this stretch of road, though, is that the way from here to my office is a sealed road that is, for some unknown reason, closed to all car traffic. There's a section of East Avenue that's blocked off, starting at Bellchambers Road at the northern end, and ending at an assortment of offices of Defence contractors. Actually, the road runs from there all the way through DSTO, but much to the chagrin of the early-morning commuters, the north gatehouse is very rarely open.

As is so often the case, it wasn't until I'd gotten to work that I realised I'd forgotten something. Word to the wise: if you aren't going to wear your work shoes on the way to work, /leave them at work/. So I was in my good work clothes, and a pair of sneakers. Really, there wouldn't be anything wrong with wearing my work shoes on the bike: they're little more than black sneakers, after all, and I've walked many a mile in them already. The problem is deciding whether to wear them to work every day or whether to take them to work once and leave them there all week - and sticking to that one plan. I didn't bring a belt, either, but I've got no excuse for that.

I'm starting to look forward to the ride home each day now. Leaving at twilight, you see the colours change over the Edinburgh bushland. On Tuesdays, you get to laugh at the people queued up for cheap petrol; on Wednesdays, you get to laugh at the people who forgot to fill up their cars on Tuesday. It's not that I'm not a sucker for the gas-guzzling lifestyle: I still own a car, after all, but I drive so little in it that I feel that I'm making that evolutionary leap beyond oil with every day that I choose an alternative. Remember, peak oil is largely an economic phenomenon, so the weaker your dependence on oil is, the weaker the effect of its price will be on you, particularly in the long term. Almost paradoxically, I consider what I'm doing such a good investment that I will neither need nor want whatever money it returns to me.

I felt as though I was making record time on the way home today, but it turned out not to make any difference. It still took me 40 minutes to get home, and I didn't feel any more or less tired and sore than I usually do. Normally, I would be inclined to rest on the laurels of a day like that, but I'm determined to get up tomorrow and do it all over again.

Wednesday

I'm putting the stakes up a bit higher today. Instead of riding from the Elizabeth interchange to the office, I'm getting off at the Salisbury interchange and continuing from there. In real terms, instead of riding 3km to work, I'm now riding close to 7km. I'm still planning on riding all the way home as well, which is still more than double that. This is all part of the build-up for this week.

After yesterday's stellar weather, the showers have finally come. However, it was only Adelaide rain, which was too faint to see from inside. When I ducked outside to see just how hard it was raining, I could barely feel it on my hand. I can live with that, I thought, remembering that there is indeed hot running water at work. I made sure I had the shoes and belt I forgot to leave at work on Monday, and grabbed the water bottle I forgot yesterday.

It turns out that the sleet is considerably more noticeable when you're riding through it that it is when you stick your hand into it from under the cover of the front porch. By the time I got to the bakery, I was starting to regret not having worn contact lenses today; waiting for the train, I used up the last tissue I was carrying with me, getting as much cleaning and drying out of that as I could.

Salisbury Interchange is interesting. The railway line crosses the highway, high above the underpass of regular traffic. There's also a foot bridge into the northwestern suburbs, from which you get a unique view of the highway; at rush hour, you almost get the impression of living in a major city. The foot bridge connects with a paved track that appears to run between a school and the main roads. I've taken this path once before, but I couldn't remember where it ended up, so I was navigating based almost entirely on my sense of direction, heading in the rough direction of work, picking up the suburban backstreets on the way. It's a shorter distance, but I'm not convinced it's any quicker, especially when you end up turning across heavy traffic afterwards.

Salisbury, as its name suggests, is high up on a plain, whereas Mawson Lakes, formerly known as The Levels, is quite close to sea level. There are no steep hills along the way to suggest such a difference; moreover, it's a steady incline that gains some 50 metres of altitude over the 7km voyage. Heading west into Edinburgh, the climb continues; and with the rain still falling, I'm talking to myself to keep going. It's not much further. There's hot running water. Just a little further.

