At some point in the past I read a plot summary for Moon and it immediately tickled my fancy. I added it to our Netflix queue and promptly forgot about it until Nigel was raving about it at work on Friday.

I watched the trailer and was immediately sold on it.

I caught it today with Matt. Absolutely fantastic. I don't want to try and describe it very much because I'll just give too much away. A definite must see if you like Sci Fi of the Kubrick variety. I have no idea why this film is having such a limited release.

I've always prided myself in the fact that I didn't have any fillings. That's about to change, sadly.

One of the teeth at the back, top right of my mouth has a deep valley, which makes it hard to get at with a toothbrush, and there's a small cavity at the bottom of that.

Dentist trips for me have always just involved the cleaning and scaling and an exam. Aside from having my wisdom teeth out (which I had done under general anaesthesia) I've never had a dental procedure before. Eeek.

I've already had one enquiry, so I guess I'd better get writing.

Despite the lawyers being really down on using this Consulate, I have to say that from my experience, it's been the easiest so far. Or I'm just getting used to the rigmarole.

The one screw up was I didn't read the instructions thoroughly enough, and we rocked up to the Scotia Bank branch to deposit the visa application fee in their bank account, and I thought the fee was quoted in Canadian dollars. Turns out, it was quoted in US dollars. It wasn't the end of the world that we didn't have cash, they could sell us US dollars on a credit card, except the bank would only accept Visa card, not Mastercard. I haven't had to deal with such bullshit since the great Cabcharge/Visa card war in Australia in the late 90's.

Moral of that story: read the instructions multiple times. Carry one of each flavour of credit card when traveling internationally, just in case.

That minor transactional hiccup aside, everything went fine. The Consulate itself does all of the pre-interview shenanigans on one floor (the bulk of the waiting around, the fingerprinting and photographing) and then they shoot you up to another floor for the "interview". Annoyingly, they run you through the metal detectors again on the higher floor.

The interview was basically "So you work for Google? How about the food?" and then he told us to come back the next day to pick up the passports. I think we were in and out in about three, three and a half hours.

I have to say, the ability to collect the passports from the Consulate later is a real boon. When you're in a foreign country, the last thing you want to deal with is any glitches in the postal system, or trying to get mail delivered to a hotel. This alone makes me like the Vancouver Consulate the best.

We went back at the 2:15pm allotted "passport pick up time", and they came down to the security checkpoint on the ground floor and you show your receipt and they give you your passports back. They tell you to step outside and check it, and come back if there's any problems, so I presume you can at least talk to a human at that point if there are any problems.

This is my third E-3 visa. They did not ask to see any of my supporting paperwork showing ties with Australia or anything else that I had in my giant wad of paperwork, just the approved Labor Condition Application, which they kept and returned with the passport the next day.

We got back from our brief visit to Canada last night. We had a great time, Vancouver and Victoria were both very nice.

YVR (Vancouver Airport)

This airport has to win the award for nicest airport I've seen. Clearly they pulled out all the stops in preparation for the Winter Olympics next year. The airport is very bright, airy and open. Before you even hit the immigration line, you pass through a couple of water features, some indigenous art, all of that jazz. Immigration is done in the open in a huge hall, instead of in the dark bowels of the airport, which was a pleasant change from the usual US airport immigration experience. (That said, Houston airport had a pretty nice immigration experience). Oh, and it was blanketed with free WiFi, which was a nice touch.

Ferry to Victoria

The brief geography lesson I got was that Victoria is on Vancouver Island, and Vancouver (the city) is not on Vancouver (the island). Go figure. Getting to Victoria from the airport via BC Ferries was a very seamless experience. You board a bus from the side of the airport terminal, and it drives to Tsawwassen, drives onto the ferry, and then you get off the bus and go sit on one of the passenger levels of the ferry.

BC Ferries

BC Ferries deserves special mention. The ferry itself is huge - 7 decks (three of them for vehicles). It's a veritable shopping mall on water. It's got some stores, buffets, exclusive $10 entry lounges, video arcades, cellular payphones, the works.

The trip to Victoria

The ferry ride took about 1.5 hours, and was very scenic. We passed by a few smaller islands, and I had an instant flashback to the TV show The Beachcombers that I used to watch as a kid, particularly the opening sequence.

Victoria

Victoria is a beautiful city. It's the capital of the province of British Columbia, and I likened it to Canberra in a lot of ways. It had more modern conveniences than a town with a population of its size would otherwise normally have. It was a government and university town. Nice houses, very green in general, and being an island, there was water everywhere. It seemed to have lots of bays, and harbours and rivers. It was very nice.

Flight back to Vancouver

We took a Harbour Air seaplane back to Vancouver on Sunday afternoon. That was fun. I've never been on a seaplane before. It took about 35 minutes.

Vancouver

First order of business in Vancouver was the purpose of the whole trip: renewing our visas. That went fine, I'll write a separate post about the process. Afterwards, we bought tickets for the Big Bus, and toured the city for the remainder of Monday and Tuesday.

Drive to Whistler

For Wednesday and Thursday, we hired a car, and went a bit further afield. On Wednesday, we drove up to Whistler to check it out. The drive up took about 5 hours, because we stopped at every scenic spot we came by. Waterfalls abounded. There was a lot of work being done on the roads between Vancouver and Whistler, upgrading them for the Olympics. Whistler itself was pretty spectacular. Some crazy looking ski runs. The village looked like Squaw Village on steroids. The drive back only took about 2 hours.

Cleveland Dam, Lynn Canyon suspension bridge

For the last day, we drove to Cleveland Dam, where there was a salmon hatchery, and checked out the dam, hatchery and surrounding area. It was lovely and green. After that, we drove to Lynn Canyon to check out the suspension bridge there (unlike the Capilano Suspension Bridge, which costs $26 a pop, the Lynn Canyon one is free).

That was all we had time for really. The weather wasn't fantastic during our stay, but it didn't really prevent us from doing anything either. I'd have liked to have checked out Stanley Park if we had more time, and Sarah wanted to go to Grouse Mountain.

We had a near-100% success rate at being picked as Australians, unlike when we're in the US, where more often than not, people ask us if we're British. Apparently this is mainly attributed to the fact that Australians run all of the ski lifts at Whistler. We certainly heard a lot of Australian accents while we were getting around.

