Well, it’s finally happened. The other shoe has dropped. The balloon has gone up. Call it what you will, things are different today than they were yesterday.

When I woke up yesterday morning, I was a reluctant Episcopalian. As of approximately 9 PM yesterday evening I became, along with virtually everyone else in my congregation, a member of the Anglican Church of Uganda.

Uganda?

Uganda.

Naturally, John the Tester and I spent most of the work week working, so
there’s not much to tell. Still, there were a few highlights, including
several more half-pints of Toohey’s Old.

On Monday another JPLer showed up; he’d gone through hell trying to get
here. His flight got four hours out from LAX, had a problem, and flew
back to LAX. After five hours in the terminal, the passengers were
loaded on to another plane and flown to Sydney. He missed the last
flight to Canberra last night by fifteen minutes, so they put him up in a
hotel in Sydney. He woke bright and early, not surprisingly, and caught
the earliest flight to Canberra, and then got lost on the way to
the complex at Tidbinbilla.

Tuesday we had dinner at the Santa Lucia Trattoria in Kingston. I’d been
there with some folks from the complex on my previous trip, and had had a
chicken and veal risotto that was out of this world. I’d been wanting to
have some more, and was not disappointed. John and Bob, the other JPLer,
had a seafood risotto which featured, among other things, Baby Octopus.
Lots of restaurants that we looked at had dishes which included Baby
Octopus; I asked an Australian friend whether this was some kind of fad,
and was assured that the friend had grown up with it.

There was a neat bookstore near the restaurant, where I picked up a few
oddments you’ll be seeing reviews of in the next few days.

Not much happened on Wednesday and Thursday, but on Friday I learned a
valuable life lesson: Australian hot dogs are made with an unnatural red
dye, and are to be avoided. That was at lunch at the Moonrock Cafe, a
little snackbar and giftshop attached to the museum at the complex.

John and I left after lunch, because we were going to be coming in again
for Saturday morning to talk to some operators who weren’t going to be in
on any of the weekdays we’d be there. After some discussion, we decided
to spend the afternoon at the Canberra Zoo. It’s a nice zoo. We got
some excellent pictures of the koalas, and also of the little
fairy penguins, one of whom, we were assured, is the original of Tux the
Linux penguin. It’s unique among zoos, in my experience, in that you
could actually see all of the animals fairly well. Most of the new
exhibits at the Los Angeles Zoo seem to be designed to let the animals
hide from you.

Then, that evening we went shopping for gifts for friends and family
(Jane scored a blue denim pullover covered with aboriginal art), and
ended the day with a glass of Toohey’s Old Black down in Manuka.

Sometime during the week, I don’t remember exactly when, John was
telling me about the places he’s been. He’s just out of college, but
compared to me he’s a world traveller; and he has a way of tossing off
the most exotic comments with a straight face. The best example, and my
favorite, was

I went to this hookah lounge in the Egyptian section of Bangkok…

He didn’t get any farther than that, because I stopped him. I couldn’t
let a remark like that pass without comment. And since then, I’ve been
completely unable to think of anything else as casually exotic that doesn’t
involve either sex or illicit drugs. I mean, who knew that there were
hookah lounges in Bangkok? Who knew there were Egyptians in Bangkok?
For that matter, who knew there were hookah lounges in Egypt? Not me.

On day 2, a Sunday, I woke up about 7 AM. Actually, I woke up about 3
AM, which would have been 8 AM in Los Angeles, but after a little tossing
and turning I managed to get back to sleep again. When I finally got up
I walked out to the living room of my suite, and beheld two hot air
balloons hanging in the air outside my window. I grabbed my camera and
took a picture.

Sleeping until 7 AM counts as a major victory; my first morning in
Canberra in 1999, I woke up around 4:30 AM or so and simply could not get
back to sleep. That set a bad tone for the rest of the trip.

