How's my shoulder? Probably a rotator cuff injury, the GP thinks. It's still a little niggly. Looking forward to resuming yoga and swimming soonest.

We made our annual trip to the Moonlight Cinema on the 23rd. I tried to tally up all the things I've seen there, and it's a lot now: Lantana, Gosford Park, Secretary, Casablanca, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and now Atonement. Every year I look to see if one of the other outdoor cinemas would suit better — several of them are closer — but they never pick their weekend movies right. Andrew and Stephanie decided it was very uncomfortable and that we're all grownups now, and should buy Gold Grass tickets henceforth (central picnic spot, they provide beanbads and a glass of wine). My cheap little soul cried.

That Sunday we had an exciting adventure, where by exciting I mean expensive. Andrew's mother has broken her arm and we wanted to visit Singleton. We booked a rental car, since then we could go over to Kate's ordination in Newcastle on the Monday evening. Rental car booked for nine in the morning. We show up, in fact, at eight past ten, to find that the rental car place is open from eight to ten only on Sundays. Queue a long walk back home and a lot of phone calls to try and find an available car. Thrifty in Artarmon had a Subaru Forrester, which sounded like an abomination in terms of fuel prices. At the last second, Hertz finds a Toyota Corolla, also in Artarmon. By then it's so late that I can't get the train down and have to get a taxi all the way. The taxi driver turned out to be a once-a-week driver who works next door to the Hertz the other six days, so there was no problem with him finding it.

Hertz have two options for fuel, it turns out. One is to fill it up yourself, the other is to pay in advance for a full tank of fuel (exactly) and return it as empty as you can. I'm not used to fuel efficient cars so the second sounded like a safe bet. No, not really. The Artarmon-Singleton-Newcastle-Artarmon triangle, for future reference, is about two thirds of a tank for a modern Corolla (30 litres if I have the arithmetic right). They were also the worst rip-off I've seen for insurance. The deal with rental cars is a double-whammy. First they quote prices exclusive of compulsory taxes (hopefully this won't be legal soon). Then, once they have added about one third to the price for the taxes, they then point out that the insurance you have is a terrible terrible risk: $3000 or so excess, regardless of fault. That can be rectified for about half the cost of the rental again.

I think differently about insurance from a lot of people. I've heard an argument for not getting ambulance cover that goes if you need an ambulance, you'll be so relieved to have lived that you won't mind paying a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for it. I can't really imagine that: I'd be more likely to be thinking damn, I'm off work, and now I have to come up with money for the ambulance bill! Likewise, the theory is that if I crash a rental car I'll be so relieved to be alive that I won't mind paying the excess. Maybe we're picturing a different kind of accident, because I visualise the one where I get rear-ended at 10km/hr in a carpark, where I definitely will not have relief at being alive subtracting from the joy of being out several thousand dollars.

However, having said that, no I didn't buy the excess reduction this time. I just couldn't imagine myself handing over another $70 without snarling in an unattractive fashion. And I didn't damage the car either, as it happens. For all I know that really is the absolute possible best deal they can do on decent insurance without cutting their own throats, although I sort of doubt it given that credit card companies can offer it more cheaply, but it is terribly arravating to be hit up for it in the process of five seconds while they finalise the order. At least this time they didn't show me photos of their latest write-off as justification.

For the record, I do have ambulance cover though.

Kate's ordination was a bit strange, because of the church services I've attended in my life, at least ninety percent of them have been the Catholic Mass. The Anglican service, at least the High Church version, is almost but not entirely like Mass except oddly with a little more Latin. It was also strange simply because it's been coming so long. Almost as long as the longest PhD enrolment I'm personally acquainted with. Kate was preparing for her theology studies when I met her by doing psychology and various appropriate ancient and modern languages. Then she vanished to theology college, then she was sick for a while, for a year or so she's worked in a lay role and now she's a deacon. (The Newcastle diocese also ordains women as priests, that's the next step.)

After the service we gave her an Ordinary Sunday (as opposed to Lent, Advent etc) stole and went to a small reception. In many ways it was rather like a wedding, but in many ways not. The clergy wear black to the party, for one thing, and it doesn't go for as long, partly because the congregations had been bussed in from other parts of the diocese. Andrew and I had a very late snack/dinner with Anna on Darby Street before driving back.

This last weekend was the last weekend Andrew had in the country before being away for three weeks, so naturally we had to cram it full. Saturday was Senior First Aid and Sunday was the first One Day International cricket Tri-Series final.