I'd also never seen such a saturation of Starbucks before. In Vancouver, there were literally Starbucks across the road from Starbucks, and around the corner from another one. Whistler village had two.

The Canadian accent is cute. They really do tack "eh?" on the end of everything, although it's phonetically more like "ay?". "House" and "about" are also pronounced distinctively differently.

Overall, Vancouver wasn't what I'd call bursting at the seams with tourist attractions, but seemed like a nice city. It was fairly flat. The beggars were well dressed. Everyone was very friendly. A lot of the taxis were Priuses. It seemed pretty clean. I could handle living there. Not sure how bad it gets in winter.

It's time for the obligatory two-year E-3 visa renewal (well reapplication, technically), and this time we thought we'd stay local and do it in Vancouver.

We flew up this morning, and we're going to get a ferry to Victoria and stay the night with my cousin and meet his wife and kids, then take a seaplane back to Vancouver on Sunday night.

We've got an appointment at the US Embassy on Monday morning. If everything goes to plan, we'll fly back on Thursday evening.

I'm looking forward to a bit of down time. The timing is unfortunate, given this H1N1 flu outbreak, but our visas expire at the end of the month, and consular appointments aren't particularly easy to come by (or flexible).

I've moved buildings again, and am now the closest to home physically possible, which makes self-powered commuting less of a drag.

Sarah's restarting her Certified Nursing Assistant course, in an accelerated mode this time, and started clinicals this week, which is at a skilled nursing facility in the opposite direction to work, so I rollerbladed to work today and yesterday.

I managed to convince my phone to get a GPS lock today, so I used the very cool Android app, GPS Tracker, which when enabled, will report to InstaMapper's website as well as record a track.

Here is today's commute in.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

Kinglake residents say town looks like a nuclear bomb exploded

Rain fuels flash floods across north Queensland

Heatwave conditions ease in New South Wales

Things sound absolutely dreadful Down Under at the moment.

Sarah and I caught Taken this evening, along with Steve and Emily.

Wow, this was a good watch. Maggie Grace played a very convincing 17 year old. I had to double check it really was the same actor that played Shannon in Lost, because she seemed so much older in Lost.

If you like your action fast, furious and relentless, this is a must see.

We're now the proud owners of a Wii.

Sarah was discharged today. I decided to scrap trying to go to work, as I'd just have to leave at some point to pick her up. The hospital had to ensure that the nurse from Critical Care Systems was able to come to our home before they could discharge her, so that the IV antibiotics could be continued.

We left the hospital at about 11:30am, and he got to our place just after 1pm.

He whizzed through the whole process, as she was due for more antibiotics at midday and he wanted to get the IV started. She's on a four hourly course. Fortunately, that doesn't mean we have to change the IV every four hours.

The way it works is the bag has enough antibiotics in a (presumably saline) solution to last six infusions on a four hourly frequency, and it's hooked up to a pump (that'll cost us $5000 if we don't give it back at the end), which takes care of everything.

So once a day at around noon, Sarah has to disconnect the old bag, flush the line with saline, do something with some Heparin to prevent clots in the line, and hook up a new bag. The bag and the pump fit into a carry bag that can be worn like a bum bag or slung from her shoulder and looped through a belt. It'll be her permanent companion for the next (hopefully only) two weeks.

The PICC has two ports (and I don't think that's the correct term) on it, and the IV is only hooked up to one, so the other one should be flushed and "Heparinised" regularly as well. The nurse comes back in a week with more supplies and to do some maintenance on site where the PICC line enters her arm.

Critical Care Systems seems pretty impressive. They provide all the gear, fill the prescription, and bring it all out to you (by a nurse). They provide a 24 hour hotline to call if there's any problems, questions or concerns, and can dispatch somebody to us if necessary. We've got syringes preloaded with saline and Heparinised saline, more alcohol swabs than you can poke a stick at, and the fridge is full of IV bags.

It's awesome that medical technology has progressed to this point, where Sarah can go about her business almost as normal, instead of being stuck in a hospital for another two weeks just because she has to have a tube in her arm.

To prove this, the little trooper was back at her CNA course this evening, and starts clinical training tomorrow night.

It's been a somewhat long day...

I got up at 6:30am for a 7am ankle physical therapy session.

I went to the hospital after that. When I got there, a sonographer was doing the echocardiogram on her heart to check the valves. I missed the doctors. Sarah didn't feel any more knowledgeable about her condition even though they'd been through.

The patient Sarah was sharing with had a bad night, caused her to have a bad night's sleep also, and she always deals with all of this crap much worse when she's got a sleep debt.

Dinner stayed down, but breakfast did not.

The sonographer seemed fairly confident about her heart condition. Usually they don't make any comments on what they're seeing and leave that to the doctors, so we took some comfort from that.

I managed to corner the physician's assistant who had been following Sarah in her office, and quizzed her on what was going on.

It turns out a PICC line had been ordered, and they get installed by specalised PICC nurses and that's all they do all day. The PA implied that it might not happen until tomorrow. The gall stones were definitely unrelated, and something to follow up with her primary care physician. Incidentally, Wikipedia has some wicked pictures of gall stones. Talk about freaky.

I think I hung around until 10am, and then headed into the office to try and get some work done, with the intent to come back after work.

Not long after, Sarah called me up all beside herself about the PICC line (she doesn't deal well with the idea of getting jabbed at the best of times, and being tired put her over the edge), so I scrapped work, and went back to the hospital for the remainder of the day.

I decided to hunt down her cardiologist to see if the PICC line was absolutely necessary, and I managed to get the exact low down on her condition.

• the infection is staphylococcus aureus, not one of the other staph strains that I can't remember, which are considered less serious. The one Sarah has/had is the "bad enough" one, a.k.a. "golden staph". Fortunately it's sensitive to antibiotics, unlike MRSA, which is the really bad news one to have. So my heart skipped a beat when he said it was aureus, but I recovered when he said it was sensitive. I could have sworn the staph infection she had last year wasn't aureus, but he seemed to think that it was.
• when she presented at the ER on I guess Sunday morning, this staph was found in the blood sample they took. What is unclear is whether this is because of contamination from the skin when they took the sample (staph is present on the skin, it's only a problem when it gets internal), or it was indeed in her blood, whereas with the infection she had last year, it was never present in her blood.
• because of her aortic root replacement/graft and the risk of endocarditis destroying her heart valves, they didn't want to take any chances. Hence the PICC line and the two weeks of intravenous antibiotics. Two weeks is really a compromise. He said if they'd wanted to get all paranoid on her, it'd be a six week course, and they'd have done a transesophageal echocardiogram to boot.