I took a quick shower, and then drove down Canberra Avenue four or five
blocks to St. Paul’s Manuka, a vaguely gothic brick church of the Anglican
variety. It’s not
nearly as pretty as All Saints Ainslie, the church I went to in 1999, but
it’s the local church so that’s where I went. Just my luck–they were just
beginning their planned giving compaign. I didn’t get warm vibes about
the place–I don’t think I’d pick it as my regular church, given a
choice–but the service and especially the Eucharist was joyous and
comforting. God is good, and I was glad to praise him.

Then I returned to the hotel and called John the Tester as we had agreed
the night before; no answer. I called him at intervals, getting no
answer, until he finally called me about 10:30 AM; apparently he’d been
out drinking until about 5 AM with folks he’d met in a bar up in City
Center, and my last phone call woke him up. (Whoops!)

Well, anyway, we went out to the Australian National Museum, which I’d
not seen before as it had opened just a couple of years before. It’s
got some interesting stuff, but I have to question the judgement of both
the architect and the folks who approved his design.

Canberra is divided into north and south halves by Lake Burley-Griffin;
the halves are joined by the Commonwealth Avenue bridge. The museum sits
on a peninsula just west of the north end of the bridge; the site is
incredibly scenic. You’d think the architect would have taken advantage
of this, but instead he built a museum that looks inward onto a
courtyard; and the courtyard is filled with a strange mixture of
rubberized concrete, fencing, and pond called “the Spirit of Australia
Garden”. Personally, if I were Australian I’d be insulted.

Next we toddled of to Woden Plaze, one of the local malls, where
we had lunch; I was also able to buy some books by
Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey,
Iain Banks, and Terry Pratchett.

On the way back to the hotel we saw another car coming at us head on.
It honked at us madly, and we realized that indeed, we were in the
right-hand lane. John quickly swerved into the left lane, and we escaped
injury, though John was a bit shaken. But then we remembered that we were
on Canberra Avenue, which, like many thoroughfares in Canberra, is a
divided road. There are two lanes each way, with a thirty-foot-wide
island in between. In other words, the other driver was the one driving
the wrong direction.

At one point I heard an ad on the radio about some store called The Lettuce
Connection. They have lots of different kinds of Lettuce in stock, or
you can have your Lettuce custom designed. It wasn’t until the ad was
almost over that I realized that the store’s name was really The Lattice
Connection.

Around 6 PM we walked down to Manuka and had dinner at a place called El
Rancho. My dinner was nothing special; but following John’s lead
I elected to try a half-pint of Toohey’s Old Black, and that was really
nice. It tasted good and went down smoothly. I don’t drink beer very
often, and a half-pint is usually more than enough, but I was almost
tempted to have another.

My trip to Canberra DSCC officially started at 6:20 PM on March 13 when
the Super Shuttle arrived to take me to LAX. I kissed Jane and the kids,
and then waved through the shuttle window after I
got inside. The driver got extra points–it was dark outside, and he
turned on the inside lights so that the kids could see me.

I really had no desire to be leaving my family, let alone with a war
in the offing. My imagination was running riot, telling me that either my plane
was going to crash, or that a terrorist attack was going to wipe out Los
Angeles while I was gone, and that either way I’d never see them again.
That’s ridiculous, of course; but people do die in plane crashes, and it
reminded me to spend some time talking with God on the way to the airport.

I have to give the shuttle driver credit. I wasn’t sure how he could
possibly do it, but he got me to my terminal in fifty minutes, dropping
me off outside the United International Terminal at 7:10 PM, exactly
three hours before my flight was due to leave. I had to show my ticket
at the terminal door, and then wait in a line specifically for my flight.
Checking my bag went quickly; then I had to wait for a couple of minutes
while they screened my suitcase. A fat old security guard got a call on
his walky-talky, and told me I could go ahead.

The next barrier was the security screening for me and my carry-on stuff.
It was no big deal, as I’d made sure my pocket knife was in my suitcase
and that I was wearing a minimum of metal–my wedding ring, and the
rivets on my blue jeans. I had to take my laptop out of its case and let it go
through the X-Ray machine by itself, but that was the only annoyance.
The security was a lot more stringent when I flew to Vancouver, B.C.,
last September.

