Entries from December 2004 ↓

I’m standing in the kitchen alone, cleaning the day-old scum from the bottom of my mug. This is what a bad job is like. No company, no talk, no life. It’s like death row here, shells of men dragged from their slumber each day just to see the clock hands wind. Each man too deep in his own self-pity to care about another. Three soul-less days between rejoicing and rejoicing, yet such a lifeless drone between. The smothered cry of a lonely radio echoes somewhere down the halls. I crack the silver seal of the instant coffee and dive there into with a weathered spoon proclaiming from the stem that it belongs to FRED, or perhaps that it was victim to a phantom calligrapher with a similar moniker who simply couldn’t help himself. I have no feelings for this coffee mug. I can not fault it as an appliance for drinking, but it holds no fondness for me. Maybe I shall leave it here when I depart this place. I turn to the emotionless refrigerator for my dairy assistance, shelves of lunchboxes crush my dreams of cakes and cinnamon buns, a reminder that even cafe staff have vacated this husk of a place. The white cooling giant brings no solace for my under-stimulated soul, she offers only a festive chart on how to mathematicise my drinking, and an overcomplicated chart dictating whose turn it is to buy the milk.

I never buy the milk.

I’m beginning to appreciate weekends more and more, there’s only so much zing you’ve got left in the evenings once you get home from work. Last weekend was no exception.

So I got home on Friday and cranked up the air conditioner (oh thankyou god for the air conditioner) and started getting comfy. Turns out one of my roommates (No, sorry, not Glen) was going to be in the final of some bikini competition or other down in Fremantle that evening. So, I was dragged kicking and screaming* down to a club in Freo to suss this thing out. It was only after myself and my skinny-white-boy accomplice arrived that I was made aware of the fact that the exchange of currency was involved in letting me through the door. Yep, it’s been a while since I’ve been clubbing alright. However there was one thing that I noticed straight away, or rather, didn’t notice.

Once we’d travelled down a particularly cinematic long entry passage and down some stairs, we emerged into the void of the club and found the nearest bar. I’m looking around and I notice something. There’s no smoke. Anywhere. I figure it’s kinda weird, so I look about and don’t see a single cigarette or ashtray, then I get told that this is a non-smoking club. The revelation shocks me, I can go home at the end of the night and my clothes and hair won’t smell like someone vomited in an ashtray, let alone the endless entertainment provided by seeing the occasional person light up and then guessing how long it would take the bouncers to come and mug them to put it out. So we had a few drinks, hung around, I got to talk a bit to one of my friends boyfriends who I hadn’t had much of a chance to speak to before, and he turned out to be a bit of a champ, very impressed (I didn’t take him home though, I figured it might create a rift in the other friendship). I think there were also some scantily clad women parading around in the background somewhere, but I didn’t notice*. Also, my new lid and gloves became token items in the flesh parade and are now famous.

Saturday saw me take to the shops again (after fruitless reconnaissance on Thursday night) to start hacking away at my Christmas shopping dilemma. The major dilemma being that I always tend to find more things that I could use than things I would like to give away, and it’s a constant battle to constrain myself so I don’t skimp on other gifts to afford new toys for myself. Damnable impregnated sense of generosity. Thankfully I managed to knock a few off the list, but I’ve still got a lot of work to do.

The following morning I got up at some ludicrous hour (at least for a Sunday) to kit up and go for the first serious ride I’ve done since I had my off back in July. First thing to do was to go meet up with my riding friend down the road before we headed off to Byford to meet the others. I knew he’d just bought a new bike, but when I rocked up to his place in East Perth, I was confronted with this:

A Fireblade. The same bike which I had clashed horns with five months earlier, ending in an incident that left us both thinking we had seen better days. It was even the same colour. Creepy. Still, we rode off to Byford to meet up with the others, and after losing Warren when he took the wrong turnoff to Dwellingup (after which he figured we must be ahead of him and took off like a bat out of hell thinking he’d catch us up), we rode back to where we started to try and find the phone-less madman, only to find out half an hour later when we hit Dwellingup that he was almost an hour ahead of us (we discovered as much by phoning back a missed call and getting a tavern in Brunswick). So we called the Pub we planned to stop and told them to tie him down if he got there before us. A rather brisk strop South through Waroona, Harvey, Brunswick, Dardanup, Boyanup and Donnybrook later, we eventually made it up to Greenbushes a found Warren at the pub (already onto his third beer no less =P).