So armed with the facts, I headed back to tell Sarah the news that she really should have the PICC line installed, and that she was getting off fairly lightly, relatively speaking.

The PICC nurse had a cancellation, so she was able to do the installation today. It was totally less traumatic than I think either of us were expecting.

It took about 45 minutes to install, and it was done at her bedside. Sarah was very brave and I don't think it really hurt her all that much. I watched the whole thing, and it was very interesting. It was particularly interesting because there was another nurse observing, so the PICC nurse was explaining everything as she went. She was also really nice and good at what she did (she'd been doing it for 14 years) so I think all of that helped.

So Sarah's now got two IV ports strapped to the inside of her upper left arm (attached to the PICC line), and no other IV lines in. She should get discharged tomorrow after they sort out whether she's going to receive IV antibiotics on a 4 or 8 hourly schedule at home, and exactly how all of that's going to work. I think they send someone out to our place to give us some training, and someone comes out once a week to do a bit of maintenance on the PICC line itself. I presume I'll be her personal nurse again. All it involves is a bit of plumbing.

Her cardiologist seems to think she should be able to still do her CNA clinical training with the PICC line in. She may just have some problems with lifting duties. I guess we'll just see how all of that pans out.

So that was the excitement for today. Sarah had her appetite back at dinner time, and was generally in much better spirits when I left her this evening than she was this morning. I could go into much more detail about the ins and outs of the PICC line installation, but I don't really have the energy.

And I thought the recovery from original heart surgery was a bit rocky...

Let me try and gather my thoughts...

Yes, Sarah's got gall stones, no, they're not the problem.

Yes, she's definitely got a staph infection, no, it's apparently (again, fortunately) not the bad type, but unlike last time, it is in the blood.

Apparently that makes endocarditis a bigger concern, the consequences of which are rather scary to put it mildly. I'm guessing this is why they're pumping her full of IV antibiotics.

The doctor(s) that is/are looking after her only do their rounds in the morning, so we've only got all of this information out of band from the cardiologist who popped in to see her this afternoon and sneaked a peek at her chart. So the exact course of action is unclear. He mentioned the possibility of getting a PICC line, which can stay in for up to a month, so they can continue giving her IV antibiotics for a while. We don't know if that means they could or would then discharge her. They want to do an ultrasound of her heart tomorrow to make sure everything's still okay there.

Pain-wise, she's doing better. She hasn't had any more IV pain medication since this morning (just oral stuff), but she hasn't got much of an appetite since throwing up last night. She did eat some dinner though. Nausea has been coming and going throughout the day.

Despite all of this, she's in fairly good spirits and is fairly mobile.

I'm going back to the hospital tomorrow morning to try and catch the doctor(s) when they do their morning rounds.

Somewhat ironically, this hospitalisation is now buggering up her attendance at the Certified Nursing Assistant course she's doing in the evenings. She was due to start clinical training this week. Somehow, even if she were to be discharged tomorrow, I don't see how working in an aged care facility with a PICC line, an open (albeit packed and covered) chest wound and a staph infection is going to be a good idea for anyone involved.

Seriously, every time Sarah has surgery, it all goes pear shaped.

The bottom (last time it was towards the top) of Sarah's incision from her recent wire removal surgery was looking a bit red, swollen and hard on Friday, so she went in to the clinic at got them to take a look at it.

They decided that a knot in the sutures was trying to work its way out, and causing inflammation or something, so just like last time, they decided to reopen the incision a bit. They did that, and cut the knot out, and rather than packing with gauze, they just taped the small opening closed with some steristrips and covered it with gauze and sent her on her way.

Somewhat fortunately (for me) Sarah went into the clinic during the day while I was at work, so I missed participating in the fun and games. They didn't use any local anaesthetic, but Sarah said it didn't hurt too much.

That night, though, she was in a reasonable amount of pain, again, similar to last time, except it was a band across her upper abdomen, below her breasts, instead of chest pain.

Mindful of the staph infection disaster from last time, we trotted off to the ER on Saturday afternoon, hoping to nip this in the bud. They did some blood work, which came back clear, and gave her some IV pain medication, which didn't seem to do much, and were generally scratching their heads as to the cause of the pain.

Fortunately, one of the surgeons involved with Sarah's wire removal from 2.5 weeks previously happened to be on call, so he got called in. He had a bit of a poke around the opening with a long cotton bud, and declared that it was possibly infected, because there was a bit of cloudy fluid discharged when he poked it in. Oh, and the cotton bud disappeared a good centimetre or more under the skin further up the incision, which indicated an abscess was forming.

So, for the second time, I got to watch my wife being cut open with a scalpel. I think the local anaesthetic injections were the most painful part for her. He opened the incision up a bit further, and packed it with some Betadine-soaked gauze, and we got sent home with the same instructions as last time this happened: I had to repack the wound with saline-soaked gauze two to three times a day and let it heal from the bottom up. She was also prescribed some antibiotics. She's got about a 2cm incision just below her breasts. It looks a lot deeper than the hole from last year's incision.

So we got home about 6pm last night, and went to bed around 11pm. Sarah lasted a couple of hours before she woke up in even more pain than before. She called up the hospital and had the same surgeon paged, and he advised her to come in to the ER again. So at I think about 2am, we headed back.

They took some more blood, did a CT scan, which came back clear, and decided to admit her. They're giving her IV antibiotics and pain medication. Initially she didn't want to have any more IV pain medication because it didn't seem to be working, and it tends to make her nauseous. She wasn't keen on dealing with throwing up with the amount of pain she was having. It hurt to move as it was.

With a mixture of IV anti-nausea drugs and the IV pain medication, the pain has finally come under control though. She did have one bought of vomiting this evening, which didn't seem to cause her too much discomfort, and she's getting in and out of bed more comfortably. They're going to keep her in overnight. She has a post-operative followup tomorrow in the clinic, so I expect they'll keep her in the hospital until at least then, depending on how things go.

