" ATL for Mean Machines... but I'd rather be gardening. (a message I sent to the floor when I began my ATLing today)

I'm serious. Now that it's starting to warm up, most of my garden is doing well. The jasmine has woken from its dormant state, and the succulents are doing well, but my herbs seem to have carked it over the winter. Well, except for my rosemary, which is growing like a weed. I need to re-pot my bottle-brush and peace lily, but I need to find the time to get new pots from Marrickville and a new bag of potting soil. Of course, the size of these packages discriminates against those of us that don't have cars. It's not fail. And while we're talking, I'm between notches on my belt. If I wear the looser notch, my pants nearly fall off. If I go tighter, it's uncomfortable to sit down. But I digress. If you have any questions, I'm sitting at Damo's desk.

 

Lucas Brown |Team Senior - 42
Salmat - using the force in one to one communication

Musings

I took a different route to work today, and as usual when I do this, I found myself wondering: what if I just kept walking around looking at things and didn't go to work. I never got the urge to skip school at any time in my academic career, but I've had this sort of urge since I've begun working in Australia. There just seem to be so many interesting things to do and I just want to wander and see them. I don't know if it's sad, but a lot of those things revolve around food, wine, beer, and cocktails. Not the doing any of those things to excesses, but the enjoyment and interesting nature thereof. For example, I want more Innocent Bystander Shiraz Viognier. We had some and it was great, but I felt we rushed it a bit.

It seems I've become a magnet for gossip at work. Not the usual who-shagged-who gossip. More like oh-no-that-special-project-we're-working-on-is-ending-we-might-get-pwned-on-hours-and-supervisor-infighting-and-it's-all-coming-down-man gossip. It's giving me an unsettling sense of impermanence with everything I'm doing. I miss the illusion that managers know what they're doing and have things under control. And our back-of-house work has ceased being about quality of work lately and has just become a race to make your quota for the day. It's fair demoralising.

I stole a lobe off a cactus on the way to work today. I felt no guilt, as the cactus was about the size of a volkswagon, and I had no worry about storing it until i get home, knowing that succelents like cacti can survive for up to two weeks off the plant, then grow new roots. This particular cactus had no needles that I could see, so I had no trouble handling it. What I didn't realise is that its needles are 2-3 mms long, half the thickness of a hair and fall out on their own to coat what's nearby. In this particular case, what was nearby was the inside of my right sleeve. I spent the following half hour to work attempting to tweeze (with no tweezers) these little spines out of my wrist. They didn't hurt, but would twinge whenever they caught on something. Which was whenever I moved. So I got pwned by a plant.

Been listening to a lot of Spoon and the New Pornographers. Melodic power pop. Recommended, but not for Ted.

Tanja and I are about a third of the way through the 7th season of Star Trek TNG. Tanja's become a nerd to the point of discussing with someone at her work whether a colleague is a Ferengi or a Cardassian. I vote Cardassian. Oh, and I forgot how good the episode "Lower Decks" is.