So we stopped for a drink, a bit of a snack and chiselled the dead bugs from our visors while we rested for a bit. The main street of the place was silent as the grave, very cool. The place was almost like a ghost town, I was outside taking photos when I heard someone pull up at a servo almost a k’ away and you could hear the sound of the bowser pumping fuel just cutting through the air. All very cool. Once we’d freshened up, we got back in the saddle and rode off to Bridgetown and from there went down to Nannup. That leg of the journey alone made the trip worthwhile. The hills and the corners were absolutely blissful, the roads were clean and sealed and the corners just swept back and forth for miles on end, constantly changing in steepness and camber around the hills. Absolutely gorgeous. And that’s to say nothing about the breathtaking scenery either.

We stopped at a few other towns out the back of nowhere to get fuel between the stretches, heading back North along another route before we stopped at Collie and from there, clocked straight up the South Western Highway to make it back home. Nine and a half hours, four full tanks of fuel and over seven hundred and forty k’s later, my leather-clad ass was glad to see a comfy bed again. I took a few other photo’s on the day that are over here. We had a great time and I got to find a lot of those back muscles I forgot were there. My body was even kind enough to let me make it to work alive the next morning after a 6am start.

This week has been more of the same at work, while my evenings have been relatively quiet. This weekend we have another reload coming up, so I’ll be heading down to Bunbury. And while this weekend won’t be as diverse as the last, I’m sure I’ll find something to humour myself with.

* - may or may not be a complete fabrication designed to cloud the suggestion that I possibly still have hormones

So the play rocked out. Fun was had, entertainment was provided, shrubberies were mentioned and everyone left with the same number of appendages they came in with. And even though it delivers a completely lacklustre facsimile of what the event was actually like, I now have a DVD of the performance as well as a divx on a CD which hangs my PC every time I try to open it.

My job has become slightly more bearable as of Monday, seeing as how I am now contracted directly to a division of the Western Australian government and not through a recruitment agency. This means slightly more pay, half an hours less work each day and last but not least, I now get sick and holiday pay. Just in time for public holiday season, awww yeah. Half an hour a day might not seem like a big deal, but when it’s half an hour less of watching the clock tick in the afternoon or half an hours more sleep in the morning, it’s time well spent.

I recently had the cam chain tensioner (alternatively referred to by the technical term “thingy”) replaced on my bike, which has been great. The old one wasn’t going to cause any real damage, but it made a loud ticking noise between 5-6k rpm and sounded terrible. So now it’s all smooth and zingy, I decided to go out to the Kwinana Motorplex with some friends on Wednesday and give it a bit of stick. I figured if I could run a decent 12, I’d come away satisfied for the evening. I ended up doing six quarter mile runs on my 600, getting better times as the night went on. My friend also took a V8 BMW 540 that he’d just bought out for a bit of a shot to see it’d go, and ended up running a 14.6, which is quite respectable for a car with creature comforts like a factory TV in the dash, and more interior leather than you’d find at a biker club. Of course it was outshined somewhat by a particular fellow who decided to mosey along in his new Audi

As for me, I started out the night by racing up against a lowered Hayabusa (which is one of the fastest bikes in a straight like ever conceived) who ran flat 10’s all night. But back to the point of conversation; me. First ever quarter mile drag and I came out with a 13.199 at 167kph (104mph), which was OK, but I was expecting to improve, and aside from my fourth run which I fluffed the launch on (and the staff conveniently lost the timesheet for. It’s OK, I won’t miss it), the times consistently improved.

6:43pm - 13.199 @ 167kph (104mph)
7:17pm - 12.945 @ 174kph (108mph)
8:04pm - 12.624 @ 177kph (110mph)
(Run that disappeared into the ether)
9:37pm - 12.567 @ 183kph (114mph)
9:57pm - 12.143 @ 187kph (116mph)

I ended the night with a 12.1, so I was pretty happy, and it was good fun, which of course requires an obligatory picture of me looking goofy.

I’m entirely unimpressed with my blogging of late. It feels about as boring as Saved By The Bell re-runs, but without the use of loud, obnoxious colours. Whatever it is that I’ve been doing of late seems to be quite lacking in profundity, or at least any great insight or hilarious anecdotes.

I don’t really enjoy being inside all day. Especially where I can’t see the sky.