Her cardiologist, intimately familiar with last year's debacle, dropped in this afternoon. He's wondering, given how this has happened twice now, if Sarah has some sort of allergy to the type of absorbable suture they've used. Apparently there are different types of sutures, so if she ever has any other surgery, we'll have to get them to try a different type

It'll be interesting to see how she goes tonight, as the pain seems to get worse overnight. She hasn't had any IV pain medication since about 1pm, and she wanted to see how she goes without it, because if she gets discharged tomorrow, she'll have to rely on oral stuff anyway.

I think it definitely gets harder for her to manage her pain when the pain is causing her to lose sleep. She can only deal with having a couple of night's worth of bad sleep before it all gets too much. So I'm really hoping she gets a good night's sleep tonight. Not that hospitals are renowned for that...

Sarah brought The Story of Stuff to my attention today. It's well worth 20 minutes of your time, irrespective of where you live.

...and there was a distinct feeling of deja vu. At least the procedure itself was nowhere near as long (under 2 hours).

On Thursday, Sarah had some day-surgery to have her sternal wires removed. The top one was causing her some discomfort because the skin there was the thinnest (whether that in itself was related to any of the previous incision complications remains uncertain).

The surgical team popped in to pre-op to autograph their work (seriously, they initialled her chest) before they started, and asked if she wanted just the top wire removed, or all of them. We consulted the Magic Eight Ball application on my phone, and it gave a resoundingly affirmative response, so she got them all removed.

Despite removing them all being a bit more surgically invasive, I think this is for the best. It means none of the other wires can cause any problems down the track requiring yet another trip to the operating room.

They also did some scar revision on the top part of the scar, where it was a bit stretched (from the previous complications), so incisionally speaking, she's had almost as much incision work done as the original heart surgery.

Ironically, this made the plastic surgery (laser treatment and steroid injections) she had late last year largely redundant.

She took the dressing off the incision this morning, and we had our first look at it. It certainly looks a lot better than before, so fingers crossed it won't get infected this time, and the overall long-term result will look better.

It's not a holiday without a road trip, especially with petrol prices being lower now than they were three years ago when we arrived here.

So we headed off on Christmas Day for San Simeon, with the general plan to tour Hearst Castle on Boxing Day (which isn't a public holiday in the US, but is a company holiday), and then head to Thousand Oaks, to visit a friend of Sarah's who also had heart surgery this year, and then head home.

We'd hatched this plan a few months ago, and afterwards, saw a news piece on the "Civic Musical Road", and when we discovered it wasn't too far from Thousand Oaks in the grand scheme of things, we decided to throw that on the itinerary as well.

I found a five-part "making of" documentary on YouTube, along with what I presume is the original commercial, and of course, we had to record the experience.

Making of, part 1

Making of, part 2

Making of, part 3

Making of, part 4

Making of, part 5

Presumably the final commercial

Our experience (on the relocated version)

Netflix really is a great service. (That is why I bought some shares in them after all) I like their core product offering, and I like that they're fairly switched on technically with their website. Now I also like their phone support.

We were supposed to receive Clerks: Tenth Anniversary Edition, but we received the bonus disk instead (I'm not even sure how you can do that, it doesn't appear to come up when you search for "Clerks"). I reported it as mislabeled, via the website, but this wasn't really accurate: the sleeve said it was the bonus disk. We'd just been shipped the wrong disk.

I wasn't sure whether the mistake was that we'd received the wrong disk, or that it was misrepresented in the DVD list on the website. I discovered that our $13.99 a month seems to entitle us to 24-hour telephone support (can you believe that?), so I called them up, bashed in our customer identification number, and in under a minute at 11:48pm on a Saturday night, was connected to an all-American sounding "Jill", who very quickly identified that we had indeed been shipped the wrong DVD, and so organised for the right one to be shipped out.

The entire experience was delightful. Yay for Netflix having competent phone support.

It wasn't me.

My ankle still isn't quite right since I sprained it back at the end of August.

It still looks more swollen compared to my other foot, gets stiff when elevated, and my foot doesn't have the same range of movement as my left one.

I trundled off to a podiatrist yesterday, and he had a poke around, and then looked at it under a fluoroscope while he torqued my ankle.

Based on that, it looks like I have a anterior talofibular ligament instability. When he torqued my ankle in one direction, there was a 1.5cm gap between the bones of my foot where there should have been about a 0.5cm gap. This ligament's position certainly corresponds with where there's still some swelling, so it makes sense.

I've got some (utterly boring) exercises to do, and I have to go back and see him again in 5 weeks. He said surgery may be necessary to fix it, as left uncorrected, I could have a bad time with arthritis in my 50's, and there'd be not a lot that could be done about it at that stage.

So we went out and bought a balance board last night, and I'll be spending the small amount of time I watch TV standing on one leg.

Looks like I might be in my very first class action.

Excitement, he wrote.

(or Taxation without Representation)

Wow, it's finally over, and best and right man won. I'm very excited and happy with the result.

It has been very interesting being able to observe the entire process from start to finish. All the primaries and caucuses, the protracted battle between Clinton and Obama in the Democratic primaries, the record breaking money Obama raised, the campaigning, the misinformation.

It'll be very interesting to see what the next four years brings. It's an exciting time to be living in America.

California is an interesting state. It has "ballot initiatives". Its constitution can (and has been) amended by essentially referendums whenever there's some other excuse for a vote. Anyone can propose a ballot initiative with sufficient backing by petition. Wikipedia has a good writeup of all of California's propositions. Probably the most controversial one this time around is Proposition 8, which seeks to essentially reverse the same-sex marriage right that the Californian Superior Court ruled on earlier this year.

This concept of ballot initiatives seems to trickle all the way down to the city level, where they're called Measures. San Francisco has some ridiculous number of them this time around. They use letters, and I think they go all the way to V. There's one to rename a sewage treatment plant after George W Bush, there's one to decriminalise prostitution. A co-worker who lives in San Francisco brought the official voter guide book to work with her today. It's about the size of a phone book and about 1.5 centimetres thick. I don't see how it's possible to make an informed decision on everything you're expected to vote on, when there's that much reading.

