Desert Mandala: Life In Central Australia

Amanda December 20th, 2007

Hello dear readers,

Once upon a time, Spam was tinned ham. That’s right. Spam ham. Comes in a semi-triangular tin with a unique wind-off lid. Loved by campers everywhere and still loved by many proud Central Australians. There’s even recipes for Spam-burgers.

Spam ham is ok stuff. You wouldn’t want to live on it, but every once in a while, it’s fine.

Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of spam I’m talking about. 

I am talking about that kind of stuff that you get in email box, or in our case, in your comments boxes. This morning, I found 39 little messages trying to sell me lots of medicines: anti-biotics, engancers for your love life, stuff to make you thin. (Actually, I’m convinced that one day an entire container load of that stuff beginning with ‘V’ (men use it to get themselves aloft) is going to turn up at my work place and everyone will be walking around, upright and unable to sit down for days!). When I checked the comments again at lunchtime, I found another 11 equally unwanted spams in my ‘awaiting moderation’ box.

I have taken umbrage at this unwarranted attack on our humble little blog.

As a result, I have now taken evasive action. If you are a real person who’d like to post a comment, a trackback or a ping, no problem. You will just have to full in one of those little word tests … and wellah! your comment will be posted immediately.

If you are, however, some piece of javascript or some other little code nasty, TOUGH!!!

And with that, Gadget and I will sign off for a few days. We are leaving for Bowral tomorrow morning and will be driving down. We will be spending Christmas/New Year in NSW, enjoying some cooler weather and some rain. 

I’ll take some photos of our road trip and put them up when I get to Mum & Dad’s.

See you all soon.

• self-help , time management
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Amanda December 20th, 2007

I read recently that if you have more than 20% of your workspace taken up by personal items, then you are percieved as not being professional. I also read recently that women who don’t apply more layers of make up than there are geological strata in the MacDonnell Ranges are also seen as less than professional. For these pieces of wisdom, I say thank you feminism, thank you Hollywood and thank you soulless corporate culture!

I have to admit, I fail on both counts. Anthropologists who engage in remote area fieldwork don’t need to impress with inch-thick foundation and other pore-clogging gunk. Just some sunscreen and a bit of lip balm will do. As for my office…

To upset the corporate clones, I collect snowdomes.

That’s right … those symbols of everything that was tacky and wrong about tourism in the 1960s and 70s … snowdomes. I currently have about 65 of these little guys in my office, stacked neatly on my bookcase. Whilst most of them I’ve collected myself, friends and family have thought of my eccentric habit and have brought them back from all over the world (like Hawai’i  and Bosporus). They’re surprisingly hard to come by in Australia nowdays, which is why I occasionally have to resort to something like the tiny porcelain thimble (from Port Pirie in South Australia), a tiny gold stature of a merino ram (from Goulburn in NSW) or a miniature tea pot (from Woomera in South Australia).

From time to time someone – I think it’s our cleaner, the walking American stereotype- plays with them and upsets my arrangement. But mostly, people tend not to notice them until they’re mid-sentence in a conversation with me and say: “Oh, wow! I’ve never noticed those before … how wonderful!”

And you know what? I’ve never had anyone tell me it’s not professional.

• corporate culture , fun
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Amanda December 16th, 2007

For me, one small slice of heaven is finding other bloggers out there who share my frustration with shameful grammar, apostrophe abuse, and fools who couldn’t park a finger up their nose. I also harbour a penchant for Engrish (yes, that’s right Engrish not English) signs. Imagine then my delight in discovering a treasure trove of likeminded people who equally take offence at apostrophe abuse, quotation mark overuse and twats who can’t park or string together a few paltry words in an intelligible sentence. I know, I’m teasing you, so without further ado, here are some gorgeous blogs and websites for you to check out:

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/ 

If you EVER feel inclined to enclose a word, a phrase or an entire sentence in quotation marks, be sure – be very sure  – you actually understand what quotation marks are used for. HINT: it isn’t for drawing attention to your product or message unless you want to look like a complete dick.

 ... hmmm, I wonder just what kind of “service” you get at this station?

http://www.apostropheabuse.com/

http://www.apostrophism.com/

These two blogs address the peeve dearest to me: the misuse and/or ignorance of humble apostrophes.

