However, North Sydney is still stuck with bloody Joe Hockey. Nooooooooooo..! Dammit, maybe I should have defaced that poster of him opposite my apartment block. Then again, he knows where I live so perhaps I would have been suspect #1. I don't suppose Mike Bailey would have been any better anyhow. Ah bugger it. I guess you can't have everything.
I voted absentee in my parents' electorate (the very safe Liberal seat of Mitchell - the new guy there is a young 'un, Alex Hawke) and it gave me such pleasure to walk past all the pamphleteers just to dismiss them with a "I'm sorry, I'm not from this electorate". I recommend it. Especially to the Christian Democratic Party. Seriously people, there's no place for religion in politics. Haven't you ever heard of Estates? I belong to the Fourth.
I then spent the best part of three hours in the thick of transport-related 'disasters' (usual kind...). First was the drive to the petrol station to fill up my dad's car and pump up his tyres and clean up the exterior to hide the fact that his alway-garaged pride and joy has spent about ten days of the last month outside, under a tree, in the rain. I'd saved up a Shell petrol voucher only to find that there was no longer a Shell where I thought there was. Then the squeegee cleaned the back windscreen but squirted dirty water all over the boot of the car, under the freakin' spoiler so I had to use paper towels to mop it all up. Top that off with my struggle with one of the old-fashioned air pressure hoses (I can never be sure whether I'm pumping it right - let's just hope for the best)...
So that my parents could have both vehicles at their disposal when they returned, I decided to catch public transport home. Laden with groceries. It is at this point that I questioned my decision to buy 3kg of grapefruit. Problem was that my parents do not have a bus timetable at their disposal and there was no internet at the house. So I had to call the transport info line which required me to know the bus stop number before I could find out the timetable. After much button-pushing, I managed to talk to a human who found my bus stop number for me and told me that the next bus was at 3:55pm and the next after that 4:55pm.
It was already 3:40pm and it takes 10 mins to walk to the bus stop uninhibited, never mind that I knew I was going to be burdened with four bags full of stuff. So I had to quickly lock up, pack everything together and heave everything up the hill to the bus stop. I only made it because I saw the bus as it entered the roundabout before the bus stop so ran in front of it to catch the driver's attention. Otherwise it was an hour wait...
So I made it to Beecroft Station. The citybound trains usually come at 21 and 51 past the hour on weekends so it was unusual to see the northbound train pull up first at 4:33pm. After it had pulled away, an automated announcement "reminded" passengers that there was trackwork on the line from North Strathfield to Strathfield. Now this particular trackwork is the bane of my existence because it is only one stop's worth of trackwork but the usual three minute ride turns into a 30 minute nightmare when passengers alight at North Strathfield and cram onto an undersupply of buses, negotiate Parramatta Road and disembark at Strathfield Station. It's even harder when you have four bags of groceries. However, I felt even worse for the group of consumers who'd just bought a suite of furniture from Rhodes Ikea.
I waddled onto the platform at Strathfield. I should also note at this point that the milk bar at Beecroft had run out of newspapers and the kiosk at Strathfield didn't appear to sell papers, so I was stuck with loads of dead time and nothing to fill it with. Eventually my train arrived and I reached Waverton just after 6pm. Just love it when a 30-min drive is a 2.5-hour public transport disaster. I'm losing my grip on public transport advocacy, climate change or no climate change.
I was particularly annoyed that the announcement about trackwork did not play until after the northbound train had left the platform at Beecroft because it would have been my pleasure to change trains at Hornsby and travel down the North Shore line instead of having to deal with the North Strathfield crap. Hmph.
Anyway, today there was more bad news in the north: the result of the NSW vs TAS one-day cricket match at North Sydney Oval. Although NSW totally annihilated Tasmania in their recent test, NSW went down by 9 wickets this evening. A poor effort. To be fair, we batted pretty well even though we kept losing wickets. And fielded magnificently... just no verve in the bowling, Bracken apart. Anyway, here's a pic of Australian captain Ricky Ponting as his typical swashbuckling self:
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