The observation I've made is that Americans seem to have an inherent distrust of their governments, so that's why so many bits of it are directly elected by the people. Judges are voted for, county sheriffs are voted for. You vote for your school board. It seems like very few positions of any power are appointed by someone.

Coming from Australia, where it's really the opposite, I'm not sure what I think is better. I think I like the simplicity of the Australian system. You vote for someone, and you essentially delegate power to and place trust in them.

For part of the 32 hours I spent inside a plane crossing the Atlantic, I watched Recount.

I wanted Sarah to see it as well, so we got it with NetFlix and watched it tonight.

I have no idea how factually accurate the movie is, but I'll assume all of the bits that were on the public record were vaguely correct. I'll assume the chad factor with the ballots was correct. The movie portrayed the US electoral system as a complete and utter shambles. The thing I found most striking was that the recounts keep having deadlines that weren't met, and the whole recount got discarded as a result. The process seemed incredibly flawed.

It got me wondering how the Australian vote counting goes, given it's completely manual. I might have to volunteer as a scrutineer when we wind up back in Canberra.

I highly recommend watching this movie if you can get your hands on it.

I got a voicemail message at home from UPS for a Christopher Pollock. I've previously received some mail for him as well, so I went searching, and it turns out that he lives elsewhere in my apartment complex.

Not long after we moved to the US, we were picking up a pizza from Pizza Hut, and someone else was also picking up a pizza for "Pollock". It seems my last name is more common than I thought.

We're heading off on a vacation, the first real "put our feet up" kind of vacation since our belated honeymoon a couple of years ago.

Our ultimate destination is the Seychelles, a tiny set of islands off the east coast of Africa, near Madagascar. Sarah's aunty and uncle live here. Her uncle's the deputy commissioner for the United Nations Indian Ocean Tuna Commission.

Getting there is pretty heinous. We're flying to Houston, then to Dubai, then to the Seychelles. Originally we were leaving tomorrow, but Sarah noticed that we only had an hour to transfer in Houston, and when she checked with the airline, they agreed (despite them booking the entire trip in the first place). So now we've changed to a flight today, with a night in a hotel in Dubai. Emirates only fly to the Seychelles a couple of times a week, so we really don't want to miss the Dubai-Seychelles leg. The flight from Houston to Dubai is 15 hours. That's worse than San Francisco to Sydney. Not looking forward to sitting on a plane for that long.

Flying on September 11 is an interesting experience so far. It seems that the airlines are "randomly selecting" all passengers who aren't US citizens for secondary inspections at the security checkpoints. I was vaguely aware, but had largely forgotten, that if they print SSSS in the bottom corner of your bording pass, then you've been randomly selected. The TSA guy was very apologetic, as he proceeded to completely dismantle our carry-on luggage.

The other fun aspect is that hurricane Ike is busy making its way towards Houston. It's not supposed to make landfall until Saturday, but since they've already evacuated some cities south of Houston, I'm really hoping it doesn't bugger up our flights.

We're in the Seychelles for 10 days, and then we're going to spend 3 days in Dubai on the way back. It'll be during Ramadan, which is apparently an unpopular time for Westerners, so all of the hotels are nice and cheap. It looks like it's going to be pretty hot as well.

It's hard to believe, but it's a year ago today since the worst day of my life.

In so many ways, it feels like so much longer, yet the memories still haunt me.

I was playing racquet ball with Kendall yesterday, and I was running backwards, towards the front wall to try and get behind the ball, and my right ankle rolled underneath me as I was putting my right foot down.

There was a really nasty internal crunching sound, and it hurt like hell, so I thought that maybe I'd broken it. I was able to walk home from the Club, so I figured it wasn't broken, but the swelling was pretty bad.

Several hours later at Urgent Care, they confirmed with an x-ray that it wasn't broken, so it's now strapped up and in an ankle brace. I have to keep off it for 10 days.

I seem to have pretty bad ankles in terms of rolling. I quite often stop myself from stepping down on my foot when the ankle's rolled inwards slightly. Back in May I rolled my left ankle a bit, just crossing the street, and it's still sore.

John Goerzen writes an entertaining piece on his ongoing battle with Dell to stop receiving advertising from them.

(The comments on the post are rather interesting in themselves)

I say "good on you, John" for taking a stand. Now that I know of these prohibitory orders, I might try them out on Pennysaver so I stop getting their stupid catalogs.

A while ago our junk mail situation got completely out of hand, and at the time I found 41pounds.org, which for a very reasonable $41, did a very good job of stopping pretty much all of the addressed spam.

About the only thing we get now is a small wad of catalogs that USPS delivers to every resident, which isn't explicitly address to us by name, just the apartment number. That and these stupid "checks" from Washington Mutual that we can use against our credit card account with them. They give me the screaming heebie jeebies, and I shred them on sight, because I've seen how insecure cheques are.

One of the things I've wanted to do since I discovered that Caltrain (and the VTA light rail) are well-equipped to take bikes, was go for an outing further afield on our bikes using one of these methods of public transport.

So we finally got around to doing that yesterday, when we threw our bikes on the train, and BART, and went for a ride around Golden Gate Park.

The grand plan was to bike to the Caltrain station, take Caltrain to Milbrae, BART to downtown, then bike from there to the park, and then catch an afternoon showing of The Dark Knight in IMAX at the Metreon, then bike back to the BART station, and reverse the whole thing.

We had a minor hiccup in that Sarah had just gotten her bike back from a friend she'd lent it to, and as we were about to head to the Caltrain station, discovered that it a broken spoke. She managed to extract the spoke and we got to the station with a couple of minutes to spare.

It turned out that Mike's Bikes were fairly close to the BART station, so we stopped in there on way to the park, and they were able to fix the spoke on the spot in 20 minutes for the princely sum of $21.

Unfortunately the weather was pretty typical summer San Francisco weather, and it was quite cold and foggy. It didn't get any better as we got closer to the park (and the coast), so the ride around the park itself wasn't terribly exciting. The hill we had to get over (Hayes Street) was a bit of a slog. On the way back we saw the filming of a Japanese Nissan commercial (complete with right-hand drive car).

I'd done some research into bike parking beforehand, and found that all of the parking garages are required to provide bicycle parking, and there's a pretty comprehensive list.

So we parked our bikes in the Moscone Center garage, which was about a block from the Metreon, and went and caught the movie.

