On 5 August I went to get my car serviced and mentioned the fact that I might’ve instead of the RAV4 preferred to buy a Kluger. The Kluger wasn’t being sold in Australia when it came time to replacing my Aurion, but for a number of years had been on sale with a hybrid model available in the US. The service staffer who welcomed me said that the Kluger is larger than the RAV4 and so the latter is easier to park in the city.
In fact I’d wanted to buy a Prado when I lived in Japan – so the Kluger in a hybrid model would’ve helped me realise a dream. It was too late now (until the time for the next car came around).
Another staffer who was there gave me information about E10 petrol (the one with ethanol mixed in) saying that it was better for the car than the 91 octane petrol I’d been buying. 91 petrol is the cheapest but I’d also been buying it because I’d heard there were worries about using E10 in cars (as my taxi driver who’d later take me back to the service centre averred), but the staffer didn’t think this was true anymore. He said that E10 has 94 octane fuel in it and so it burns better, more cleanly, though it wasn’t as good as 98 octane fuel when it came to protecting car engines.
When I turned into Bourke Street from the car dealership I thought that the steering and handling felt better than before. The checkout staffer’d said that they’d switched the tyres round to make sure the wear was uniform and in order to get the best mix. I’d had a short verbal run-down of what’d been done but by the time I was driving on the street the details of the work escaped me, so I’m including below a snapshot taken with the checklist they gave me at the time I paid.
What struck me was how welcome laundry is. For me, especially on those days when, due to fine weather, I am able to hang wet clothes – once they have emerged, clean, from the bowels of the washing machine – outside on my Hills clothesline (the same model which, at the time of writing, Bunnings was advertising for $209 – I didn’t recall, when I saw this advert on the TV, how much, earlier in the year, I’d paid for mine and, regrettably, didn’t make a note of it at the time, so that information is missing here).
Even when it rains, however, I felt pleasure in being able to use the heat-pump dryer I keep in the laundry to be ready when it rains and I need to wash clothes. This device is so silent and it treats my poor, ragged clothes with such delicate care (it must be more delicate due to their extreme age and excessive frailty) that using it reminds you, as you press the “On” button and tap the pressure switch, of the advancement of human knowledge.
Because embodied by the technology used to make the thing is the idea of progress. But the fun doesn’t stop there! I’d actually come to feel happy to take clothes upstairs to my studio, where a table sets the scene for separating and folding items that have been dried by the sun or by the power of inversion (not used here in the Proustian sense!). And more – I can say that I even enjoyed ironing, and especially treasured moments spent thinking about my solitary days in Queensland as, when I lived there among the bush turkeys, the possums, and the bananabirds, mum’s old housekeeper would iron my shirts. Sometimes Georgette would bring her pet budgie – named Harley – over to mum’s if she was going to stay the night there, and the bird would utter squeaks and chirps like frogs on a warm night.
So, if laundry is always going to be there for me, I welcome ironing too. I celebrate dirty clothes and all the devices that work for me while I pass stray hours involved, downstairs, beguiled by the plot of a novel (which might be read on a Kindle or which might be read in a hard-copy book) or, upstairs, using an MS-Word document to draw imaginary figures and writing verses.
On this same day Joe asked me via WhatsApp if I wanted to get a lift installed in the light well (what he calls the “atrium”), but I respectfully declined his invitation. He’d made it, presumably, so that both of us could benefit by leveraging our purchasing power to convince a supplier to install the devices at a reduced individual cost. I belatedly got around to justifying my decision, the next morning when it was still too early for sunlight, by estimating that, in the case of a power outage, I’d be in a very bad situation as once the internet goes off there’s no mobile phone access inside the building, so that, in case such an eventuality came about, nobody would be able to get me out of the lift if, once power came back on, for some reason it still refused to operate. I’d had
a bad experience with a lift in 2017 and didn’t want to find myself in a similar situation.
I set up a couple of “exclude” rules in two of my Twitter accounts so that spam wouldn’t enter my feed. You do this in the TweetDeck application. In addition to a hashtag (for example “#poetry”) you can add a rule saying that a particular term (for example “words that rhyme”) is excluded from a search. In this way, on two days including 12 August, I rid myself of the pain of seeing tweets that had been begging for attention but delivering nothing useful. People for some reason think that by increasing the frequency of their posts they can increase their relevance, but along with animated GIFs, as it’s totally disrespectful this type of post makes me feel ill. When using this application what you want are posts that are good for you (for otherwise you wouldn’t use a hashtag) and that come from a wide range of accounts. You don’t want some idiot trying to appropriate your time by uselessly putting repetitious information into your field of view.
Near the end of August I almost sold one of the paintings I’d bought back in March from a guy in social housing in Waterloo. This man was only notable in my mind because his apartment had a bad smell even though the building was relatively new. His unit was in a building just off Henderson Road, across the road from a police station in a street where there was no parking so I was forced to park around the corner in Wyndham Street (near Redfern Station).