On my way through the terminal I stopped at a McDonalds and got some
fries and a Diet Coke. Gastric distress is my great fear on a long plane
flight, and taters are a rare good ballast for an empty
stomach, as the Gaffer said. Fries are one of my favorite things for
preventing heartburn. The Diet Coke was simply a source of caffeine to
help me stay awake on the plane until it was worth trying to sleep.

My flight was scheduled to leave Los Angeles at 10:10 PM, Thursday, and
arrive in Sydney around 7:30 AM on Saturday. With the time difference
(19 hours), that amounted to a little over fourteen hours in the air.
Boarding was at 9:25, making fifteen hours on the plane in all. I had a
plan for surviving those fifteen hours:

First, hope that (given the unstable political situation) the plane would
be nearly empty, so that I’d have an empty seat next to me–and maybe and
entire empty row.

Next, stay up until about 2 or 3 AM, California time. I had some books and
my Nomad Zen Jukebox to help with this; with the Jukebox I had some
special earbud headphones that incorporate earplugs, making it easier to
hear the music and harder to hear the plane. Plus, they’d be giving us
dinner, and maybe there would be a movie worth watching.

Next, take a couple of Excedrin PM tablets (the normal adult dose)
resulting in a 76 mg dose of Diphenhydramine–the anti-histamine
otherwise known as Benedryl; and put in the regular ear plugs I’d bought.
If I was lucky, this would knock me out for six-to-eight hours, leaving
me just enought time to have breakfast on the plane before we landed in
Sydney.

Jane had her own plans; she’d heard rumors that various airlines were
cutting service in lieu of going into bankruptcy, and so she packed me a
nice lunch: sandwich, cheese stick, brownie (from the best batch
she’s ever made), carrots, celery.

But nothing goes according to plan. We started boarding on time, but
what with delays at the gate and delays on the tarmac it was 10:30 PM
before we left the ground. By that time I’d already been on the plane
for a full hour. (I was sitting next to a couple of guys from Holland
who work for a company that writes and sells software that runs on cargo
ships. Or something like that. We chatted a little bit as we waited for
the plane to take off. They’d already flown from Cuba to the Netherlands
to New York to Los Angeles.) Then, the Captain told us there was a storm on
the direct path from Los Angeles to Sydney, so he was going to fly toward
Hawaii then hang a left, thus lengthening the flight.

The food on the plane was actually reasonably good. On the other hand,
the cabin interior was showing signs of poor maintenance. The arm rests
all looked worn, and the woman just ahead of me had no reading-light.
Also, the TV projector in our cabin was busted, so there was no movie to
watch. (It was “Jerry Maguire” anyway, a movie I have
no desire to see.) So I spent several long hours reading. And this is
where I made my first mistake.

My book leading up to the trip was The Arms of Krupp, by
William Manchester. It’s a good book, but it’s a thick trace
paperback, and that’s clumsy on a plane. Still, that’s the main book I
had in my backpack when I arrived at the airport. I wandered around the
terminal gift shop, looking at this and that, and found a paperback of
Stephen King short stories called Everything’s Eventual. See
my review for why this was a mistake.

Finally, I decided at about 1:30 AM to turn out my reading lamp and try to
sleep. That was a little early, but mine was the only active reading
lamp in my cabin. (Some folks had been sleeping since we took off.) I
went to the lavatory and took a couple of Excedrin PM; I put in
the earplugs; I waited for oblivion. The earplugs were a great idea, by
the way. You can still hear the dull roar of the jets quite clearly,
but they are much quieter, as are all of the other things going on.
Details are hazy, but I believe I managed to doze until maybe 4:30 AM.
(Most of that was due to the ear plugs and fatigue, I think; there was no
oblivion. I’ve been taking anti-histamines for my allergies for too many
years.) Then I sat up and went back to reading.