The Dark Knight was really good. Very... dark. I really liked Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, much better than the original. I wonder if they'll just keep re-imagining the Batman movies over and over? There was pretty good continuity from Batman Begins. I thought the voice of Batman was a bit ridiculous though, at least initially. You kind of got used to it after a while.

Anyway, we got back to the parking garage, and some lowlife had cut through the cable lock that we'd used to lock our bikes to each other and the rack, and stolen Sarah's bike! Annoyed does not begin to describe it.

We trundled off the seven or eight blocks to the Hall of Justice to file a report. The SFPD weren't the least bit interested, really. The somewhat astounding thing was the bike racks were right behind the cashier's office, and there was video surveillance, and someone still managed to just walk right in, cut the cable, and walk out with the bike. We checked with the duty manager, and he reviewed the video footage and said they have footage of him walking in and then walking out with the bike. So hopefully the police will get hold that.

We have to see if we can dredge up the purchase documentation for the bike and see if the serial number is recorded. I have no idea if we'll ever see the bike again. Our renter's insurance may cover it, but I suspect the deductible won't make it worth our while to make a claim.

I have to say (and it's not like it's a recent discovery or anything) that the Bay Area's public transportation is a joke. It cost us $32 to go from Mountain View to Downtown San Francisco, via Caltrain and then BART. Our Prius takes about 11 gallons at worst, and with gas prices being at say $4.30 a gallon, that's about $47 a tank. We get about 400 miles out of a tank usually, and it's vaguely 40 miles from home to the guts of Golden Gate Park. So it's cheaper, and faster to drive to San Francisco than it is to use a bicycle and public transport. Particularly when you factor in the risk of theft of your bicycle.

Our next bike lock will be one of those fancy Kevlar ones.

Today is our third wedding anniversary.

We're marking the occasion by having a night at the Tickle Pink Inn, which I can vouch for as being very nice indeed.

Unfortunately I ended up on-call this week, so my day off tomorrow isn't going to be as idyllic as it could have been.

It's hard to believe we've only been married three years. I think we've already been through more than a lot of married couples would have to go through in a lifetime.

Here's to at least another 50 years.

Sarah just got her University results for semester 1.

A distinction and a credit.

That was starting the semester recovering from heart surgery. I'm very proud of her.

She's doing three subjects next semester, and then she's finished first year. Pretty impressive progress really. I know I wouldn't stand a snowflake's chance in hell of doing well studying externally.

We currently have fifteen cats in the house. Only three of them are ours.

When Sarah was contracting at Google, she started an informal, but company-endorsed trap/neuter/release program, because the basement of buildings 40-43 had a bit of a stray/feral cat infestation.

Since she left Google, she's continued doing trappings on an on and off basis.

She got a call a couple of days ago about a litter of kittens behind one of the other buildings, so she headed off last night with one of her crazy cat lady friends, and they proceeded to catch one of the kittens. She brought that home, and I went back with her, and the mother, which seems fairly feral, had been caught in a trap. The rest of the kittens seemed to have managed to secrete themselves away inside a generator behind the building.

This morning, with some help from various facilities types, she managed to extract the other four kittens from the generator. So that put the mother plus five kittens in the spare room (in a large cage).

At more or less the same time, Sarah got news of a litter of six kittens that need rescuing from down Gilroy way (some woman in a trailer park didn't seem to realise that boy cat + girl cat = kittens), so after grabbing the other four kittens this morning, she headed off to Gilroy to grab them.

So the current plan is to get the mother cat of what we'll call the Google litter desexed on Tuesday and then release her back where she came from. Her five kittens are young enough (~8 weeks) that they can be socialised and won't be feral. The six Gilroy kittens are from non-feral parents, and are about 11 weeks old. All of the kittens are old enough to be desexed as well, but Sarah can't get them into Palo Alto Animal Services for desexing for a couple of weeks, so I suspect we're stuck with them in the interim, unless Sarah can find foster homes for them. To cap it off, we're going to Sacramento for the weekend, so we have to get one of our friends in the complex to take care of them all.

The sad thing is the Gilroy Six seem to be in worse condition than the Google Five. They've got pretty poor coats, and seem to have some diarrhoea. Hopefully with a better diet they'll pick up. They're all very cute. The first one of the Google Five that Sarah caught last night is particularly cute. I expect Sarah will get some photos of them all up soon.

If anyone is in the Bay Area is interested in a kitten, we've got them by the near-dozen.

We recently joined The Club of Mountain View, because it just happens to be around the corner, and we both want to try and get back into some semblance of shape.

The Club has pretty reasonable facilities. It has a large cardio room, a large weights room, a group exercise room where they do a number of classes, and a spinning room. It also has three racquetball/handball courts, as well as an indoor basketball court.

Pretty much all of the facilities are included in the monthly membership, so Sarah went and booked a racquetball court this evening, and we had a bit of a whack.

We didn't have a clue how to play, so it was just basically half an hour of belting the ball around, and I have to say, I really liked it.

I haven't played squash since high school, but didn't enjoy it, because I was more used to tennis, and constantly misjudged where the racquet head was, hence missing the ball. I never really liked the characteristic of a squash ball either.

I really like tennis, but I have habit of getting carried away and belting the tripe out of the tennis ball, either sending it completely out of the court (over the fence) and far away, or at the very best well and truly past the back line of the court and into the fence.

Racquetball seems perfect for me. I can belt the living daylights out of the ball. It can't get lost. The racquet is short and reasonably large. There's a very satisfying thwack sound to boot. In short: I like it.

Sarah and I did the 50km route of Tour de Cure today. Many thanks to those who sponsored us. It was looking a bit dubious for me making the $150 minimum for a while. Sarah raised $170.

We couldn't have asked for better weather, really. It was clear, not too hot, a light breeze. The 50km route was very doable. All of the hills involved were rolling, so it wasn't too much of a slog.

This was the first major bit of exercise that Sarah's done since her heart surgery, just over 5 months ago now. She held up well, but was totally exhausted afterwards. Some of the uphills were a bit tough on her. I'm totally out of shape as well, and was expecting it to be much harder as a result, but I was pleasantly surprised at just how doable the ride was. That said, we both had a decent nap this afternoon after a dip in the pool.

