It's been a tough week
Well it's Thursday again and it's been a tough week all round with some rather major changes with major implications happening. The company I wolr for no longer exists, it has been subsumed by our parent company and big chnages are afoot, in fact our whole core business has now chnaged which puts us all in a very difficult situation. Life goes on though, even with the potential for major upheaval.
The exciting news is that it is less then two weeks till we go away on holidays and we are bloody excited! We actually start our holidays a week tommorow, but I dare say I will have a huge amount of work to finish so that I am not still working on the plane! LOL.
I have been working on a special site so you can all follow us on our trip with lots of pictures care of my new digital camera and a chance for you to add comments every day as well. We are hoping to update the diary at least every second day if not daily, but we will just have to wait and see how much internet access we can get.
I have had a hell of a lot of email from people recently tellling me to write the next chapter in Life at a Private School. I sat down recently and planned out the next ten chapters or so and made a real effort to get through chapter eighteen in the boys lives, but I havent had the time or the motivation to finish it yet, but I will very soon.
Queer Dollars
I don't usually promote American Centric activism causes, but since I know the guys behind this particular idea I really thought I should promote it.
Queer Dollars are a reaction to the American Salvation Army's decision to rtecsind their same sex partner benefits to employees a couple of months ago. During Christmas the Salvation Army Santa Clauses are all over the main streets of America with a red bucket for donations. So to show that this policy is not acceptable lance and some others have developed the Queer Dollar which you can download and print. Instead of putting money in the buckets, you can make statement that the Salvation Army needs to change it's policies. For more information ahve a look at the following links:
Queer Dollars To Downloading
PDF Version of Queer Dollars
Download some today print them out and use them!
Less than three weeks to go
The time is drwaing closer and closer now till we go away and we are both getting very excited although our time is filled with so much to get done and finish before we go. The christmas season is almost on us, and people have staretd to send out invitations to parties and drinks events. Our diaries are filling up quickly and we have been in the unfortunate posiition of having to say nbo to things that conflict with pre booked events. I hate saying no to my friends because I like to see them.
Last weekend we went to ARQ night club
http://www.arqsydney.com.au and had a real blast. It does have to be the best club in town. We dragged oursleve home about 4:30am or so and spent the next three days recovering from the night. I love to go out and party especially when the music and the atamoshpere is good, and Saturday night was no exception. the problem is that it takes a couple of days to get back to normal, and of course now we wan t to go out again and agin, but all good things must be done in moderation or it will bevome the norm and no longer be special.
Long Week
It's been a very long week this week with lots to get done at work and not enough time - I sound like a broken record sometimes with this sort of stuff. But it is now three weeks today till we start our holiday and about three and a half weeks till we actually leave to on holidays, and the carrot at the end of the stick is drawing closer. The bad part of it though, is that I don't have an enormous time to get everything done and am getting a bit stressed out about this part.
Two things have happend this week that I thought worthy of note. The first is a rant about a restaurant we had dinner at on Tuesday night in Sydney called
Oh Calcutta. We had totally forgotten that we were meeting friends for dinner and booked at the last moment which wasn't a problem. When Lee rang he asked whether it was still BYO (Bring Your Own Wine etc) which they agreed it was. We and our friends duly arrived with wine and were promptly told that it was not BYO, which confused us as we had been told us it was. The staff were particualry rude at this point and in retrospect we should have got up and left, but we stayed.
the female waitress who served us was so rude and disinterested, that she dribbled wine all over the table as she was pouring, practically threw the plates at us and snarled at us. In fact she was so rude at one stage we almost got up to leave. So the moral of this story is don't go to
Oh Calcutta it isn't worth the rudeness and the stress.
The other thing that I wanted to mention was a rather sad and poignant episode. I have been working later at work than normal and went downstairs to get a coffee at about 8pm on Thursday night. It was cold and raining outside and people were hurrying around in between gaps in buildings. Sitting down on a bench near my office was an old lady, somewhere between 65 - 75 sitting in a raincoat and plastic shawl over her head. As I passed she asked me for some money for a "fare". I looked at her and decided that she didn't look like a drug or alcahol dependant person, so I stopped for a few moments and gave her all the change I had (only a couple of dollars). She took it and thanked me and I went on my way. I could see her from my office and I watched as she asked a few more people, then got up and left.
It made me very sad watching her, because my mother and father are in her age range and it struck a real chord with me and made me think that this was probably someone's mother, or sister or grandmother. Where were her children or loved ones? Is she all alone in the world? does no one care about her? It reminded me that I love my parents and am very grateful that they have my sister and I to look after them if anything ever went badly wrong.
I am often confronted by images of homeless people and this was just one of many small episodes that make me sad in our society that we allow people to live onthe streets or don't help them. It's sad that our society spends about $250,000 a year on keeping one person in jail and yet the amount of money spent on social welfare is next to nothing in real terms for people on the streets. They are our problem and we need to help if we can. A few dollars here and there won't help the full problem, and many of the people will end up spending it on alcohol, drugs and ciggerettes, but those two dollars might just help someone who wants to get off the streets get a hot meal or hot drink and keep them alive a little longer.
Depressing Weekend
Australia is a long way away from the rest of the world, and I know that most people couldn't care much about Australian Politics, but over the weekend the
Xenophobic nature of the maintstream Australia has shown in the re election of the narrow minded and bigoted John Howard and the Ultra Conservative Liberal National Coalition.
I am highly disapointed, not just beacsue I can't stand John Howard and his desire to try taking our society back to the 1950's but more so because it means that the majority of Australian's agree with his policies and believe that Australia should be isolated form the rest of the world.
Australia is fast becoming a nation of racist narrow minded bigots and they are so scared of the rest of the world middle class australian's are promoting a society that simply pretends that equality and acceptence are not concepts that are important. If Australia isn't careful they are going to end up as the joke of the world (if we aren't already with Howard and his cronies).
I am a thirty something married gay boy living in Sydney, almost on top of the gay scene but not in it!
Why Sometimes blue?, because I love blue, but also I am sometimes blue :)
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