When I learned how to use an apostrophe back in 3^rd grade, it made perfect sense to me. You have a noun (like dog) and to show that the dog owns something, you used an apostrophe: the dog’s ball. If there are two dogs each of whom owned a bone and you wanted to say that the bones belonged to the dogs, you put the apostrophe AFTER the plural noun: the dogs’ bones. Again, this tells you that the dogs OWN the bones. Not that there’s two dogs.

It’s not rocket science. Ahhh… but for some people, apparently it is!

A common apostrophe abuse seems to be where morons … I mean … people apply a rule that is something like: use an apostrophe on every noun ending in a vowel. Thus: tomatoe’s (more than one tomato) or PIZZA’S. For godsake!! The pizza’s WHAT? What does the pizza own? Tell, me because I really want to know. Another abuse is found with common abbreviations: CD’s; DVD’s; TV’s.  This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Putting an apostrophe in CD’s still indicates ownership: the CD’s what? Its cover, maybe? The correct plural abbreviation is: CDs, DVDs, TVs, and the same with dates: 1970s, 1990s, 2000s.

The other way in which apostrophes are used is for contractions –when you joint two words together or leave out part of a word. That’s not hard to grasp either. That’s = that is. Don’t = do not. You’re = you are. Wasn’t = was not.Got the picture?

The only slightly tricky one is ‘it’s’. It’s = it is. Its (no apostrophe) is a possessive pronoun: its ball, its chair, its den, its furry headpiece. Easy.  If you can drive a car, use email, read a freakin’ recipe book, you can damn well stop being so lazy and use an apostrophe correctly.

Similar to apostrophe abuse is a phenomenon that seems to be confined to the USA: the use of lower-case ‘l’ in signs. Check out this blog for a graphic explanation:

http://lowercasel.blogspot.com/

Do lazy, careless drivers who couldn’t park a finger in their ear, let alone their cars in a supermarket car park annoy the crap out of you? Then this is the blog for you:

http://badparking.wordpress.com/

(We could actually start a lazy shopping trolley/random shopping trolley blog in Alice Springs, but that’s a rant for another day!).

Finally two more blogs, one from the world of lame church signs and my favourite broken English website. You know those really, really bad signs that churches put out on near the footpath to shame/motivate/guilt you into going to church … like ‘Jesus: Thermonuclear Protection’? Well, in America (as you might expect) these are at plague proportions (hah! I made a clever joke):

http://crummychurchsigns.blogspot.com/

And of course, what would this post be without a link to my all time favourite webpage about really bad English signs written by non-English-speaking people:

http://engrish.com/

• fun
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Amanda December 15th, 2007

Ok. I’ll admit it. I’m really burnt out. Not just at work, but with life in general. What Gary and I should have done is to book a week on a houseboat by ourselves. Anyway, to numb myself, I’ve been looking for blogs written by people who live in Alice Springs. There aren’t that many – or at least, thery’re not easy to find. I’m sure there are more Alice Springs bloggers out there, but for now, here are those that I’ve found. I will put up a separate blog roll on the sidebar of the page for those of you who’d like to read other people’s blogs in Central Australia. This one is John Rawnsley’s. Not only does it look good, and it’s a very worthwhile read:

<http://rawnsley.wordpress.com/

There’s local Alderman Jane Clarke’s:

http://www.netgrrl.com.au/blog/

Here is another one, which is now one of the 1000s of sad, neglected blogs decaying on the WWW:

http://desertgirl44.wordpress.com/

This is Jenny Fallon’s blog, which isn’t really about Alice Springs, but more about Jenny’s writing life:

http://www.jenniferfallon.com/blog/

A ‘best kept secrets in Alice Springs’ feature on a ‘Darwin’ blog:

http://darwinblog.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/alice-springs-more-recommendations/

Unfortunately, there is not much else out there in the blogosphere, except for ditzy travel blogs which say things like:

“I passed through Alice Springs on my way to Uluru… There wasn’t much to see there, but I got really drunk …”

Why is it that Alice Springs is immortalised and mythologised on one hand as ‘the Alice’, that remote, quaint and dusty little town in the middle of so much vastness, yet what people do when they come here is:

1. pass through on their way to elsewhere; or

2. (even worse!!) see it as a place with little value other than for getting drunk in.

NOTE: it’s only people from elsewhere  who call Alice Springs ‘The Alice’; people who live here call it ‘Alice Springs’ , ‘Alice’ or ‘town’!