I’d sold one of his pictures for $10 (a café scene) and one for $15 (a stylised horse) and the group of six cost me $50 in total, so I still had some way to go to recouping my investment. A reproduction of ‘The Scream’ by Edward Munch drew the interest of a woman living near Wollongong named Julie and she even got me to find out the postage cost, necessitating a visit to Botany Post Office. I even went so far, on her instigation, as to try using a website called Sendle that allows you to post things door to door, but the inconvenience (you have to be at home all day when they pick up because they won’t call in advance) and the cost (not significantly less than the post office, and sometimes more) made it less attractive than Australia Post. Then a woman named Jasmine who’d been messaging me about the item in June got back in touch, asking if I could bring it to Wolli Creek train station – which is just across the other side of the airport from me – but, as before, she couldn’t settle on a time to carry out her plan. I’d just agreed to a price of $10 for the picture, but then told her that if she didn’t tell me by the end of the day (the 25th) what time she wanted to meet, the price would go back to $15. In the meantime I’d put up the price on Facebook Marketplace to $25 because buyers, I find, frequently haggle so it’s best to apply a price that will probably be bargained down and, in addition, you’re going to have to jump through some hoops in order to finalise the sale because they’ll make a time to meet then, at the last moment, will make it necessary to reschedule due to some important event happening in their lives that outweighs your convenience.
On the morning of 26 August I picked up some witch’s hats while out walking with Ming, who’d stayed the night. Omer had also stayed over. The equipment was sitting on a nature strip on the other side of Booralee Park, on a quiet thoroughfare. Council cleanup was happening and the pavements and nature strips were crowded with people’s unwanted household and garden goods.
The next day using the Myer website I purchased a new rice cooker as the old one’d gotten broken. What had happened to the old one is that the cooking bowl had been bent out of shape at the rim, making it unable to find the element in the base, and this had cause it to fail. I think that someone had dropped it on the floor, damaging it. I got a new Breville rice cooker to replace the old Breville rice cooker. In the interim I’d been using an even older rice cooker – a Kambrook model I’d bought 15 years beforehand – but this item had the unfortunate characteristic that grains of rice stick to the bottom of the bowl as the protective non-stick coating has been eroded due to cleaning with a scourer so that, now, in order to clean it, it’s necessary to soak the remnant rice with water, and then drain away the excess water before scooping the residue into the bin. I perform this ritual so rice doesn’t go into the drain.
On the same day I changed the settings on my state government petrol price tracking app (FuelCheck) to refer me to retailers selling E10 fuel, in consideration of advice gotten from Toyota at my annual service at the beginning of the month. The servo up the road in Mascot sells E10, so I promised myself to go there in future in preference to the servo on Gardeners Road that I’d regularly been using to buy 91 octane fuel.
On 29 August I had a problem with Instagram on the iPhone. It coincided with a period – only brief, a few minutes at most – where my internet connection faded to two bars. What happened was that I wanted to edit a post, but when I opened up the Instagram editing screen a message appeared telling me that there was no internet connection. On my PC TweetDeck was still delivering posts, however, and I could access the profile page on Instagram on the PC. So I restarted the iPhone and saw that this didn’t fix the problem. I’d already terminated a number of iPhone Instagram sessions by double-pressing the home button and swiping away the app, but nothing seemed to work to fix it. Eventually the problem resolved itself.
Jasmine got back to me on the last day of the month saying she’d be able to meet me at Wolli Creek station to pick up the framed Munch print the next day – the first day of spring – and I organised it for midday. I didn’t renegotiate the price, deciding to take whatever ($10 or $15) she gave me. In the evening, while I was reviewing the conversation I’d had, I looked at other requests about artworks I’d listed, noting a couple from one individual who’d evidently backed off due to the lockdown. One of his messages came on 25 July and another (about a different artwork) on 17 July.
I’d bought the works in separate deals and hadn’t wanted to keep either but neither of these conversations resulted in a sale though both required, on my part, time and effort. Inconvenience a fact when using Facebook Marketplace but, conversely, on the last day of the month I sold a tape dispenser to a guy who arrived in his late-model SUV on-time and without delay, in fact he messaged me 12 minutes before he rocked up: as soon as a price was confirmed he set out in his car.
----------------------- Sept ----------------------
On 30 August I did washing the wrong way – putting two thick flannel sheets in the machine at the same time and making it unable to run properly – so the device, as part of it rotated, started to make a sound like something was scraping on a hard object, and I responded to this tiny crisis – a desperate moment ensued when I walked into the laundry to face the music – by taking one heavy wet sheet out and draping it in the sink, then doing them each separately. Subsequently I wasn’t sure if the cotton wash cycle worked, and whether I’d buggered the thing up, so on 1 September when I put on a load of clothes I checked the time (4.55am) as I hit the “Start” button and went upstairs to my computer to monitor the social graph and do a blogpost. At 6.15am I went down to the laundry to see the wash cycle complete, which happened at 6.28am, so when the door silently unlocked at 6.30am, feeling relief I removed the washing then hung it up on the line out the back.