I get into work bang on 9:00. Of course, I'm in daggy clothes that are soaked from both directions, so I can't much hang around the office like this. One of the buildings here is equipped with a proper change room, presumably recalling the days when actual military personnel were here and had to keep fit as a matter of duty. Really, though, the difference is only that my duty is to a higher calling than Queen and country.

In any case, that shower was worth it, without question. I can feel my legs stiffen up, now that I'm only using them to stand on the spot. I can already tell that I'll spend half of today doing squats and going for random walks around the office to loosen up my knees.

Having spent 15 minutes getting cleaned up and getting changed, I'm starting to calculate in my head how long it's really taking me to get to work. I left today at about 8:10 to get to the office at 9:00. I reckon I could ride in that amount of time: it takes me 40 minutes to ride home, and the climbing wouldn't add that much time to the total. The only problem is that I should really be at work and in a working capacity by 9:00, so really, I should be leaving ten or twenty minutes earlier. That said, we don't get many visitors here, and none of them ever wants to see me, so unless I'm specifically meeting someone, I don't think anyone cares if I start and finish a bit later, as long as things get done.

As you can probably tell, work isn't really capturing my attention today. My boss called me at around lunchtime to try and arrange a meeting with me, and again about an hour later to cancel it. We'll try and meet again tomorrow morning and see what progress we can make. I've scribbled down some ideas regarding a direction that I don't really know we should be taking, just in case that's what we end up deciding.

I left a little bit earlier today than yesterday, catching a break in the showers, as well as wanting to get back to the shops before the bakery shuts. I didn't buy much, and there wasn't anything I needed urgently, but the bakery was offering me free stuff and I wouldn't have gotten it home before the weekend otherwise. The things we do, I suppose.

To cap off a pretty trying day, I thought it would be a really good idea to do a stir fry when I got home. After eating that in front of Spicks And Specks and washing up everything, I wasn't done with it much before 22:00. At least I don't have much that I need to do to prepare for tomorrow.

Truly, I'm tiring from this, and not just the cycling. On the way home, I felt that the cycling was getting easier, but my legs were like jelly through the night, and I can't run all the way up the stairs as easily I could a few days ago. Maybe organising this is getting easier as well, although I wouldn't know it today, without an array of frozen meals that I can just grab on the way out.

None of this has stopped me wanting to continue, though. Seeing petrol jump to 154.9c/L today helped a bit, and I now find myself heckling people with my bell as I ride past petrol stations, so I can always look forward to that. We might get more rain again tomorrow, so I'll have to see what I will be able to do. I'll be interested to know how I feel physically and mentally as well.

Thursday

I wasn't sure what I'd do today. I had noble goals of riding all the way to work, but I had three concerns about whether I'd manage it. My first problem was that the Bureau of Meteorology had forecast showers for the morning, and I could only hope that they don't coincide with my ride to work. My second and third problems were that my knees were aching like anything.

I had my alarm set for 6:20, in case I bailed on the bike ride and had to take the bus. The weather was moving in from the west, seemingly blowing the rain clouds away, and I could see what I swore were blue skies over the horizon. The bike ride was on, and I was back to sleep for another hour.

Leaving at 8:05, I could feel my knees arguing with me before I got to the end of the street: they're going to hate me for this. I had thought about taking the elevator at Mawson Interchange rather than riding up over the bridge, easily the slowest part of the whole journey, but some roadworks had sprung up overnight, and taking another detour from the one they had established wasn't worth it. Anyway, the bridge is quite an apt metaphor for peak oil: the climb is much easier in a car, but the descent is far more satisfying on a bike.

Navigating Salisbury Highway on a bike, you notice it's only straight and true on a map. The quality of the road surface varies wildly from smooth finish to seismic anomaly. The bike lanes are either generous or non-existent, so the trip combines peaceful, uninterrupted cycling with the white-knuckle terror of mingling with rush-hour traffic. In some parts, I'm not convinced it's safe to be on the road at all - and it's bad enough taking my chances with oblivious pedestrians on the footpath, thank you very much. Maybe I need a bigger bell, but then I'd have people chasing me to buy ice cream.