The big thing we learned at first aid was the perils of the aging volunteer workforce: a lack of First Aid trainers.

Andrew and I have to have CPR certification to proceed to our next step in diver training: Rescue Diver. Rescue Diver is a little like taking a surf livesaving course for leisure, it doesn't mean we will be going out and, for example, searching for missing people in the water like police divers (who are considerably better equipped and trained) do. It's a non-compulsory course in how to deal with diving emergencies, highly recommended for all regular recreational divers. It used to be part of all diver training, but as the courses became commercialised, the training was broken up into what is now about three or four courses: Open Water, advanced Open Water and rescue. Maybe the Deep specialty after that.

There's a one-day more-or-less generic First Aid course in the diving agency syllabus: Emergency First Response. We elected not to do that because it's more expensive than most two day Senior First Aid courses, and we'd have to travel to Manly to do it. Instead we did St John Senior First Aid by flexible learning, which makes it a one day course. (Instead of the other day, we got a CD in the mail with six hours of movies and audio presentations of first aid knowledge.) We got up at seven on Saturday to do the actual course; I'd only been up with a journal article until 1 or so. (They cry if you leave them alone too long.)

At the end of the course the trainer tried to recruit the class: more trainers needed! All the trainers are retirees who are retiring their hobbies too. It seemed dubious to me though. He himself has worked in first aid both as a professional responsibility (at a power station) and for years in the Scouts. His most aggressive first aid was stitching someone in the middle of a long hike. Not legal without medical training apparently, but if the person has to walk out, that's one way of getting them out. He's seen an eyeball that popped out. (Someone in the class didn't realise that they stay attached to the optic nerve and asked if it was appropriate to take it away and pop it into a container of milk, as with a tooth you can't reinsert!) It seems unlikely that a confident trainer, even at Senior First Aid level where a great deal of the training involves leaving well enough alone — although there's lots more fun to be had now that automatic defibrillators are everywhere — would easily grow from a student recently trained themselves.

The trainer was jovial, interesting and not unduly obsessed with gross things. The major problem was that he was one of those older men who cannot resist, when surrounded by young women (in this case, under 40 was meant) on commenting on it regularly. Since the class was largely preschool and primary teachers doing their compulsory refreshers, there was lots to comment on. He didn't have a creep vibe — for reference, I define a creep vibe as that given off by anyone I do not know intimately who is behaving either in a manner calculated to remind me that they have a lot of power in whatever situation that they are merely choosing not to use, or someone who is behaving in such a way as to signal that they're sexually aroused — so it was a little annoying and tedious, rather than, well, seriously annoying and tedious. But on the balance I vastly prefer to go through something like first aid training without once being told repeatedly that I'm a pretty young woman.

Worse, it was 'be embarrassed to be an Australian' day when seeing people of Asian descent. The trainer had the minor role, in kindly asking the class's sole medical student at the end of the day if she could read English well enough to take the test. The major episode was passing the ticket booth at West Ryde while a woman roundly abused both the man in front of her and the ticket seller about how she was a real Australian, not like f-ing them. Andrew and I didn't say anything but we should have. (Afterwards, I came up with funny, you don't look indigenous.) I hope the seller was very very slow about handing out her change. Trains on that line only run every half hour.

We went down to The Courthouse in Newtown for dinner with my sisters and my parents. I had hoped that I would have a chance to have coffee or something with my parents, but they'd driven up from Orange and went straight to their motel, after adventures finding the car in the backstreets of North Sydney. The next morning we met Julia at Central and Dad at the grounds for the cricket.

I'd never watched any cricket game from end to end (when I was very young I was on a Kanga Cricket team, so I guess I've played several end to end). I probably won't again for a while, but not really because it's boring just because it's, as everyone knows, so long. It is quite emotionally involving in fact, like going to a concert or similar, although possibly the comedown is also mixed up with getting up early the next morning to say goodbye to Andrew for three weeks. I believe that this is his longest work trip to date, and possibly the longest time we've been apart for several years, possibly since 1999. I'm not worried about getting through it, but it did rather sneak up admist all the activity. The cricket wasn't, in the end, the most exciting of all possible games, as Australia batted first and did not set a strikingly high target for the second innings. So India was able to be cautious and consistent, rather than needing to take risks.

Among the many questions to which there is no true socially acceptable answer (the canonical example still being how was the funeral?) one of them is How are things without Andrew?. 'Terrible' would mean that I was a bad dependent person. 'Great' would mean that I was a terrible wife.

