These are the voyages...

I love a good cocktail and enjoy a good wine but lately I’ve been enjoying non-alcoholic beer more frequently. I like a cold beer and I particularly like popping a stubbie in the freezer for 15 minutes to put a nice little icy edge on it. 

I don’t usually drink during the week but with the non-alcoholic beer I can come home and wind down with one, sitting on the balcony just letting the work thoughts slide out of the brain. I usually have the Asahi but my current stock is Peroni. It’s quite tasty. 

I use one of the many many stubbie coolers I acquired from dad’s collection after he passed away and a little part of me feels like I’m still sharing a beer with him. It’s been 22 years but it still gives me some comfort to have a small tangible connection to him right in front of me.

With Tropical Cyclone Alfred slowly making its way towards the South East Queensland coast at a speed of 7km per hour the waiting game has started.

Earlier in the week it was expected to cross the coast on Thursday, which became early Friday morning, then afternoon and now early Saturday morning. Plans were put in place to close down Brisbane and the surrounding region as of Wednesday evening. All public transport stopped, most businesses closed, and the supermarkets and other essential locations were closing Thursday afternoon and everything was to be closed Friday. Everyone was advised to stay at home and wait. Which has now become wait through Friday as well.

There have been some adjustments to the closures but nothing substantial, more a case of things due to close staying open a bit longer. There haven’t been any announcements yet about whether supermarkets and the like will open for some time Friday. Once a large business has made the decision to be closed, cancelled deliveries and rearranged rosters it’s not any easy pivot to say you’re open again.

The basement carparks of my apartment building, and many around us, were flooded in the rain event in March 2022 so there is some anxiety across the neighbourhood as to what to do with cars. I didn’t want to move mine to the street but was concerned I’d have to in the middle of torrential rain. Fortunately, there’s a small shopping complex at the top of my street which has raised the boom gates and made the carparks available (and free) until at least Monday. They did the same in the 2022 floods so I was waiting to see what they would do. When word went round on the building WhatsApp group last night I decided to take my car up then and leave it there. It’s a full carpark now so I’m glad I did. It’s also one less thing to worry about. 

We switched to work from home as of Wednesday through until next Monday. It’s been good to keep busy but I’m beginning to get restless. I think I’d mentally prepared myself to finish up on Thursday and be off work post-cyclone on Friday but now the uncertainty has crept in. What will work advise and when will they advise is bouncing around in my head. I’ve checked in with my teams and the moods varies from still hoping it goes away through to could it just come now. 

I cleared my balcony the other day, I have plenty of water, plenty of non-perishable food to see through any power outage, I have some buckets ready to fill with water to help with the toilet if we lose mains pressure, I have a battery radio tuned to the local ABC station. I’ve made the important trip to Dan Murphy’s to acquire some additional gin supplies. One should never waste an opportunity to restock. I’m from north Queenslander, I’ve been through a cyclone and seen them come close. I know I’m as prepared as I can be.

All I can do is wait.

My favourite local cafe is Doc Brown. The owner is a big Back to the Future fan, hence the name of his cafe. He is also a huge movie buff and can talk to you about movies for ages. We’ve been swapping notes on things to watch for years now. His level of knowledge about directors, actors, film scores, would put some reviewers to shame.

Earlier in the week he hosted a movie night at a nearby venue, which just happens to have a 40 seat theatre in it. He gave some introductory comments and then we watched Not Quite Hollywood, a documentary about the “wild untold story of ozploitation”. Afterwards he started some conversation going by offering some thoughts and posing a few questions and then we were talking about the documentary itself and also the movies it covered.

What I really liked about the evening was the way it was clear movies were a passion of his and the absolute kick he was getting out of sharing his knowledge with a disparate group of people; the only thing we all had in common was being a regular at Doc Brown. I love watching people get animated about the thing they're passionate about, particularly if it is completely unrelated to their work. You can be passionate about your work but it’s healthy to have outside interests which are more or at least as important.

The other thing I liked was it reminded me to go hunt down Turkey Shoot, a completely bonkers movie from 1982.  