The meeting with my boss has been postponed again, and it might not be today at all. Since I still don't know what I should be doing, the frustration is setting in. You'd think this would be discouraging me from making an effort to get work, and I'd be lying if I were to say it wasn't having some effect. It's just as well that riding has been so much fun and so satisfying. The key, I think, is to persevere with work as much as I do with the bike: just as I know that some parts of the ride are more difficult than others, I know that the current inactivity will eventually make way, and I'll be off at a frantic pace again. Still, the slow points on a bike last minutes, not weeks. That's kind of a downer.

Today was classic autumn weather: bright and sunny for a while, then raining, then sunny again. In most parts of the country, this phenomenon is referred to as "Melbourne weather", but Adelaide's weather is not much better at this time of year. I got a few spots of rain on the way out, but I could still see the brilliance of the sunset through the bush to the west, at least for the first few minutes. That said, the sunset lasts a bit less time every day, and I left a bit later than I'd hoped today.

I was pretty hungry by then as well, so rather than get there and start foraging, I stopped in for junk food on the way home. It seemed that everyone else in the entire city did as well: I've never stood in line so long for "fast" food. To make matters worse, everyone in the queue ahead of me seemed to be catering for a family reunion, except for the couple ahead of me, who spent ten minutes disputing an order because they got something more than what they ordered. At least someone had a busy day at the office.

It was nearly 20:00 when I got home, and I could feel the air getting cooler. I couldn't wait to have a hot shower, get rid of my dirty clothes, and just stop for a moment to rest on my laurels. A colleague told me today that you can well be surprised by what you can do when you're committed to it, and of course, he's absolutely correct about that. A few days ago, I could have seen myself regretting an experiment such as this - arriving at work one day, for example, and being so weak and tired that I couldn't even walk, let alone concentrate on work. Now that I'm on the home stretch, all that remains is to get the stuff I've left at work this week, bring it all home, and wash it - perhaps even in preparation for next week. I can taste the finish now; not even fried chicken and cheesecake could mask that.

Friday

Well, this is it: one last early start, one last dash for the train. Followed by a weekend of washing clothes, no doubt.

On the way to the bakery, fittingly, I caught up with the friend of mine who lent me the bicycle that made this little experiment of mine possible. I let him know what I'd been doing and that the net result of it may be my purchasing of a new bike. I'll try to catch up with him and pick his brain about what I should be looking for. I can't see there being a paradigm shift from what I've already got; it's more about designing something for me and for my needs.

When I got on the train, I saw one of my old bosses from my previous job at Defence. I don't know whether he saw me, and frankly, I don't much care either. He and I had a falling out when one of his yes-men, who was scared to death of me (and possibly still is), tried to blame me for screwing up a project, and when he stepped in, he turned out to be no more honourable than the coward he was defending. Usually, I just act as if I don't know them; they should be so lucky, in reality. Fortunately, he didn't change to the bus today.

It's weird, actually. He's a keen cyclist, he uses public transport whenever possible, he's multilingual, he buys organic produce, and he's got a positively evil sense of humour. Before the disputes came up, we got on famously. Afterwards, he decided that pecking order of his subordinates was more important than their ability to work together, and the disputes got out of hand. Now, I'll never speak to him again. It might seem like a shame, but I don't really want to be associated with people that harbour such resentment of me, and I'm just glad I don't have so many of them in my life any more. I am, admittedly, morbidly curious to know how these people think of what happened, but only as much as a passing driver slows down to look at a car accident: you might want to know, but there's a good chance you won't like what you find out.

The office is always very quiet at 8:15 in the morning, which allows me to concentrate better on my work. That is to say, it would allow that, if I actually had that much to do. In the absence to a solution to any of my problems, I'm trying to find ways of filling up my days at work, and I always feel guilty about doing that, even if I didn't cause the problems in the first place. It makes it difficult to appreciate your own ability to do something worthwhile with your life, to leave on the world a mark that is truly yours, to be a person you can improve stuck in a place that you can't.

