We’ve had our first houseguests; Dermot and Tim came up from Sydney yesterday and we’ve had a pleasant weekend together showing off our new home town. They both seemed surprised by and impressed with Newcastle’s relaxed-yet-cosmopolitan ambience, and it was an energising experience to have my own increasing happiness with being here confirmed through the eyes of others.

Validation, while hardly essential, helps.

Having a couple of tourists in tow, we finally walked down the hill to the Merewether ocean baths, which is where the photo of Brent at right was taken (click the photo to go to the gallery). The baths, opened in 1935, must be one of this town’s greatest assets and are a spectacular sight, with the huge surf pounding the rocks just a few metres away from several hardy souls patiently swimming laps in the chilly winter water. I’m not that brave but once the weather warms up a bit I’ll be in for a dip first chance I get.

New bloodwork results last Friday — generally good news although my liver is struggling under the strain of too many glasses of red wine. Details here.

Moving into a frantic phase of preparation for the next PL, plus returning to university this week after a year away. I’m excited about uni but afraid my enthusiasm for the temple of mediocrity that UTS can sometimes be, will make this semester harder than it need be. God grant me forbearance.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): I hope you decided against participating in that weird contest — you know, the one in which you would have competed to see who could bang their head against the wall the most times before passing out. I trust you also turned down any invitations you got to show off your amazing wounds or prove how attractive your problems are. Continue to show a similar forbearance in the coming week, Aries. The worst is over. The pressure to express yourself perversely will soon diminish as the very hassles that have been frustrating you will morph into elegant opportunities.

[Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology, 16 July]

So we went to the garden centre to get some plants for our new house…

Irresistable

We are fairly settled into our new home now after what seems like an eternity of packing and unpacking. Newcastle is being gorgeous for us. More later, although the broadband connection isn’t in place yet so net access is sporadic and slow.

You never know how many cardboard cartons full of meaningless impedimenta you’ve accumulated until you move…

Two more sleeps.

It is hotter inside than out, but I do all right until I encounter the banks of glass doors. Each one has to be Windexed, wiped, and buffed-inside and out, top to bottom, left to right, until it’s as streakless and invisible as a material substance can be. Outside, I can see construction guys knocking back Gatorade, but the rule is that no fluid or food item can touch a maid’s lips when she’s inside a house. I sweat without replacement or pause, not in individual drops but in continuous sheets of fluid, soaking through my polo shirt, pouring down the backs of my legs. Working my way through the living room(s), I wonder if Mrs. W. will ever have occasion to realize that every single doodad and object through which she expresses her unique, individual self is, from the vantage point of a maid, only an obstacle on the road to a glass of water.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s bestselling account of the struggle to survive on minimum wage in ‘welfare-reformed’ America is causing a stir in North Carolina. After Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America was prescribed as summer reading for students at UNC, state legislators have described the book as “intellectual pornography with no redeeming characteristics,” and “a classic Marxist rant” that portrays business people as exploiters of working-class Americans.

Sounds like journalism to me.

[Raleigh News & Observer]

I have been to Newcastle and back today. Photos in the gallery.

Newcastle is stunning today. I’m still shitscared, but Newcastle is stunning.

Six more sleeps in this crazy city.

I’m starting to feel a bit unsettled about the change we’re about to undergo. I find myself noticing the little things I’m going to miss about Sydney: too consciously.

Like Sydney Park at sunset, the sexy smiling strangers on the street, the almost-instantaneous availability of everything, the easy presence of my mates, the spontaneous availability of opportunities for pleasure, gratification, stimulation and hedonism…
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I don’t know who’s saddest to see him leave, me or the dogs.

We’ve had a good weekend, productive and fun by turns. We spent a lot of time packing for the move and pretty much everything that isn’t an essential part of our daily lives is now sitting in one of dozens of cardboard cartons stacked up around the house.

Saturday we took time out to join Kabi and Ian for the opening of Art as Agitation: 30 years of Political Posters at Jura Books. It was a borderline stirring/disturbing experience to look at these remnants of the political struggles of the seventies and eighties, blu-tacked up all over the shop.

Yes, blu-tacked. Jura is an anarchist bookshop down on Parramatta Road, they don’t exactly have the money to employ a conservator.
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POO SINKS: FEDERER FLUSHED

Tall moody wog boy makes Wimbledon final. Film at eleven.

Brent calls last night with his bloodwork results: undetectable and 1100 T-cells. Eleven hundred? What’s with that? In my opinion, a CD4 count of 1100 stretches the boundaries of good taste. It is ostentatious in the extreme.

Five hundred, now that’s a respectable number of T-cells in any company. (What I wouldn’t give for 500 T-cells!). As well as being more than adequate, 500 is a polite, proper and gentlemanly CD4 quantum that will not raise an eyebrow in even the most sedate company. Six or seven hundred, while beyond the needs of any one man, is acceptable, laudable even. Anything more than that is showy at best and vulgar at worst.

I recall a time when having too many T-cells was not a matter that one would publicly discuss, for fear of upsetting the delicate sensibilities of the time. When your friends were struggling along with double or single digits, any mention of an oversupply would lead to half-joking requests to spread a few of them around to those who really need them. More than once in the bad old days I found myself embarrassed to be the only person in a group of comrades with a (barely) triple-digit CD4 count.

Of course I’m delighted for Brent. Obviously the Newcastle air is doing him good, and I shall be expecting a similarly shameful superfluity in a couple more weeks.