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…