I met up with Jasmine at Wolli Creek but it was a struggle to make an appointment. Originally I’d suggested 10am but she said this was too early, so I changed to midday. At just after 11am she asked me what time we’d decided on and I replied but she then said she wouldn’t be able to make it by then. She suggested 12.30pm and then 1pm, and I asked for the earlier time as I was already in the area having come on time and having, when she’d mentioned her being late, gone to a friend’s house to wait. A bit later she said she’d be at the spot agreed upon at 12.35pm but then changed the time to 12.40pm and in fact she didn’t turn up until 12.45pm, coming up the stairs and looking right through me while using her phone to message me to tell me she had arrived. I’d earlier told her I was wearing a blue heavy jacket and had a beard so I don’t know what she was looking for but I had to call out her name three times to draw her attention and make her turn around to face me. She’d wanted to pay $10 but had asked me if I had change and I only had a $5 bill, so in the end she took the picture for $15, which was the price I’d had on the item at the start.
Adding this most recent sale I’d recouped $40 of the $50 I’d expended for the batch of artworks bought in Redfern.
At the end of the month or at the beginning of September I started using a new social media site called Nextdoor which, established about four years prior, isn’t yet very well patronised but which focuses on the geographical location where you live. You can see posts from people who live in suburbs near you, so for example I saw a post from a guy in Mascot whose daughter had left her scooter outside their house so that it was stolen, or a woman in Pagewood who posted a photo of her dog Teddi. There are groups, and I joined the art appreciation group (to which I posted a photo of one of my hangs) and the books group (to which I posted a link to an article about writers writing). People can put up things to sell, as well, and I asked about a chest of drawers in Annandale that was listed for free, telling the owner that I’d pick it up if it fit in my car. She got back to me to say it’d already been promised to someone else, but that she’d let me know if they didn’t turn up.
The range of subjects is just as varied as with other social media sites but the bias is strongly local. People ask about how to buy cocktails nearby and what the fire that they saw in the sky was due to, they might complain about someone stealing a pot plant off their porch and request the name of a good cleaner. Because they put their real names (though sometimes the last name is acronymised) they do things with consideration for the feelings of the person they’re talking to and in an atmosphere of politeness and repose. There’s less of the aggressive posturing and flame wars you routinely find on Twitter though, predictably, noise or dogs sometimes get people upset.
On 2 September I picked up the new rice cooker from my post office box in Broadway Shopping Centre, and the next day used it to make some rice. I didn’t measure anything – the instruction book says to add a cup of water for every cup of rice – and just added water to a level I thought would do for the number of grains I’d poured into the metal cooking bowl. On the “Cook” setting the machine was very slow working but the result was satisfactory though a bit dry for my taste (I don’t eat rice but serve it when friends want it). A week later I worked out that for small amounts of rice you should use the “Fast cook” setting, so resolved to do so next time I used the device.
I did something new on my Kindle on 10 September when David O’Nan, who runs the Fevers of the Mind poetry blog, sent me a new book to review. I’d done reviews for him in July and this month he sent me a PDF but then also sent me a MOBI file (an ebook format). I’d never received a file in this way – via email – to use on my Kindle, as usually when I read an ebook I’d buy it from the Amazon store online, but in this case it was just as easy to get access to the poetry because, after plugging the Kindle in, I just copied the relevant folder from my PC to the connected device using Navigator.
The next day on Nextdoor I saw a conversation between Lucy Lyon of Kingsford and Zey Magz of Randwick about dogs, the discussion closed by this time so there was no way for me to become involved in it. The dogs in question had invaded Lucy’s front yard and were evidently off-leash. She’d been asking what kind of measure she could take to remedy the situation and Zey had said she should talk to the dog’s owners. She said she’d done just that but they had laughed it off. Now she was desperate but Zey thought the situation shouldn’t be escalated to a higher authority, such as the local council.
I finally removed the packing tape from my fridge on 16 September, taking out each shelf with my hands and stripping off the sticky blue-and-white stuff, then putting everything back in place. I tucked the waste into the bin under the sink. The tape had been in place since January – indeed, since the fridge had been installed by Joe. He generous as well in supplying a new microwave oven and a convection oven to match the Bosch stove. I thanked Joe for these devices on 6 September and he replied, “God sent you here amen,” and “You’re a good person.”
On 20 September I set up a new group in Nextdoor called ‘Streaming TV and movies’ and added a photo from my camera roll showing Liam and Thomas talking on the phone in the prison where Liam had been incarcerated following Vinnie’s death. I resolved to change the image at some point in time, but for the moment thought it suitable considering the lockdowns around the city – though some restrictions where I live had been lifted the night before.
The next day I got a request from a person named Marie to buy Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Silent House’, which I’d put up for sale on Facebook Marketplace. I’d never sold a book this way and was delighted. We made a time to do the transaction the next day, on the morning of which I listed other books in my collection for sale and washed the car. Some of these books I’d read and didn’t like and others I’d not read and had no inclination to read, including two crime stories. Also listed ‘The Da Vinci Code’, a book I’d tried to read but which had defeated me with its clumsy lack of form.
While I was washing the car a council worker came over in his ride-on mower and asked if I wanted the nature strip tidied up. I put the car on the other side of the road so he could access the area with his machine.
