Hang on, Melbourne, what was I doing in Melbourne all of a sudden??

I was sent there to conduct a 1 day training course for a budgeting system that I was involved with. Actually it wasn't quite one day. Sort of.

I got up hellishly early even by my standards and caught the first available flight down. Which is to say, the first one that I was moderately confident of connecting to by train. (With one later train as a backup; always have a backup plan.) So the train got me to the airport, and I got on board the plane, and we departed on time. Except that there was fog over Tullamarine and we were sent to Mt Bulla, the Victorian ski field, to wait. I was quite looking forward to a little skiing except it wasn't so much Mt Bulla as about 20,000 feet above Mt Bulla so there was no skiing to be done. We finally arrived, and my "taxi" was in fact one of those parcel vans with seats. Which of course offers you the same level of comfort as a Fed Ex package gets, though granted with a little more space. As it turned out this was useful as I powered up the notebook (a steam powered XP company one since we're not 'llowed to use our own) so that I could e-mail the trainees (who were in meetings so I couldn’t call them) to let them know we'd have to push back the go time by an hour.

The course was good, I was a little out of practice so my usual presentation style (which is essentially George S Patton meets Bon Jovi) was at only about... oh, I'd rate myself 75% on that day. At lunch time I took the Olympus (the Canon was too heavy for a one day trip) out to see what I could shoot. Southern Cross station is always good value though it can be a tricky sod because of the range of light and shadow. I was surprised that the Olympus handled it as well as it did; the outdoors in the far background is still a bit too bright though. I was tempted to burn it a little but decided against it. In any case you shouldn't be looking there, you should instead be focussed on the purposeful stride of the woman, as powerful in its own way as the locomotive that she is striding toward. She does get a little lost in the final (shrunken down) image, and I did consider doing some cropping, but I really didn’t want to lose all of that lattice work at the top of the image either.

Anyway, on the flight back to Sydney we found that YSSY (Kingsford Smith Airport) had been partially closed due to heavy thunderstorms. We were put in a holding pattern until our fuel ran out and I'm typing this from the afterlife. No, wait, I'll read that again. Until our fuel almost ran out and we were diverted to Canberra where we sat being refuelled for about half an hour. But not reprovisioned, so food and drinks were in short supply when we finally rocked back onto runway three-five outbound from YSCB. Then, because we had a full tank of fuel and the inbound heavies from overseas did not... we were put into a holding pattern again. Finally, oh sweet finally, we touched down at YSSY. This was of course after most of the trains on my line had stopped running for the day. Actually, beyond a certain point on the line they had completely stopped running because of trackwork and I had to catch a bus for the last segment. And thus did my head finally hit the pillow at around zero one hundred in the pitch dark A.M. of the Friday.

Since for me revile (known by some as "rouse", others as "that effing alarm clock") is 04:10 (earlier, if I have a plane to catch) to get showered, shaved and dressed ahead of my 2 hour long commute to town, for some reason I elected to sleep in for a couple of hours and work remotely from home on the Friday.

I do hope that the lady in the image had a more... direct journey to wherever she was going to.