I like you. I’ll kill you last!

Apparently, I’m a glutton for punishment. I’ve accepted a contract job with a top-5 Australian site to help out with their Doubleclick migration, which will be my third in the last year! I am actually pretty excited; traffic pays a hell of a lot better than temp work, and the offices are located in the middle of the Vietnamese section of town. Looking forward to some delicious, delicious lunches!

It’s so funny to be on the other side of this sort of thing. Instead of working my ass off & putting together training docs & harassing Doubleclick with unanswerable questions, I just get to be the low-level contractor who has to be trained from scratch on the site structure and the old ad server and such. I’m going in tomorrow for a few hours of site training to get an idea for how they sell the property and how things are divided up.  Work officially starts Monday, which is exactly two months after my last day of work in Seattle.  I’m actually ready, I think, to be a 9-5er again; it will be nice to use my brain a bit more, for sure!

Now that I have money coming in, I’ve gone and spent my paycheck of the future on basketball shoes.  Shit’s expensive here – I dropped AUD$140 on an okay pair of And1s!  But the good news is I think I’ve found a basketball team in the upper division of, according to the cool guy who sold me the shoes, the best league in Melbourne.  Once the film fest is over I’m going to play a trial game with them and see how it goes, so hopefully that will work out.  They even play on Tuesday nights, just like at home!

Speaking of the film festival, it’s now in full swing and I’ve liked everything I’ve seen thus far: No One Knows About Persian Cats, Moon, and Humpday.  I think I’m going to see a total of 10, which when you count in my volunteer shifts makes for a busy couple of weeks!  Starting off my time in Melbourne with a fest was a great idea – definitely a nice introduction to the arts scene here.  My volunteer shifts are cool, too, since merch sales really only pick up when folks are shuffling into the cinemas.  So I have a lot of free social time; I made friends with the venue manager, who says that she has some connections into basketball leagues here.  She’s made some calls on my behalf so if my prospective team doesn’t work out, I have a backup strategy.  One of my housemates was making fun of me for putting so much effort into finding a team that *doesn’t* practice; she has a point!

I’ve also been trying to do more touristy things, since I am nearly out of funemployment time.  On Tuesday, I decided to walk over to a waterfall I’d seen on the gigantic Melbourne map in the bathroom.  The waterfall itself ended up being really lame (like 2 feet high! why is that even on a map?) but it was in the middle of an awesome, huge park.  It’s built around a bunch of switchbacks in the Yarra River, which makes for some excellent walking and bird-spotting and stuff.  I ended up covering about 14km in total, and explored a big chunk of the park as well as the neighborhoods in between here and there (it’s three to the east).  It’s fairly close to my job as well, so I expect I’ll be spending more time out there as the weather gets nicer.  On Wednesday, I signed up for a group tour to the Yarra Valley wineries, which was tons of fun.  There were only 6 people on the tour, and there was a lot of wine, so we all had a great time.  It doesn’t sound very good, but a lot of Australian wineries make a sparkling Shiraz/Pinot Noir, and it is absolutely delicious.  Definitely one of those drinks to file under danger…

The house & housemates continue to be awesome.  The other day we got a letter from a TV production company asking us if they could use our house as a location for some CSI-type show.  We are all really excited and hoping they want it to be a crack den or something so we can get background roles as junkies or dead bodies.  If it works out, it’d be a hell of a souvenir of my time in Melbourne!!

Oh, and apparently I’ve arrived in Melbourne – I’ve run into folks I know twice now on the street this week.  I can count the number of people I know here on two hands so I’m not sure what to make of that…

Hope you all had a great Christmas in July, heathens

I feel like I should have more exciting stories for all of you at home, but moving overseas is incredibly un-glamorous for about the first month or so.  Especially since I’m planning to be abroad for so long – it’d be stupid if I spent through lots of my savings in my very first city.  So, I’m in cash conservation mode, which doesn’t really make for good blogging.  But here I am anyway…

Speaking of savings, I discovered a couple of exciting bargains this week, in celebration of our lord and savior and when he got all born again in July or whatever.  (Yes, I am talking about Hulk Hogan, aka Santa with Muscles)  Movies here are usually really expensive – like over $15 expensive – but on Mondays everybody goes infomercial sale crazy and things get cheap.  The cinema across the road goes down to $6 before 4pm and $8 after.  So Mondays are now officially cinema days – I’ll see any old trash for $6.  It’s my hip excuse for seeing Harry Potter this week.  (The verdict?  Better than a lot of them, except the third of course, which was a real movie.  It was overlong and the usual bla bla blas about Harry Potter movies but not bad for the price!)  The other bargain was pretty good, too.  Melbourne’s having an arts festival this fall and Fischerspooner are coming thru for a night as part of it.  Unlike most cities, where arts festivals generally mean inflated ticket prices and stupidity, here it means I get to see them for $17.  When you consider it’s at their Paramount or Moore-sized theatre and one US dollar is worth $1.25 Australian, it basically means I win at life.  So ha.

