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Bikes, bikes and more bikes! A leisurely ride into Richmond so Jo could sneak in a few hours at work, then I headed up Burnley street for a lap of the Boulevarde. One lap turned into two, then very optimistically I turned back for the third. More hill climbs than I've ridden in months — almost more riding than I've ridden in months!

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I've succumbed. Here's my pig. Ooo-errr; its got a long tail.

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Greyness, wind, drizzle, and bad coffee. The variability of spring covers some of them, but the bad coffee is inexcusable. The Hargraves café — sorry, HG Café, as it is now trendily known — has gone all American and is trying to imitate all the big franchises. All the coffees come in disposable paper cups, unless you insist on a real cup. “Small, medium or large,” is the next question. You half expect: “Do you want fries with that?” For some reason I went in at lunch time, a momentary escape from building 28. What I got was not a cup of coffee, it was a glass of warm milk.

At least the music keeps me sane. Last Thursday as we drove home I caught the tail end of the Australian Mood on RRR, the end of a brief piece on a band I hadn't heard for more than two decades! The Thought Criminals now have a web site! Not only that, but they've released a double CD and all the songs can be freely downloaded from the site. I started to download them, then decided why bother, ordered the CD. Today it arrived in the mail and as a result I've been reliving my youth, with vague memories from the early 1980s and bands and Canberra's old Civic hotel and the ANU bar....

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Ow ow ow! Another day, another motorised moron.

Rush hour traffic in Haughton road? A fifty kilometre speed limit and traffic in both directions. A road specifically narrowed by the council to stop everyone using it as a short cut. A road narrowed so that motorists have to actually think and pull out to overtake cyclists safely. Not a problem for our local inhabitants. Speed up and go head-on towards oncoming cars, then swerve back in and slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the next car up ahead. Only problem was the little lady driving the big bronze Lexus 4WD, she pulled this idiot stunt just as I was approaching one of the little roundabouts, swerved back in to avoid the traffic island and slammed the side of the 4WD straight into my shoulder, arm and hand! “But mister, why you hit me? I turning left! What you doing, why you run into me mister?”

Bruised knuckles and a hand that hurt to type with for the whole day.

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Cryptic numbers? No, its the price of petrol a year, a month, a day ago, and then today. You'd almost think that petrol rationing was about to start.

Riding to work this morning there's chaos at the first petrol station — still $1.25/litre — and motorists queueing at all the pumps and out onto the road. Then ride up to the corner of North and Clayton roads where, bizarrely, the two outlet that face each other often have wildly different prices. Sure enough, its $1.25 at one of them and $1.39 at the other! Even more bizarrely, there are motorists filling their tanks at both... I wonder what the price will be in a week, a month, a year?

The weather is oscillating between the end of winter and the start of spring. The bulbs are flowering in the garden, even the ones we had no idea where there — they must have been there last year when we looked at the house, musn't they?

The old apricot tree in the neighbour's garden still manages to sprout some blossom, it'll be a shame when it finally dies, but its probably got quite a few years left in it. I think there were two apricots on the tree last summer!

Time to make the most of the day, since this week I only got a one-day weekend. Clear skies, not a breath of wind all day, near perfect spring weather.

A bit of gardening, all enthused because we have a garden: first beans planted for the year, some wysteria seeds I took from mum and dad's old vine, ripped out the broccoli plants from the winter. Jo and I even managed to catch the eye of the old Greek lady who lives over the back fence as she was in her garden and said hello — that's two out of three neighbours we've spoken to, the third is unlikely — the gent in number ten seems too reclusive! We talked about the fruit and veges in her garden, she wanted to know where we're from. Admired her olive tree and she immediately offered us some fruit next season — I might have to help picking the higher ones!

Out for another orientation walk around the streets, and to be nosy and look at the enormous piles of rubbish that have been put out for tomorrow's hard-rubbish collection. Absolutely astounding, rolls of old carpet, mattresses, fridges, TVs, rotting fences, garden trimmings, but also dozens of old bicycles, bags of old clothes, jars, bottles, plant pots — half of it perfectly usable, but all going to be crushed and off to land-fill — and a stern warning on the council brochure that anyone seen scavenging would be prosecuted!

The house now smells of Jasmine and Fresias; the smell of jasmine always reminds me of living in Cameron street in Richmond — I think it was the only thing that grew above the concrete there — the second are one of the few things I can't kill off in the garden!

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I was “volunteered.” Management can't seem to work out whether we're supposed to work between 8am and 6pm or 24 hours a day. They certainly won't pay for anyone to be there out of the ordinary hours — but all hell breaks loose when you want to upgrade anything or install anything — “You can't do that in production hours!” Bah! Who wants to volunteer for the evening? Who wants to volunteer for the weekend work? On-call as well, a phone call last night then four SMS alerts ten minutes before the shift ended — I got in early expecting the worst, only to find that a router update had clobbered the whole network for three-quarters of an hour and last night's alarms were spurious. Double-bah!

Awake at four-thirty a.m., quiet, then birds, trains, traffic. A clear sunny morning — perfect for not having to go to work! I headed off on my bike in one direction while Jo headed off in the other, me to Monash, her for an hour or so down along the bay and back!

The only good point to the whole exercise was that it happened very smoothly, we were scheduled to take all day to 5:30pm, Paul and I were finished four hours early — I wonder how the other half of the work tomorrow will go?