To cap off a particularly trying week, I nearly missed the bus on the way home. It seems that not everyone at Adelaide Metro got the new timetable, and as I was trying to cross a busy street at rush hour, I could see the bus turning to drive away. It's at times like these, when you're running across a congested roundabout to a bus stop, that you notice how much heavier wet clothes can be than dry clothes.

Even so, I couldn't stop congratulating myself all the way home. A couple of friends invited me out to dinner that night, and I had to order something decadent and expensive as a reward for my efforts. It would be especially ironic if that meal undid all the healthy things I've done for myself during the week, but I don't really care.

* * * * * *

What I have done is to prove to myself that, in spite of my obvious physical unpreparedness, I could still do it with little or no ill effect. My legs still ache, but that will fade over the next day or two, and what will remain are the memories of what I have achieved.

On that note, I wonder how many people will read this and fail to imagine themselves undertaking such an exercise. I can only respond in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exup?ry:

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

I have no special skills in this department either. To me, this was simply one more exercise in building a plan using very basic tools and materials. The rest comes from my passion, my commitment to leaving a mark on the Earth of which I can be proud. See the Earth in a different way, and consider all she has done for you, and you too will be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

One working week without a car

I've written before about getting to my new job without a car. Well, a couple of weeks ago, I gave it a shot.

Since I started my new job in January, my car use has gone up from about 7000km to about 12000km per annum. Getting to and from my new workplace constitutes 90% of my driving, but it is simply unrealistic to avoid it - or, at least, so it would seem.

I've thought a lot about getting to work without using my car. The rules were simple: get myself to and from work every day for a week, without driving my car, without getting a lift, and without calling a taxi. Sounds easy enough. This was the week that I decided that I would actually do it.

The difficulty is that there aren't too many other options where I work. The only bus that goes anywhere near my office runs twice in the morning (and one of these times is too late to be useful) and once in the afternoon. The nearest railway stations are a good half-hour's walk away. It's not so far that I couldn't ride, but I don't think any of the buildings near me are equipped with showers, so this would have to be restricted for the wellbeing of my co-workers. Oh, and nothing anywhere near my office is even remotely catered, so I have to bring my own food as well. If only to increase the level of difficulty, the bulk of our clientele works a few kilometres up the road, which "necessitates" driving rather than walking.

Really, I picked a real humdinger of a week to try this. Although it was a short week, due to the Adelaide Cup public holiday, South Australia is in the midst of the longest heat wave in Australia's recorded history. To make matters worse, the air conditioner in my building has blown a fuse, and it won't be fixed until next week. Somebody out there doesn't want this to work.

In the end, I settled for two approaches. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I would take the bus, getting to work at around 8:15 and leaving at around 16:15, working through lunch to squeeze in a full eight-hour day. On Thursday and Friday, I would ride my bike to my local railway station, take the train to the nearest station to my office and ride from there, riding all the way home in the evening.

It almost sounds like a plan. Let's see if it works.

Tuesday

It's a bit of a shock to the system to be up before dawn. I had set my alarm from 6:15 and, not being a morning person at the best of times, was far from impressed to hear it. Stocking some fresh sandwiches, a slightly bruised apple and my Akubra, I left the house at 7:00.

When you're embarking on something so inspiring to oneself (albeit so foolhardy to others), it pays to do a bit of groundwork before you start. For instance, I often feel sick if I eat too early in the morning, particularly if I haven't had enough sleep. As such, it's worthwhile knowing that both my local Woolworths and the adjacent Baker's Delight open at 7:00 during the week. Either choice would allow me my standard morning snacks of a croissant and a Farmers' Union Iced Coffee, so as long as I give myself a couple of minutes before the bus arrives, I'm set.