A couple some rows ahead of me had a little girl about Anne’s age with
them; every so often she came running down the aisle on the way to or
from the lavatory. She was a cutie. She wasn’t a nuisance–I only heard
her cry once, and the ear plugs got most of that–but watching her got me
a little misty.

At around 6 AM (PDT) they served a snack, which I skipped; but I did have
a Diet Pepsi. I wasn’t hungry, and in fact
I was wondering what I was going to do with the lunch Jane had made for
me. My digestion was happy, a condition not to be trifled with; but I
couldn’t take the lunch into Australia. I didn’t want to throw it away,
as it was much more than a lunch; it was really a statement of Jane’s
love. She knew I didn’t want to go, and that I needed to, and she
couldn’t do anything about that. But she could pack me a lunch of
comfort food. In the end I got genuinely hungry at around 10 AM (PDT)
and ate it, and it was good, especially the brownie.

At some point in there I finished the King anthology, and this is where I
made my second mistake. Instead of pulling out the
Laurie
R. King mystery I’d been saving, I pulled out the
first book in a series by Elizabeth Haydon.
My brother recommended it to
me just a couple of days before I left, and I went out and bought it at
the same time as my new suitcase. Now, I don’t want to imply that it’s a
bad book. I enjoyed it, in fact. But see the
review for why it was also a mistake.

Around 11:30 AM (PDT) they served breakfast, which I wasn’t
expecting. The snack at 6 AM was pretty substantial, even though I
didn’t eat it, and my itinerary only called for two meals. I guess
supplying food is a kind of crowd control on long international flights.
I had apple pancakes, which were overcooked, and two sausages, which were
OK, and a bit of croissant, and some milk.

My jukebox’s battery ran out of juice about then, so there was no more
music after that.

We finally landed in Sydney around 1:15 PM (PDT), or 8:16 AM
Sydney/Canberra time, almost 16 hours after I boarded the plane and about
45 minutes after our scheduled arrival. Then came passport control, the
baggage carousel, and Australian customs, which took me until 9 AM. My
connecting flight to Canberra was scheduled to leave at 9:15 AM.
Sydney’s domestic terminal is quite a ways from international terminal,
and although there’s a shuttle bus dedicated to that purpose it still
took until 9:15 AM to get there. I finally took the 10:15 flight,
landing in Canberra just before 11:15 AM. It didn’t take long to get my
rental car, and I arrived at my hotel (the Bentley Suites in the Manuka
neighborhood of Canberra) before noon despite making a couple of wrong
turns and doing some exploring.

Yes, this is still Day 1 of my trip.

I ran into John the Tester in the hotel’s reception area; we agreed to
get something to eat after we’d taken time to shower.

I got a nice one bedroom suite on the fourth floor; the hot water
pressure was lacking. And when I tried to adjust the shower head’s spray
pressure it broke off in my hand. That wasn’t a bad thing, actually, as
it worked better that way.

JPL allows you to make one call home at company expense, so that your
loved ones know that you’re safe, so after I showered I made it. I
talked to Jane, and told her how to call me; I talked to Dave, who had
just (just that minute!) lost his first tooth, one of the lower ones in
front. (Damn it!) He was worried because he’d dropped
it or something and couldn’t find it. Jane told him that she’d put a
note under the pillow for the tooth fairy, and I assured him that the
tooth fairy wouldn’t mind; it was the sort of thing that happened all the
time.

Then John and I went and got lunch, and bought some groceries. By this
time it was about 6 PM Canberra
time, and I didn’t dare go to sleep until at least 9 or 10 PM. Just for
the record, 10 PM is 3AM, California time; by then I’d had only
three or four bad hours of sleep in the past forty hours.