This time I've fallen back on the true answer, which is more or less along the lines of 'eh'. On the surface it's kind of similar, except that I eat both less food and more peculiar food, considerably less meat, and instead of talking to him I email him all the time. (All the time, at the beginning of a trip, can easily equate to about fifteen short emails a day. It drops off to one or two after a week or so. He says he doesn't mind any of this, but that is a question to which there is an obvious answer the questioner is asking for.) At a different level it's a bit sad. If I was single there's no way I could live in outer suburbia, because when Andrew's away I move to wanting to socialise with other people about four nights a week.

When we (as in, you the reader and I the writer, not as in Andrew and I) last met I was actually just about to go out and see Juno. I quite like going to the cinema alone, mostly because it sounds far more adventurous than it actually is. I've also gone to restaurants alone in the past, which is also also not very adventurous, but can be rather dull, because the delays in serving are set up around the patrons having someone to talk to. Not so, in a cinema. I should have seen Juno without seeing the reviews though, I'd been convinced she was essentially a pregnant Daria. Not quite.

The next night, promisingly for my four night a week social life, was Anna's disco bowling birthday party. When I tell people this kind of thing, I often get told things like wow, I would never have thought there was disco bowling in Hornsby. You know what? There isn't. I don't do anything in Hornsby. I do everything somewhere else. And actually, I don't even really mind this. Given a sufficiently large sum of money I'd probably move right back to the lower North Shore, true, but I do not feel the wearisome burden of train travel so much.

The disco bowling was in Mascot, which, come to think of it, is probably much more soulless than being in Hornsby. I am always delighted, up to a point, with faux nostalgia. The Superbowl place is so very very kitsch fifties, in a way that the real fifties could never have been. (I feel the same way about recalling that Heartbeat's run is now sixteen years long, but the whole thing is meant to take place in the 1960s.) It was a teeny bit blaringly loud for me, and a little weird as an actual party, as many of Anna's friends view her parties more as a very important networking event, to the point where I was half-apologetically but also half-angrily told off by one of her guests for reminding him a few times that it was his turn to bowl. My right shoulder isn't really strong enough for bowling any more either: I was bowling 7lb balls, which is lightweight indeed. I bowled 138 from my right arm and 88 from my left, although they had gutter blockers up for us. I did get a clear strike twice from the right and once from the left though, so I feel that I have satisfied my bowling needs for this decade.

The following day was International Women's Day, and we had an Aussie LinuxChix hackfest. Unfortunately, this 'hackfest' for me involved learning about one very important tool: ddrescue, the hard drive recovery tool. My hard drive had actually been failing for a couple of days (I really should know by now that repeated fsck errors are usually an early warning sign) but by Saturday morning it was unignorable. I do have backups of major things (all mail, all music, all correspondence, all code) but it was nice to be able to get all my installed packages and desktop files and such back. That was Saturday and Sunday. Monday was getting enough data to get a replacement under warranty, Wednesday was installing onto said replacement and Friday was hanging around all day waiting for a courier to turn up to take the old one away. And there have been various interruptions involving using the development version of Ubuntu that have kept me busy.

This last fortnight or so has been our summer. Normally in Sydney we would expect weeks of relentless humidity in summer, and a few pitiless humid days reaching through 40℃ and out the other side. (Once a major radio stations had a party for the first 40 day at the airport.) Much above that is rare, although I've experienced about 45℃ in the Sydney area (and humid too, thank you so very much) and 43℃ in Melbourne. This year it sounds like Melbourne was hot if anything, but Sydney was placid and mild. The main observatory near the harbour, which is admittedly hardly the hottest place in the metropolitan area, hit a maximum of 32℃ for the whole summer. Therefore, I was totally unacclimatised for this last fortnight. It hasn't even been in the thirties but it's been humid and bright and summery and I have difficulty making it down the street and back. My parents were in town briefly yesterday and we sat in partial sun blinking and wondering if we were burning. Meanwhile, Andrew passed through Montreal for the approximate tail end of an extremely cold and long winter. His introduction to it was spending an hour shovelling and pushing a car out of snow at the airport. He says Chicago at present strikes him as very mild.

Today I saw The King of Kong with Julia, Steph, Joel and Ben, which is worth seeing, if you give it a pass for the first five minutes while they slow the edits down. It does a rather good job at sucking you in by playing it for laughs at first. People who like it would probably also like the book Word Freaks, about the equivalent personalities in tournament Scrabble (except that high level Scrabble is not limited to two world class competitors).