No Middle Name

Now that we've been here for 5 weeks, I feel qualified to dispense my hard-earned wisdom. Firstly, visa choice. If you're coming to Australia, don't bother with a temporary visa - go for permanent residency, if you can, it makes things a lot easier. We're here on a Temporary Business Subclass 457 visa, sponsored by my wife's hospital. No problem, we thought, we can apply for residency once we're sure we like it. The problems are: you can't get finance for anything if you're on a temporary visa, so make sure you've got a shitload of cash available to you; you can't buy a home, you'll have to rent (well - you can buy a home but first you have to apply for permission with the Foreign Investment Bureau); you're unlikely to find someone who will give you a permanent job, since they can't be sure you're going to be around in 12 months' time (this is a problem for me, not my wife - who can't change jobs for 12 months anyway); yo...

Do you know what is the scariest thing about moving to another country? Everything. It's all new, and it's all scary. We've left behind family, friends, jobs, decent chocolate, and marmite. If you let yourself think about it for longer than a few seconds, you'd crap yourself. So, you don't. The people that do think it through carefully and thoroughly are the ones who say "oh, we thought about doing that for years, but we never went through with it". The vast majority of people who stay where they are, and are quite happy about it. We, however, are the sort that would always wonder "what if...", eventually becoming bitter and twisted, bringing it up in arguments 30 years later. "Yeah, well, little Johnny wouldn't even have been in the stolen car with the brazilian midget prostitutes, the cocaine-snorting donkey and the nuns if we'd moved to Australia, like I wanted to!" So, we went for it. Crossed our fingers, closed our eyes and...

En route to Australia. No blogging for a while.

Latigo Flint: Fuckin' Grrrr.

[Note to American readers who may have strayed here by accident: you'd call it a car trunk sale. Which probably doesn't make much more sense either.] This weekend my wife and I piled up our car with several years' worth of accumulated junk, and attended our first car boot sale. We're moving to Australia soon, so we're trying to get rid of all our household detritus, rather than pay lots of money to have it shipped halfway around the world. For those that don't know what a car boot sale is, and have clearly never watched a single daytime television programme in the UK, let me explain. To hold a car boot sale you will require the following: one field/car park (parking lot), several cars, lots of tat. The people with the junk and the cars pay the owner of the field some money for the priviledge of having lots of people stare at their belongings with disdain. Some of these people may then decide to give you some money for these items. It's like ebay, you display...

[inspired by the first line of the first song I listened to when I got to work this morning - who knows? this might be the start of a meme. Get on board now, before it gets popular and you have to start sneering.] "Come on, take my hand. I want to contact the living." I took Randall's offered hand across the table, and placed my other hand on the tv screen. It was hard to tell which was colder, deader. Randall had closed his eyes and was muttering under his breath. I'd never managed to work out what he said during these little anti-seances, but it seemed to help him. He'd drummed into me the importance of doing something, anything, of having a purpose. Not that we had ever managed to contact the living. We saw them hidden in the static on the tv sometimes, or in the reflections in windows. I could hear them in the other rooms of the house, but they would always be gone when I'd burst in, my "a-ha! caught you!" echoing off the walls. Randall said we h...

another test Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . I'll add some more words to break the line. One more test of this posting to flickr thing. I wonder if this will work.