The outbound 225 bus is hardly the most convenient way to get to Salisbury Interchange in the morning. It winds its way east through Pooraka and what used to be Salisbury Downs (which was re-branded a few years ago as Gulfview Heights), turning what would be ten minutes on the road into nearly half an hour. The good news is that the same bus used for the 225 also makes the run to DSTO and the RAAF base, the latter being very close to my office. If you're catching both, you can just stay in the air-conditioning and wait for the connecting train from the city. (Come to think of it, that might be more convenient for me as well. That might be worth a look.)

In the end, we had a fair wait anyway. Thanks to some combination of rush hour and the fear of rails buckling in the heat, the trains were running a few minutes late. More iPod time for me, I suppose.

The net result of that was that instead of arriving at the RAAF base entrance at 8:06 and walking for ten minutes to get to work, it was actually closer to 8:30 that I arrived at the office. Great. If I have to leave at 16:20 to get the bus home again, I can't realistically get in eight hours at the office - eventually, someone is going to notice all these 10-15 minutes rushes adding up. You'd think having a good excuse to leave early would be every worker's dream. I guess it all depends on whether anyone notices.

That said, I did get to work, and I did get home again, although it did cost me a minute's job - seeing a bus stop from a distance, and finding the bus already there and idling, is still a little disconcerting.

Wednesday

I could actually get used to this 6am start business. It's dark when I get up, but it's dawn when I leave the house, and the suburb takes on a palette that so few of us ever get up to see.

Everyone keeps to themselves at the bus stop. Actually, at this bus stop, there is usually only one other person waiting - a young blonde, who looks perhaps younger than me, concentrating on a cigarette. She was here yesterday as well. For me, the cigarette is almost as much of a do-not-disturb sign as the headphones, particularly because my immediate reaction to smokers is to ask rhetorically, "you know those things'll kill you, right?", which is less than ideal as a conversation starter.

It's weird that it's been ridiculously hot - maxima consistently over 35 degrees, and not dropping below 30 until just before sunrise - and yet, I have no second thoughts about getting out and walking. My colleague and I are still walking at lunchtime as well, to which end I'm grateful to have brought the Akubra and not one of my legion of baseball caps. I remember being back in Townsville over Christmas and walking ten minutes to the local shopping centres. That felt a lot more uncomfortable than it does here; the higher temperatures are more than offset by the sub-10% humidity. Just get a long drink of water when you get to where you're going.

The bad news for is that the combination of low humidity and daylight savings time means that the hottest part of the day is about when I'm walking to the bus back home. I've hardly noticed the heat wave at 8:00, but at 16:00 it really grabs your attention. What I have noticed is how much of a difference it makes simply to be in the shade. As I'm often travelling on foot, I've gotten into the habit of tracking from one shady spot to the next, walking on the north side of the street, even sticking to streets through which the breeze is blowing, in an effort to cool off a bit. I've also started preferring sneakers to sandals when it gets really hot, as I've found that my reefs don't soak up sweat the ways socks do. You don't want your feet to slip around inside your shoes, and you can always throw sweaty socks in the wash.

All in all, two nearly successful days of taking the bus to work. I'll probably dock myself a few minutes because the buses have been a bit later than I'd hoped, but it's not so much that it can't be recovered when I have my own transport all the way home. It's been a while since I used the bicycle, so I made sure the chain was oiled and the tyres pumped, ready for tomorrow.

Thursday

After two days of 6:15 alarm calls, I certainly appreciated sleeping in until after 7:00. Once I'd gotten a change of clothes together, as well as my typical packed lunch of sandwiches and yoghurt, my backpack was pretty full - and I hadn't had breakfast yet! This might take a bit of tweaking; it may be possible to leave clothes at work, for example.

I didn't even leave the house until well after 8:00 and I still didn't feel as though I was in a hurry. In the end, I had to stand around waiting for the train to come. I caught up with a friend of mine from DSTO, who I hadn't had much to do with since I quit my old job in June. She was glad that I'd landed on my feet. I was glad to hear that things at DSTO were still much the same as they had always been - yes, I know I shouldn't laugh, but I still do.

