During my time at the backpackers, I befriended an American girl staying there, and she came by the office (which is in the same building as the backpackers) on Friday evening when we were planning what we had to do next week to ask if I wanted to get dinner. After she left the guys gave me a knowing look, not aware that Mandy was married. I had probably the best chicken parmagiana (a staple of Australian pubs) I had ever had. Man it was good.
Saturday was spent doorknocking and preparing announcements for the coming week, including making some calculations which may turn out to be very useful in cutting through to explain why one particular government policy is a bad idea.
Back at the hotel, my workout for the day was to do 10 pushups for every point the Wallabies scored. They started well, then played very badly, allowing a try when NZ were a man down, and they generall lacked any intensity or even interest. It wasn't until they had a man sent off (an entirely justified call by the ref given that he had explicitly warned both teams when the Wallabies had complained about delaying the game by throwing the ball away at penalties, and then one of the Wallabies did just that to get his second yellow card.) It's odd, but they played better with 14 than they did with 15. They even gave me cause to do more celebratory pushups, and brought my total to 280.
This morning I slept in (in relative terms) and had a bit of a run and a workout before going into the office. I also had my August swim, meaning that I have been for a swim in the open ocean every month since August 2005. Five years straight.
TW: Run to Lambert's Lookout, up and down twice, then 10 pushups in the surf, sprint up to the playground, 10 pullups - 10 rounds. And I got a lot of funny looks from locals and a boy who asked me "Excuse me, what are you doing?" A seven year old girl even started doing pullups of her own, assisted by her mum.
Today some admin details were taken care of, then candidate and I went off to the local rugby league fixture. Plenty of people were there, and after the home team had lost the announcer informed the crowd that the karaoke sing off and pole dancing competition between Candidate and his Labor counterpart (who apparently is nicknamed "Moscow" on account of his leftist orientation) had been cancelled. We had a good laugh.
This morning I read an
article about Kevin Rudd in which someone speculated that he might have asperger's syndrome. The article wasn't about that, but about his habits, his focus, his lack of social awareness, and his self-centredness, much of which contributed to his downfall. Reading that, I realised that I share some habits with the former PM. Struggling at times with perfectly normal social situations, acting in ways that people see as awkward, a tendency "to read aloud interesting titbits that he found on Wikipedia" and others. I don't share his incandescent rage or his lust for power, but I wonder if he was Australia's first aspie PM. (Of course, being an aspie doesn't make you a good person. I find plenty of aspies to be rather unpleasant company.)