You know the person, the one who looks up an escalator and sees everyone standing on the one side but chooses to stand on the opposite side. The side to stand varies from country to country.

There’s a solution to this problem. A sensor in the step detects when you’ve been stationary for too long on the wrong side and a little cattle prod comes out and zaps you. Maybe a disembodied voice which says “move” if the budget stretches to it.

My response to a crank challenge by Deborah.

I’ve been accumulating various lists of blog prompts to help me get into a routine and was just looking at the one from Lou Plummer and my eyes landed on “What is your all-time favourite story to tell from all the jobs you've held?”

Without hesitation my brain went “the time all three emergency services were called to work”.

The area I worked in had an annual Christmas party on a Friday night and invited a lot of external stakeholders and ensured the alcohol and food kept coming. My then boss and I, being a bit experienced by then in how these things went, had a conversation around 8pm and agreed it was probably time to depart so we could say “I’d gone home by then” if needed. It was.

Emergency services (1) - the ambulance

Security discovered someone collapsed in a bush. Concerned as they were unable to properly wake them the ambulance was called. Nothing medically wrong, too many drinks. The person came to and proceeded to abuse everyone and insist they were fine.

Ambulance left, security filed an incident report.

Emergency services (2) - the fire brigade

A staff member had too many drinks to safely ride their motorbike home but didn’t want to leave it in the carpark overnight. Another staff member, with a similar number of drinks under their belt, suggested the bike be brought upstairs in the lift and locked in the boardroom. Sounds okay you think. It was until the owner of the bike started it up, spun the wheel, which burnt the carpet, which created smoke, which resulted in the fire alarm triggering and the brigade arriving in two big red trucks.

On arriving, the fire brigade were met by Security who had quickly responded to the alarm given they’d just been nearby dealing with the collapsed person and the ambulance. On entering the area where the alarm had gone off the brigade discovered a motorbike with a warm engine but no rider to be found. The owner and erstwhile assistant had bolted.

Fire brigade left, security filed an incident report.

Emergency services (3) - the police

Security have no idea how the bike made it into the building so they call the police to find the owner of the bike. The police sent a nearby car to investigate and looking up the registration revealed the owner was a staff member. The police tell Security it seems like a problem for them and depart the scene.

Police left, security filed an incident report.

The aftermath

Come Monday, the Security Manager arrives to see my boss in person. There’s a very detailed and lengthy security log from the Friday night. My boss calls me in and we both confirm “I’d gone home by then”. After all three of us had stopped alternating between shaking our heads and laughing, the Security Manager informed us he had to send it up the line. Our boss gets a call from the number two in the organisation, who you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of, and gets told to investigate, reprimand, and issue formal warnings.

It wasn’t hard to work out who was involved. They all filed one by one into the office to get a verbal reprimand. They were handed a formal written warning on the way out. The executive assistant had used the nice thick paper and the boss had hand signed it. One of the three framed it and hung it on the wall of their office.

I’ve been writing some blog posts for the last few months but not crossposting them anywhere. I really just wanted to get some thoughts out of my head but not into a journal.

I’ve been intending to crosspost for some time but as inevitably happens, I was distracted fiddling with the settings rather than actually writing. So enough is enough, time to stop tinkering and pondering is this colour better than the other one, time to write something and hit publish.

I’ve seen others using Pika so decided to look into it and turns out it’s just what I needed. A platform I can write without being distracted by a timeline. Minimal settings to distract me.

To take directly from the About page of this blog:

I had a domain I wasn’t using for its original purpose.

I wanted a place to write longer thoughts where I didn’t see the noise of a timeline to distract me.

I tend to see something happen or read something written by someone else which sparks my thinking.

So here I am on Pika with Nothing Original Here.

Today was to get me started, get one down, and then looking at a sole solitary post will hopefully prompt me to write more and increase the list.

I think I’ve set up crossposting the way I want it using the excellent Echofeed so maybe you’ll see this appear in your timeline somewhere. Fingers crossed it’s not a mangled mess of formatting!