Apparently the 75km route had some gruelling hills in it, so I think we'll stick to the 50km one if we do it again next year.

We actually got home last Sunday, but I've been too jetlagged, and then too busy with work to really have a chance to write anything...

We got back in at around 2pm, but our bags fell victim to Heathrow's Terminal 5, and didn't arrive until around 11pm. I think I lasted until about 8pm, when I had to crash. Poor Sarah had to stay up until 11pm when they finally got around to delivering our suitcases.

The week in Zurich was wonderful. The Zurich office is everything the photos make it out to be, and then some. One weird thing: apparently there's some Swiss regulation about how much you're allowed to cool a building in relation to the outdoor ambient temperature, so there's no air conditioning in the office. Instead, you can open the windows. Unfortunately, there's a fairly busy set of train tracks right beside the office, so it can get a tad noisy... It was a pretty warm week, I think around 30°C. I certainly prefer being colder rather than hotter when indoors, so found the lack of decent cooling to be a shame, given the rest of the building's features.

That said, it was pretty amazing sweltering away in Zurich, and then looking up and seeing snow on the mountains. It was surprising how much of a temperature difference there was.

On the last evening in Zurich, we went on a reconnoitre to try and find the river that we could hear (and see on the map) behind our apartment. We eventually found some street access to it, and it was another world back there. It was fairly thickly wooded, and the sunlight was heavily filtered through the trees, so it was cool and shady.

The river was fairly fast flowing over some rocks in parts, which is what was making it so audible. The whole setting was absolutely beautiful. There were a couple of paths, and the whole thing felt like something out of a fairy tail. We think we stumbled onto a fox, but we're not sure. It's a shame we only discovered the place on the last day, as I'd have liked to have explored it further.

I really liked Zurich. It was nice and flat, and had an excellent tram service. Monday Night Skate made me wish I'd packed my roller blades. We were wandering around on Monday night, and it felt like the entire city had donned skates and were going out. Apparently the authorities really get behind it, and close roads, and the police go along behind the pack and reopen the roads behind them and pick up the stragglers. Great way to encourage an active lifestyle.

We've got all of our photos up now from the Europe trip, and they're here.

This brings the total countries I've visited up to 10, excluding Hong Kong and Macau. I don't like selecting China when I generate this map, as I've never been to mainland China.

We got back to Zurich late last night (not quite as late as we got into Prague though, thankfully).

We stopped off in Deggendorf on the way through Germany to visit our friend Christine from the Bilbys, who has moved back to Germany, along with her Australian boyfriend, who is now furiously learning German (we're talking a year-long immersion program).

Deggendorf was a gorgeous little town, with cobblestone streets and more Churches than you can shake a stick at. Unfortunately we could only stay for a few hours, so we had a barbecue lunch and a quick wander around, and headed off on our way again.

This morning we dropped the rental car back at the airport, had one of our typical misadventures on the train (went the wrong way at first) and then caught a tram back to the apartment. Everything being in German is a bit of a challenge. Parts of it you can make out, parts of it are totally unintelligible. There seems to be a general tendency to concatenate words, for example, our apartment is on what would translate to "Rehalp Street", but in the local vernacular, is expressed as "Rehalpstrasse". So when you're looking around and trying to follow directions, the names don't seem quite so ludicrously long and intimidating if you just drop the "strasse" or the "brücke" (bridge).

The car that we rented from the Zurich airport developed some kind of non-critical fault on the way to Prague, and Sarah exchanged it for another one in Prague, as Hertz seemed unable to fix it. (It had the "check engine" and "check vehicle stability control" lights on). So we drove to Prague in a petrol Toyota Auris, and drove back in a diesel Audi A3. We both preferred the Auris over the A3, as the A3 seemed easier to stall, and harder to recover from a stall. Putting it in reverse was totally unintuitive as well.

Speaking of fuel, it sure is expensive over here. We paid about 60 euros in Germany somewhere to put about three quarters of a tank in the Auris on the way to Prague, and we spent about 100 CHF to refill the A3 in Zurich. I think Sarah said the diesel cost converted to about $9 USD per gallon.

So it was a nice novelty value to drive across Europe, but I don't think we'll be doing it again in a hurry. I did enjoy driving on the autobahns though.

While I'm writing about driving in Europe, I might as well make a note about the traffic signs. We really should have researched them before hopping behind the wheel, as there were quite a few we didn't understand, and they weren't terribly intuitive (to us anyway).

For example, versus versus

The first is the pretty internationally standard "no entry" sign, but when you see the third sign in isolation, it seemed to us at least, that perhaps that meant "no entry", where it actually means "no standing". "No parking" is a variant of "no standing", with just one diagonal line. The middle sign means "no vehicles", which makes no sense at all, unless you've seen (and understood) the other versions of this sign, which have lesser restrictions of "no cars" or "no bicycles" and feature an icon of either inside the circle.

Speed limit signs were also a bit interesting. You'd have , which specifies a speed limit, but then you'd have , which means "End of speed limit". Our question was "well what is the speed limit now?" The answer seems to be "the default national limit for the class of road you're on".

The final set of signs we didn't understand until Christine explained them to us when we saw her yesterday, were and , which are "priority road" and "end of priority road", respectively. We just didn't know what a priority road was. Turns out it means traffic on the priority road has right of way over traffic on roads intersecting it. I would have thought this was pretty obvious, but apparently on a non-priority road, you have to give way to traffic on the right, regardless of whether you have a stop sign or a yield/give-way sign. So there's some sort of implicit four-way stop thing going on on a non-priority road.

Every time I see European traffic signs, particularly the triangular warning signs, it gives me a flash back to my childhood. My Aunty Peggy used to have a huge big bag of mixed Lego pieces, including a bunch of European traffic signs, and some square Lego mats, and when we were kids, and we used to go to her house to play, we'd build little towns out of all of the Lego.

This was the first time we've driven a manual left-hand drive car, and it was fine, except your immediate subconscious reaction the first few times is to go reaching for the gear stick with your left hand, and bash it into the door. It was also the first time we've driven on a roundabout on the right hand side of the road. That was interesting, because it added an additional thing to think about: the traffic on the left.

Been rather busy, so I haven't had a chance to continue recording the trip...