For dinner we walked down into Manuka and had a nice little meal
at an Italian place puzzingly called Le Rendezvous. I had an
“American Style” pizza, which is a thin crust pizza with cheese, tomato
sauce and mild (!) salami (!) (according to the menu). Actually, the
salami didn’t taste much liked salami; it had a smoky flavor. It wasn’t
bad, though I don’t think you could find anything quite like it back in
the States. (Note: I went back to the same place a couple of nights
before we came home, and ordered the same pizza, and let me tell you–
either they made it differently, or I was really sleepy the first night,
because it was awful.)

It was getting dark as we walked back, and the crickets chirruped
noisily as we passed the Australian Capitol Territory Cricket Oval.
That observation was much more amusing to me at the time than it is now.

And so to bed.

I kept a detailed journal while I was in
Australia, and I’ll be posting edited bits from it over the next couple
of weeks. I thought I’d start by explaining why I was going to Australia
in the first place, what with war in the offing and all (in the event,
the war started a week after I arrived).

I didn’t really want to go. But I work at
JPL, where I work on the ground
system used to communicate with our planetary spacecraft. JPL has a
network of ground stations around the globe, one of which is in
Australia. We just delivered a major update to the part of the system
for which I’m responsible, and the last time I went overseas was just
under four years ago. So, basically, my boss told me it was high time I
went to Australia and spent some time with my customers. She was right,
of course, even though it meant leaving Jane and our three kids at home
alone for two weeks. Oh, I could have gone for a single week–but nobody
should have to go through the plane flight, the jet lag, and the
subsequent reorientation twice in seven days.

So I was looking forward to two weeks at the Canberra Deep Space
Communications Complex, which is located about half-an-hour from
Canberra’s city center at a place called Tidbinbilla. “Tidbinbilla” is
apparently an English corruption of an aboriginal word which means
“The place where boys go to become men.” It’s also fun to say:
Tid-Bin-Billa.

Four years ago I went on my own; this time I had a travelling companion.
His name is John; he’s a young feller fresh out of college who was hired
to help our testers with their documentation. My boss sent him along to
learn more about how our system is used in practice.

On Thursday, March 13th, we went to the airport and got on the plane, and
off we went. But more of that in my next post.

Well, I’m back from yet another trip to Goldstone Deep Space
Communications Complex, the pride of the Mojave Desert. This time I
stayed at the Landmark Inn in beautiful downtown Ft. Irwin. That’s
Ft. Irwin the military base. It was a nice place to spend the night (the
shower took no liberties), but
I felt a little odd surrounded by hundreds of fit, athletic young folks
in camouflage, especially as I am by no means fit, athletic, or (by
comparison) young. Anyway, posts will resume as usual now that I’m back.

Fifteen years ago, as our wedding day drew nearer, people would
ask us, “Will, Jane, where are you going on your honeymoon?” And we’d
tell them, gleefully, “Barstow”. And they’d say, “Barstow!?” And we’d
reply, smiling smugly, “Barstow”. And they’d walk away thinking we just
didn’t want to tell them where we were going.

They were right, of course. But the joke was, we actually did go to
Barstow. That is to say, we went to Sedona, Arizona, and to get there we
took the train from Pasadena, and that train stopped for half-an-hour in
the railroad yard in Barstow. To be honest, I never expected to spend
more time there than that.

For those who have never heard of Barstow, it’s somewhat less than
halfway between Los Angeles and Los Vegas. It started life as a railroad
town (it boasts one of the original Harvey Houses) and so far as I know
still mostly is a railroad town. But it’s also the nearest town of any
size to Fort Irwin, home to the Goldstone Deep Space Communications
Complex, one of JPL’s three spacecraft ground stations.

And since my project at JPL produces hardware and software for GDSCC,
sometimes I need to go there. And unless I’m prepared to drive there and
back in one day, that means I end up spending the night…in Barstow.

The nearest bookstore of any size is about thirty miles away, in Victorville.

Tonight I am, you guessed, spending the night in Barstow. Tomorrow I get
to get up, bright and early, and drive yet another hour into the desert
for a fun-filled day of Acceptance Testing, after which I will turn
around and drive home.

Sanity might require me to make a brief stop in Victorville. We’ll see.