Work Week Down Under (week two)
Started: 2007-09-02 17:59:01
Submitted: 2007-09-02 18:04:47
Visibility: World-readable
On Sunday, 12 August 2007, Steve and I headed into the office to write up what we learned so far and to gather some more data we thought might be useful. Since it was Sunday, we only worked eight hours. After work, I needed to do laundry; Steve's room featured both a washer and a dryer (mine had a dryer but no washer), so I borrowed his washer to get my clothes cleaned. While my first load was running, we watched a tourist DVD Steve bought yesterday of the Blue Mountains. despite being made with cutting-edge video production technology in 1989, it used only one gratuitous wipe. It did show its age in the writing and styling. The video showed some of the things we had seen the previous day and some some entirely new things. (The strangest part was slight jerkiness of the pans; I attributed it to a pull-down conversion between NTSC, PAL, and possible other frame rates. The DVD itself was NTSC and was sold along side a PAL version. It wasn't apparent whether the DVD player was performing its own pull-down to show the NTSC DVD on the available video hardware.)
Our second week of work in Sydney settled into more of a routine: we had a better understanding of what to do and how to do it both in and out of the office. Thus, the week blended together much more than the previous week. Dining highlights included discovering the Blackbird Cafe at Darling Harbour; we had previously missed it on our dining survey because it was located above ground level. By the middle of the week, overwhelmed by the new options for lunch, I began craving Chipotle and Snarf's.
On Wednesday, our hosts started talking about extending our stay in Sydney. I took another look at my calendar and decided that wouldn't work well; I already had plane tickets to visit my parents (and the rest of my immediate family) the following weekend, leaving Denver on Friday. For that to work, I'd probably want to fly home on Wednesday so I had Thursday to unpack, repack, and try to recover from jet lag; that would give me two more week days in the office in Sydney. (More if I worked weekends; I demand at least one day off.) Since I had already begun counting down to seeing Kiesa again, I didn't want to have to reset my count, so I declared myself unavailable and let Steve be extended for another week. On Thursday and Friday I was excited to be going home but confident I would return, someday.