We got into Zurich (albeit late), without incident. Immigration was the biggest joke ever. There was no paperwork at all, and we just handed our passports to the guy, who just looked at them casually, and waved us through. No stamp, no scan, no nothing. It was a bit disappointing really.

We got our rental car, and drove around aimlessly for a bit, until the GPS got lock, and then headed for Prague. We went through Austria, where the guy at the border did give our passports a more thorough inspection, more because we were confused and were waving them at him. He also gave us a stamp. The woman from Hertz told us we needed to buy some sort of highway sticker for the car to drive in Austria (wow it's hard to type "Austria", "Australia" just keeps coming out from muscle memory), so we bought one of them and stuck it on the windscreen, and then promptly entered Germany.

The autobahns in Germany are wicked! Everyone's screaming along at a ridiculous pace. The fastest I got up to was 180 km/h. The roads themselves were surprisingly quiet, and only two lanes.

We stopped off for dinner somewhere in Germany, and finally arrived at the hotel in Prague at about 1am on Sunday morning, so it took about 7 hours instead of the 6 that we'd estimated.

We got to bed by about 2am. I woke up at about 10am, then went back to sleep until about 2pm. We finally ventured out for a bit of exploration at about 3pm on Sunday.

One observation about Czechs: they seem like a pretty dour bunch. Here we were wandering around, being all wide-eyed and touristy, smiling at everyone, and they'd just scowl back at you, no matter how hard we tried to get a smile out of them.

After that initial wander, we discovered that there was a Metro station right across the road from the hotel in another direction, so we caught that to go and check out Prague Castle. The Metro system is another one of those great subway systems that I love. It ran regularly, so you didn't need to concern yourself with a timetable. The ticketing was a bit bizarre. It seemed totally honor-system based. There were no barriers to stop you getting in or out.

It was fairly late by the time we got to Prague Castle, so we just wandered around the grounds, took a look inside Saint Vitus's Cathedral, and caught an orchestral performance in Saint George's Basilica, then headed back to the hotel.

Everything at Prague Castle was pretty mind-blowing. The size of grounds. The view. Saint Vitus's Cathedral. The Cathedral was huge. When you stepped inside and looked up... words can't describe it. It was amazing.

Unfortunately, we didn't bring a camera with us, so we don't have any photos from the Sunday excursion, but Sarah went back this afternoon, and her photos are here.

I think the thing that struck me the most was that here were some seriously old buildings - older than my home country, and they were in amazingly good condition. They really built things to last back in the day.

The weather so far has been pretty miserable, and if the forecast is anything to go by, will remain miserable until we drive out on Saturday.

We've survived, language-wise. The default language of the hotel staff seems to be English, and most random people we've had to interact with seem to speak English. I feel really arrogant and rude just speaking in English to people without first asking if they speak English, but I'm also getting really sick of starting every conversation with "Do you speak English?" The printed language is by and large indecipherable.

The currency, which in English is called a "crown" is crazy. One US dollar buys about 16 Czech Koruny, and the prices are ridiculous. A glass of wine at the hotel is maybe 250 CZK. Granted, the hotel prices are obscene, but seeing triple-digit prices for a glass of wine seems totally bizarre.

The prices in general seem pretty steep. Sarah said she got a 2 koruny coin in change today. We've got no idea what you'd actually use that for.

Last night, after the conference had finished for the day, we wandered off in a different direction again, and wandered through the grounds of Vyšehrad Castle. The Cathedral of Saint Paul and Peter has an amazing graveyard in it, including the grave of the composer Dvorak. We grabbed some dinner at a nearby restaurant, which was substantially cheaper than the hotel restaurants. Again, we forgot to take a camera with us.

Heh, in the 11 or so hours since my last blog post I've received two emails from people going "yeah BA is crap!"

Well the flight itself was fine. The plane was nice. The entertainment system was pretty decent. The UI was all touch screen based, which made it less clunky than Qantas'. Food-wise, I thought the dinner tray was pretty loaded with stuff.

Only problem is that the flight was running about 10 minutes behind schedule, then had to hang around in the air at Heathrow for about 10-15 minutes, so we didn't make our connecting flight. BA bumped us to the next one without any problems, so now we're chilling out in the spiffy new terminal 5 BA lounge for an hour. I guess an hour just doesn't have enough fat in it for a connection.

Terminal 5 is pretty shiny in general. Hopefully our bags won't get lost.

(Well we haven't even gotten on the plane yet)

I'm pretty sure that this is the first time I've flown British Airways.

Sarah and I are off to Zurich via London, and when we rocked up at the airport to check in, we couldn't get seats together. We're sitting in the middle seat in front of each other.

We were quite taken aback by this, as we've done a fair bit of flying together and never had this happen before. We mentioned this to the customer service person when we dropped our bags off, and she told us the reason was because they have online check-ins, all the seats go from people checking in online. They only seat people together with infants, in parties of three, or in a wheelchair. She went on to say all the airlines are like that.

Not in our experience.

So once we got through security and into the BA lounge, I thought I'd try again and see if we could get reseated. The customer service person in the lounge had a quick glance at the computer, and told me there was nothing available. There was no attempt to re-seat other passengers travelling alone, or anything. It looked like she based her inability to do it off the available seats.

I'm just really surprised.

It's stinking hot. Right now, at nearly midnight, it's 22.9°C downstairs in the living room with the air conditioning on, and 32.5°C upstairs in the bedroom, with the window open.

No prize for guessing where we're sleeping tonight.

We've been blessed with really wonderful neighbours in our apartment building. We know four out of the seven households in our building really well.

A while ago, we thought it'd be cool to rent a house and have a weekend away together, so we booked it for this weekend, rented a house in Rio Monte on the Russian River, and hung out together for the weekend.

Eight adults, 3 kids, and we're all still talking to each other afterwards.

Trying to coordinate outings with 2 small kids nap schedules was tricky, so we only made it to the Korbel winery, but we picked up some cheap champagne (an I thought you could only call it champagne if it came from Champagne, France).

Sadly, because Gavin and Christina have a second son on the way, they've bought a house up in greater Sacramento, and are moving out next weekend. We'll miss having them and Aiden as next-door neighbours.

We've decided that we should make this an annual event, so there'll be an annual "building 4" reunion.

Photos from the weekend are here.