When I got off the train at Elizabeth, I had hardly crossed the bridge towards the Defence sites when my front tyre blew out. Strangely, I hadn't noticed riding over anything untoward. I pulled over to have a look, but when I pumped more air into it, it receded within just a few seconds. Briefly, I thought about the discussion I'd had on the train and how glad I was to be out of DSTO... and that if Schadenfreude is real, its timing is impeccable. I decided to brave the rest of the journey, wondering along the way how exactly I was going to get everything home that night.

Looking at the Yellow Pages from work, it turns out that there's a bicycle shop just across the road from where I got the puncture. Very suspicious, no? Well, not really. A colleague drove me to the shop so that I could buy a couple of replacement tubes, which was nice of him. I didn't get to look at the tyre until it was time to go home, but I got the tube changed easily enough - and, in case anyone was wondering, a Swiss army knife and a set of house keys are hardly the ideal tools for such a job.

It was well after 18:00 when I left. A former colleague passed me in her car, for which I later berated her on Skype for the sense of panic and danger that I told her I had had but hadn't. (To be fair, I did include lots of sarcastic :P emoticons.) I was already ravenous with hunger, so I promised myself dinner on the way home. I stopped in at Red Rooster for a chicken dinner, although I later regretted the blackcurrant Powerade that went with it. In all good conscience, though, I should have been sorry enough for knowing such a beverage existed, long before handing over the money.

What followed is sure to be my favourite memory of this bicycle for a long time. By the time I had dragged myself away from the air-conditioning, the sun had almost set below the line of the buildings in the west. Between the weakness of the sunlight and the motion of the air as I rode, it actually seemed quite cool riding home. The rush hour traffic having all but vanished, I was alone with only my ambition and the satisfaction of achieving it. To ride such a distance was not a new experience for me, but to do so with such a purpose made it all worthwhile.

I returned to the hothouse I call my room, to prepare for one last day. Well, actually, I just checked my email and watched TV, but that's hardly in keeping with the theme, now, is it?

Friday

The last day of the week. I was all geared up for the home stretch. I didn't want to wake up so early, but I was on a mission. Quick shower, work clothes, new sandwiches, fresh apple, water bottle. Up goes the garage door, and I'm ready to go.

And the front tyre on my bike is flat. The tyre I changed yesterday at work, the one I pumped up and upon which I rode home quite comfortably, is dead flat. Usually, my tyres go flat with a sudden thud and a telltale flap-flap-flap sound as you come to a halt, and I'd gotten home on it yesterday without noticing any such problems.

Desperate, I dragged out my housemate's floor pump to see if it had just leaked, but I couldn't get it to stay up. I could hear the air hissing as it escaped. It doesn't look good.

Resigned, too late to catch public transport or to replace the tube again, I went back upstairs, changed into my work clothes and took my car keys from the bedside drawer. I had failed.

Okay, so the anticlimax wasn't really that dramatic. I've since had a look at the tyre, to find a thorn not unlike those on plants we've had to prune in our own front yard. I suppose this is the problem with not sweeping up your garage. That's taken the edge of the disappointment that I felt that Friday morning. I came so close, and I enjoyed doing it.

It was an experience that I felt that I had to do, just to see for myself how viable it was. It's difficult to overstate the importance of the end result: that I'd do it again, and much the same way, in a heartbeat. I don't have an ideal system, but I'm sure it's a workable one. What may be required is little more than fine-tuning - a straw hat, a more reliable bike, and perhaps some other things that are similarly minor. If I've made any progress by this experience, it's the recognition that the hurdles are so minor. There might not be an easy answer to this, but the variety of not-quite-right answers that I tried this week might be a viable result in combination.

That in itself may be progress enough for now. At least I've proven to myself that getting to work, which would be an unthinkable commute without a car, is in fact more than accessible without a car. There are so few places that I go for which I really need a car, and travel to and from work was by far the most significant. From here, I can make progress towards bigger goals, and I feel great for knowing that the things I can do to make progress towards them aren't so bad. That is my reward.

That, and I finally bought that iPod Touch. For the bus ride, of course.

