We're going home on Monday (from Sydney) for a week, but I may not come back, so I tried to do a bunch of stuff. First I went downstairs to the Caffe for my usual
flat white and raisin toast. There was a woman there, quite unattractive, wearing a bright yellow, short-sleeved, collared shirt with bright red roses and bright green leaves, over a tank undershirt. It was the same shirt on the cover of this year's
Time Out: Sydney guide.
After breakfast I took a bus to Circular Quay for the SOLE mission of buying more postcards with Alfred Hitchcock holding a Qantas flight bag at the airport. I dig postcards. I really like that particular one. And did they have any? Of course not. It was part of an exhibition that I missed - but I have one of them left.
So since I was down there I walked over to The Rocks and stopped in the toy museum. The stairs to the second floor are 100 years old (really) and designed for midgets, I swear. You'd fall if you weren't careful. They had some neat stuff; some strange, some undeserved of being in a toy museum (like the Star Wars soda can). I particularly enjoyed Jocko the Drinking Monkey. He pours a drink, then pours it dow his throat. The liquid returns to the bottle and the action is repeated. They had some battery-operated robots, talking robots, Japanese repros of original robots (which I have at home), etc., as well as space toys. There was some good Disney stuff, like a rare boxed Australian-made Disneyville projector (Disneyville?), and a money box featuring Donald Duck before gloves. The animators found it very time-consuming to draw feathered hands, so Donald wore gloves from the 1930s. There was a Bush Baby featuring skin that wrinkled, which I really didn't understand.
I coveted the Navy code card game, circa 1940, and Charlie Weaver Bartender: a TV personality who shakes, pours, and consumes a drink. His face turns red, smoke comes from his ears, and his body sways. In the same vein there was Japanese Chef Cook, circa 1950. He sways, chews, flips and omelette and seasons it, as the stove lights up. Also of note is the 'Office Miss' collection of typewriters and phones in steel, tin plate, and plastic, from the 1940s. Man, did I want those. The plastic, lithographed Space Station Morse Code signalling set was cool, as was the Ned Kelly (colonial Australian gangster) doll, which looked like the "It's just a flesh wound" knight.
There was an older woman with two girls, maybe 10, who were always within spitting distance of me. One of the girls saw some Yogi Bear figures and said "Wow, those must be centuries old."
Anyway, I left the toy museum and bought a vase for my mom at Object, in the Customs House in Circular Quay, then went to the third floor to see Fuzzy Prime Ministers, a large model of Sydney, exhibits about the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, and a film on the making of the Opera House, the controversy that it caused, and how it was built. They played this kooky 60s music during most of it.
By then I was hungry. Typically, I have breakfast, then go hours without eating because I don't think about it, or put it off. What happens is that I'll suddenly be very hungry and will have an incredibly short window of time in which to eat. If I miss that window, run. So I walked down to the Museum of Sydney cafe and had a salad, a flat white, water, and chocolate chip cookie while I regurgitated some inter-VLAN routing foo on my Badtz-Maru notebook. There were about seven servers, more than the number of customers, and service still sucked. This happens often.
After I ate, I walked over to Dymock's like a rocket (the coffee) to buy three more yellow legal pads. I'm happy with my black legal pad covers, too, and feel like a dolt for taking so long to realize that there was such a thing. Then I went home.
That night there was a team meeting at an Italian restaurant on Liverpool Street. I spent quite a bit of time talking with the vice president of something or other (well, she was on my left). Her husband has his doctorate in chemistry, and recently retired from teaching at Chicago. Hell, I would too. Her job got them a large pad overlooking the Sydney harbour. I also outlined some significant differences between private school and public school for someone who has three toddlers, all female.
To cap off the evening, I got jealous because of something that Y said.