Although this is a separate topic to blogs about Alice Springs, I am thoroughly disappointed to think that the town and its immediate surrounds aren’t being promoted as anything more than a stopover on the way to Uluru and a place to get pissed in. I mean, there is SO much to see and do in Alice Springs and in the 150km surrounding it: the Desert Park, the Telegraph Station, the Araluen Cultural Precinct, the RFDS, the School of the Air, Rex’s Reptile Centre, our many festivals, the Larapinta Trail, the West MacDonnells, the East MacDonnells, Gemtree, Owen Springs Reserve. I could go on.

The point of this ranting is: there is much more to Alice Springs than just passing through on your way to Uluru or getting trashed at Bo’s, Melanka’s or one of those outrageously priced tourist traps in Todd Mall. The NTG, tourism businesses and small business really need to get their act together and tell the ‘real’ stories of the town and promote the ‘real’ places (and I might add, learn how to give decent customer service), that people are coming here to see.

Or is the research wrong? Is it really just 5 star luxury hotels, beaches and endless amounts of food and alcohol that people want …?

• Central Australia
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gadget December 13th, 2007

As you might have guessed, both Gadget and I have been all too busy for the past 6 weeks with moving, working out bush, job applications and interviews and the usual round of pre-Christmas socialising. We’re both bordering on exhaustion and looking forward to the holidays. I don’t think we’ve caught up on our post-moving exahustion yet. We’re both tired and grumpy and ready to tell everything to go jump.

To begin with, we’re both waiting on interview results – Gadget for a promotion & me for a university job (a post-doc position). Let me tell you it’s painful. What should take a week, at this time of the year is taking two or more weeks. I could write more – especially about the bizarre unfolding of events that one of us has had to endure – but I guess I can’t. Those of you in-the-know will know exactly what I am talking about. Perhaps the most amusing line comes from one of my own interviews. When I asked how long until I found out, the reply was, “Not long. About fourteen days…” PAUSE “… Oh… and there’s the Christmas break. That will slow things down. Oh… umm… you’ll probably know in the second week of January.”

So I have to spend the next FOUR WEEKS stressing over whether I’ve got this position or not. Entire civilisations have fallen in that time. Do people actually understand how dreadful this is? What kinds of mental health effects it creates for applicants? My whole life feels like it’s on HOLD. Both of us feel like we’re being tortured to a silent, wimpering, but nonetheless, painful death!

Anyway, Gadget finishes work today until mid-January, whilst I have to wait til next week. Those last few days are always tortuously slow. Doubly so when your other half is at home chilling out and you’re still at work, trying not to look too bored and disinterested. I am not too ashamed to admit that I don’t want to be at work at all at the moment.

And then there’s Christmas. So far, I’ve written zero Christmas cards and bought only two Christmas presents. I am hoping to improve on this dismal effort by the end of Thursday next week, my first official day of leave. Until then, I have to sit on an interview panel, go to yet another Christmas party, write another job application, and generally try and finish up a few projects before I go on leave.  In all, I feel like I’m in the last few weeks before giving birth – that frustrating time when you don’t have the energry to finish what you’ve started and don’t want to start anything new… in fact, you’re just exhausted and stunned into inaction by the sheer insurmountability of the unknown time for which you will have to wait in order for the really hard, important work to begin.

… I am so over all this.

• corporate culture
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Amanda December 4th, 2007

Aahhh… the magic of government process. The mystery. The complicating simplicity. The ramped-up synergies and outcome-oriented program deliverables.

Excited? Those government synergies sure get my salivary ducts lubricated…. 

Tonight, however, I am confused. After spending several hours discussing potential projects to expend a surplus budget across two different organisations on three different occasions, and then subsequently drafting project briefs to spend the abovementioned money, this afternoon, we had another meeting.

And at this fateful meeting, as a Territory-wide group, we carefully eliminated most of the projects we’d proposed. I say ‘we’ very loosely – I am just the square peg in the round hole, the person down the end of the office with the snow dome collection in her office, not a real, functional member of this team in any sense. We eliminated and eliminated until,  after nearly two hours of hard and earnest elimination (a mild laxative effect, actually), we had an unspent surplus only slightly less than we started with two months ago.

Did I miss something here?  Or is it just the process that matters, bugger everything else?

 …and in other news to hand, a random picture of our dog, Charlie:

… and Ben in the pool:

…proof that we are responsible home owners, complying with NT pool safety regulations …

 …and the kind of outdoor setting you buy in Alice Springs the day before you’re hosting an 18th birthday and no one in town has anything other than plastic tables and chairs for less than $700!! (which is another blog post altogether)…

• coffee & raisin toast , corporate culture
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