[Updated 2008-04-06: There is a shower at work - just one, in one of the adjacent buildings, but there it is. Also, the Adelaide Metro has just released some new bus timetables, to take effect at the end of April, that will mean I can take the bus and still get in a full eight-hour day. See this blog entry for details.]

First week on the job

I've just started a new job with a defence contractor. Pending any more joyous paperwork or induction activities to dismiss, I'll be back in my good old software engineering boots in a matter of a few hours. I didn't sleep well before my first day on Monday, so I was tired for most of the week, but I'm feeling better now.

Actually, I had an interesting experience on Friday, being back at my old genuine-article Defence workplace. Aside a client meeting, I spent most of the time looking around for people I knew from when I worked there. It's not as though I could realistically have stopped to chat much, of course, and lots of people are still on leave, so it's still a bit of a ghost town.

Given that things weren't going so well for me when I left in June, I had wondered how I'd feel about being back there. The first person that I saw that I recognised was a former supervisor of mine, with whom I don't really get along any more. I wasn't sure if he was expecting to see me, or if he would know what so say to me if he did. I didn't really know what I would do either. Perhaps I was listening more intently than usual to my new boss, who was with me at the time, in the hope of avoiding whatever awkward moment might have been.

Fortunately, I had already had a weird premonition of what would happen. When I returned from my Christmas holidays in Townsville, another former supervisor was on the same plane back to Adelaide. I was waiting at the departure gate, and I had the distinct impression that he saw me and that I had seen him. Yet, he kept walking as if he wasn't supposed to be there. I caught another glimpse of him getting his luggage in Adelaide, but by then I was looking for a bus ride home.

It was all a bit strange. I hardly wanted to stop to chat, particularly because I don't really have a lot to say to him. I will, no doubt, see him again one day on the base. That said, I can take some heart from the sheepishness with which he seemed to avoid eye contact with me at Sydney airport. I've long had a theory that he was afraid of me when I worked for him, although this near-conversation hardly put that theory to a conclusive test. In some ways, I can't wait to find out more - I can accept bad news, so long as I understand it - but in other ways, I'm not exactly seeking it out.

It was all just a coincidence... or was it?

Well, yes, it was.

My near miss on Friday with another former boss conjured up similar thoughts. What would I do? What would he do? Nothing, as it turned out: as sure as I am that we both recognised each other from afar, we both got on with our respective business without outwardly acknowledging each other in any way. Another anticlimax, then.

All in all, Friday had the makings of a very bad day. We were waiting on some software that we are having written for us, for which we have been waiting day-to-day for months but which has been delayed again. Things didn't go so well at our client meeting, either, but we have since managed to make some progress. As for me, I'm still in the mode of not knowing what I'm doing from one day to the next, but that won't last much longer.

* * * * * *

I still can't believe that the Adelaide 36ers beat the Sydney Kings last night. After a near-melee between Brad Davidson and BJ Carter, the Sixers came out and flat-out shut the Kings down in the second and third quarters. The Kings don't lose often nowadays - in fact, last night saw them lose for only the third time all season - but I can't even remember the last time they got smashed like that.

Although I don't get anything for click-through, you can read my match report on Ozhoops. I'll have another one to write on Wednesday night, since we have the Perth Wildcats in town for the Fox Sports game.

* * * * * *

The US economy continues to crumble, and the US dollar continues its slide against the other major currencies. The Dow Jones dropped another 246 points on Friday, and has now dropped some 1500 points in the last three months and 1000 points since Christmas. Gold is knocking on the door of US$900/ounce but is starting to be outpaced by silver now.

The "good" news is that oil has dropped below US$93/barrel, so we might not have to deal with A$1.49/L petrol here for much longer. We'll see what happens on Wednesday, when every petrol station in South Australia simultaneously jacks up its prices.

While I could go another week without filling up the car, I would personally rather try getting the bus to work this week. One tiny problem with that is that it would mean waking up at 6:00 and working 8:00 until 16:30. Considering how tired I've been all week, I'm not sure I'm up to the task, at least without more training. We shall see.