1. Mark Steyn 2. My strange life

1. I got mentioned on Steyn Online! Which is very cool.
But this also means serious readers will now zoom on over to my site to see what I'm made of, and this feels kind of intimidating. I've never really thought of myself as a bigthink blogger, as I'm sure the handful of my regular readers will attest. I just randomly select what interests me at home and abroad, and put it out there, mainly because of my irresistible urge to babble.

So the spike in today's readership is quite exciting, but I know it won't last. Thanks for coming anyway.

2. I really should explain the previous post. I lead a rather strange life at times. My husband flies for QANTAS so he's away a lot, up to ten days at a time. So I'm mostly a QANTAS widow. During a two-month bid period, he's away for half of it. Which means that when he comes home for a break of say, five days, he gets a LOT of priority. Blogging goes down the drain (I'm sure you understand.)

And when he's home, he's out of time zone. Seriously out of time zone. When you fly to from Melbourne London and back, and then to LA and back, and then to Frankfurt and back, your body clock just refuses to re-calculate. Which means he's either asleep at 6pm or awake until 5am. Either way, normal marriage functions which others take for granted are, shall we say, a little disjointed. Like conversation. Doing stuff together, such as going out for dinner.

You know that's what I meant, right?

Anyway this week was weird. My son is doing his final exams for Year 12 (VCE in Victoria). What with tutors, French oral exams, practice exams, real exams, and of course, parties in between, my taxi service has been severely overstrained.

Plus I've been organizing travel for a bunch of academics at my University. Now my department, international marketing, does this stuff for a living. We send our marketers overseas about 6 or 7 times a year each. We're used to it. It's funny how international travel is often touted as an incentive for a position. "Overseas travel opportunities" the job description often trumpets. Sounds great. But when you travel to India for 5 exhibitions in Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Ahmedabad and Delhi in two weeks, working from 7am to 9pm each night at the exhibition and then packing it up so you can start at 7am again the next day, carrying round a mountain of display equipment, files, brochures etc, talking yourself hoarse to about 3000 students in one exhibition, dealing with the problems of a dozen agents you have to visit in their offices as well as interviewing their students, and coping with all the other problems associated with travel in a foreign country, you can see why it loses its glamour.

But as I said, our staff are used to this. Academics, bless their little cardigans, are a different kettle of fish. Quite often they've never done this before, so they ring you up 5 times a day and ask questions like:
"What sort of adapter do I need for my laptop? Do I have to buy it here?"
"I forgot to tell you that I'm not entitled to business class travel from Bangalore to Colombo. Can you change my ticket? I leave in about two hours."
"There isn't enough time in my itinerary to buy a Nintendo for my daughter. Can you re-schedule all the agent visits on Tuesday so I can do some shopping?"

The poor dears.

So that's why this week's blogging has been interrupted. Normal service will be resumed next week, hopefully.

Comments

[The Real JeffS]

Under the circumstances, I find it amazing that you found *any* time to blog this! You have a very busy life....when do you find time to go shooting? :-)

As they used to say in my younger days, "Keep on truckin'!"

[Jamie]

Wow. Impressed to say the least. An actual Victorian who is not mired in nutty socialism. And a female. And a female who can shoot. And a female who can shoot who was in the Navy. What a catch for your husband.

Okay, fair amount of negativity on the Victorian thing, but I'm a South Aussie. Didn't find your work through Steyn, but through researching implications of the Scoresby Freeway - your entry on this came up as a link on google. Reason I'm looking into the Scoresby? Debating a nutty socialist from Victoria on another blog...

[Scott Wickstein]

Yeah, sucks to be me hey :)

[ozwitch]

And this is bad how?

[Scott Wickstein]

Oh, okay. I lead a very bucolic existance in contrast. My day goes something like.. get up.. coffee... visit Mum, come home in time to watch cricket all day, write up the day's play, surf the net, play games, go to bed... and repeat.