In other arts news, the film festival started this weekend, which means I’m now spending a couple days a week hawking merchandise and attempting to use a credit card machine.  I also have an excellent slate of movies lined up; just came back from the first one, No One Knows About Persian Cats, which I quite liked.  The audience were rather IMDb-like and stayed until the end of the credits…  Volunteering is actually pretty nice – in a 4 hour shift I do about 30 minutes worth of work and spend the rest of the time socializing or reading a cornucopia of free books on my Kindle.  If the iPhone gets to be the jesusphone, does that mean the Kindle gets to compete with the bible and be called the jesusbook?  Because I am plowing through the public domain – just finished the entire Sherlock Holmes library and am now halfway through Gulliver’s Travels.

Other than books and movies and obsessing about money I spent my week twice getting drunk with the housemates, once by sheer chance, and swearing off beer.  Did you know that for the price of one pint of beer at a bar, I can buy a whole bottle of Jacob’s Creek Shiraz?  Did you know that a six-pack of beer costs $17 here??  I never imagined beer would be so expensive in Australia, but it is, and I am coping sullenly.  Good thing I like wine!

Oh, and I have a job interview in the morning, and I think I really want the job, so here’s hoping I don’t fuck this one up!

As if I didn’t have enough projects going

My friend Amy & I have started a little photoblog chronicling our bizarre obsession with lying facedown in front of famous things. Have a look… http://facedowns.wordpress.com/

The return of the ghost of mice on toast

Henry the cat has taken to sleeping on my bed at night – something I have been heartily encouraging ever since I noticed the mouse scurrying across my room the other night.  Given what we know about mice on toast and my lack of income, this probably isn’t such a bad thing, as it’s always good to have a backup source of protein.  And since I am renting the room from a local slumlord named Ernie, who looks like Ernie of Bert &, I think it’s a pretty standard thing.  But otherwise, I’m really enjoying the place; the housemates are nice, there’s a gas stove, and it’s close to absolutely everything.  Also, I finally have internet at home!  I’m actually splitting a mobile wireless usb thing with one of my housemates, which I wasn’t too keen on at first, but after a week sitting just outside Borders & leeching off their free wifi (too cheap to buy a coffee) I reconsidered.

Despite all that time on stolen internet, I’ve not yet managed to land a job.  Even registering with agencies seems to be insanely difficult here.  It doesn’t help that all the advertising work is in Sydney – which I knew, of course, and still decided to come here.  I’ve only been looking for a few days, however, and am not too worried.  There has to be a typist job with my name on it somewhere in this city!  And I am registered with one agency already so it’s certainly not hopeless.

Apart from looking for a job, I’ve mostly just been exploring the area and volunteering with the film fest.  There’s a bunch of cool graffiti up in Fitzroy, which is the neighborhood next door to me, so a friend and I headed over to have a look on Thursday.  I really like the area – reminds me a bit of Capitol Hill – and the graffiti gave me a great excuse for a facedown:

waspy facedown, originally uploaded by lynnith.

Thursday night I went to pub trivia downtown with some of the work visa folk, which was fairly unremarkable except that it was run by a guy who looked like David Bowie with a euro-mullet and who was much too amused by one team’s name of “Quiz On Your Face” and additionally I came in second place in a beer drinking competition, putting my country to shame.

Pictures, if you’re interested, are on my Flickr of my various wanderings and my moderately slummy homelife.

Sometimes, Australia’s obsession with shortening words backfires

mmmm, delicious sars, originally uploaded by lynnith.

American for tangerine is ‘shut the fuck up’

Don’t ask me why I’ve swapped a Seattle summer for a wintery Melbourne, which is exactly like a rainy Seattle fall.  We even had a thunderstorm today!  But I’m here, and in the last 4 days I’ve managed to find a place to live, secured all the essentials (bank account, mobile phone &c) and, more importantly, secured a couple volunteer jobs at the Melbourne film festival.  I’m helping out with the marketing/sponsorship stuff while I look for actual paying work here, and then when the fest starts I’ll be doing merchandising or something.  I actually started volunteering today, just for a couple hours, and already have some free tickets!  So suffice to say, things are going very well here.

By this point some of you may be wondering how the laziest person you know managed to get this far.  Let me let you in on a little motivational secret: living in a hostel.  Nothing like waking up at 4am to a screeching English girl in the room next door going on about how she can teach her roommates English even though she knows nothing about grammar because, in her words, “you can just talk and I can correct you when you make mistakes!” to give you the energy you need to get the hell out.  It was when she started lecturing them on the definitions of tangerine and tambourine that I put my bitch hat on, knocked on her door, and informed her that American for tangerine is ‘shut the fuck up.’

Actually most people in the hostel are pretty cool, and I’ve made friends with a few German girls.  We’ve gone exploring in St. Kilda, cooked a big group dinner, done the obligatory drinking, and apparently tonight there is going to be karaoke?  Don’t worry though, I won’t destory any foreign eardrums by singing myself…

They let me in the country, inexplicably

Clearly they didn’t check my references first. So now I’m in Melbourne…!

Excuse me, is this seat saved?

This weekend, I headed out to LA proper to celebrate the 2,000th anniversary of Jesus’ declaration of American independence.  Saturday was spent with my friend Leah, who moved to Burbank from Seattle in February.  She took me to a bbq/pool party in a place hilariously named “Valley Village” (really?), put on by an old childhood friend of hers she hadn’t seen since she was 5 or 6.  It was good fun – until someone put their foot through a skylight…  After that, we headed over to Santa Monica to roam the beach and watch folks set off fireworks.  It was pretty:

santa monica beach on the 4th, originally uploaded by lynnith.

On Sunday, I met up with my friend Joyce, who I worked with back in the day at Cannes Lions in London.  I can always count on her for an interesting collection of LA sights & food, and Sunday was no exception.  We started the day with brunch, and then headed over to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.  I heartily recommend the museum for anybody who enjoys the extremely weird – it’s devoted to the fringe and features such exhibits as Garden of Eden on Wheels: Collections from Los Angeles mobile home and trailer parks.  We also learned that eating two mice on toast, fur and all, will cure incontinence.  After we conquered the museum, we walked up one of LA’s foothills for a view of the city and lots of off-leash dogs.  None of them were in the same class as Seattle dogs though!  Shameful.  We finished off the day with shaved ices from Milk & some excellent Thai food.

Then it was Monday, and time for Steffi and I to take our classiest roadtrip ever – a pilgrimmage to the Salton Sea and more importantly, Salvation Mountain.  The mountain is built around a hill about 3 miles outside of Niland, a dusty little town with delicious Mexican food.  It’s actually still a work in progress – Leonard Knight, its creator, works and lives there and has done so for the past 25+ years.  Here he is at the mountain:

the man & his mountain, originally uploaded by lynnith.

The whole thing was pretty surreal, and after our little tour we both decided we’d been saved.  And what better way to celebrate being saved than to head up to Palm Springs and gamble for Jesus?  Turns out, Steffi’s in much better spiritual shape than me – she netted out $150 while I only won $25…

Later today I’m headed to the airport – hopefully my pilot isn’t one of the Michael Jackson funeral lottery winners and I’ll be Australia-bound at 9:30 tonight.  I land at 9:30 in the AM on Thursday; the next time I blog, I shall be in the FUTURE!

In the words of General MacArthur said, “We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”

I’m writing this from Diamond Bar, CA, a burb to the far east of Los Angeles, out among the foothills and the valley of the dirt people and million-dollar homes with H3s out front.  It’s warm, and primarily beige-colored, which I suppose makes it a good place to clear my head of all the packing & moving & goodbyes before I head off into the Australian winter.  Most importantly, it’s home to Steffi & Wes, who’re letting me stay for the week against their better judgement.  I think I’ve just about managed to conquer their entire living room with my couch-surfing self and all my worldly possessions.

My final couple weeks in Seattle were pretty fun – had lots of great food, met up with tons of folks, and got my party on.  I did time my departure so as to be present for our house’s annual birthday/pride/etc extravaganza, and this year’s was certainly quite excellent.  Pre-party, a bunch of my friends came over & we held a powerpoint competition; everybody had 5 minutes and an assigned topic.  It sounds really nerdy (& probably is) but it was actually quite entertaining.  Enough alcohol was eventually consumed that the morning after the party, my brother woke up to find his stationery out and a stamp missing…

I also managed to see David Byrne again, this time at the Paramount – he clearly was informed about my trip and scheduled his latest Seattle tour stop for June 26th!  The show was great, and he even brought the Extra Action Marching Band up with him, which almost made up for the lack of encore-tutus.

DB and the Extra Action Marching Band, originally uploaded by lynnith.

I didn’t much enjoy packing & saying goodbye to everyone, not that those things are ever fun.  Goodbyes are not my strong suit – though I’m great at leaving!  It was particularly sad saying goodbye to Devo, who had been my unwitting funemployment BFF all month.  I have to say, though, it is an amazing feeling to look down and see all of your belongings for the next three years packed neatly into one rolling luggage, one backpack (not even half full), and one daypack.  It makes me never want to buy anything again – a feeling which will last as long as it takes me to find a camera shop and pick up a new circular polarizer!

Things I have done so far in LA: ordered food at a restaurant from a touch-screen, seen Public Enemies at a tiki-themed drive-in, gone swimming, shot hoops with a bouncy kickball, shopped at an American Tesco

This weekend it’s off to LA proper, where Leah is taking me to a stranger’s BBQ for the 4th, and then being awesome and letting me crash on her floor.  Sunday I’m gonna tool around the city with Joyce, where we will relive our London glory days and probably eat some awesome food in the process.  Monday, Steffi and I are taking an epic all-American roadtrip to celebrate my last day in the country.  We’re heading east, stopping in Palm Springs and at the Salton Sea but most importantly ending up at Salvation Mountain, a crazy technicolor man-made Jesus mountain in the middle of the desert.  I will report back on all that – certainly can’t imagine a better way to spend my last few days in the US!!

Before I sign off for the evening, I’d just like to point out that this post is about 1/5 the length of Sarah Palin’s resignation speech also.  Wink!