Free day at the Barracks Museum

On Saturday, Sydney was promoting "Garage Sale Trail" day, which was basically like a city-wide day to have yard sales. For some reason, the city used the Hyde Park Barracks Museum as a public space for some yard sale stalls, and in conjunction with that, there was free entry to the museum. Honestly, I couldn't make the connection between the two, but that didn't stop me from going for a free museum day!

I was a little late going because we went to the Kirribilli Markets first where Toby struck his classic market pose.

We had a bite of lunch there, and then I headed across the bridge to the museum.

I ended up being a little too late to get the see all the yard sale stalls in the area around the museum - most of them were packing up when I arrived. But that was ok!

I actually forgot to take a picture of the outside, mainly because I see this building all the time. It's a really pretty tan brick building and it has a lot of historical significance in Sydney. It was originally built to house male convicts that were transported to serve their sentence in Sydney.

I found My favorite kind of sign inside:

This is a snap of the original cornerstone. Amazing it has survived all these years (since the early 1800s)!

One room was full of replica hammocks to show how many people would live in the space. It was a lot!

It was a great day at the museum!

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Third classic blunder (Guest post by Toby)

We've all seen the movie The Princess Bride, so we all know two of the world's classic blunders: "Never get involved in a land war in Asia," and "never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line." But what not many people know is the third classic blunder that was cut from the script during shooting. This third classic blunder is, of course, "never cross a Burwinkle woman."

They cut it from the movie, I'm sure, because they were afraid they might be committing said blunder by implying Burwinkle women could be a bit touchy. Smart move on their part. I've seen first hand what can happen when you tell a Burwinkle woman she acts a certain way. (Not me, of course.) Once I even saw a poor fool try to play amateur psychoanalyst and tell a Burwinkle woman how she felt and why. (Of course this was someone else as well. Not me.) In both cases, I...I mean the idiot who committed this blunder, left the resulting calm and rational conversation feeling much wiser now that he'd been made aware of exactly when, how, and to what degree his brain and mouth had failed him. It was quite a thing to see.

For those of you who (like me) have never committed this blunder, or who've never gotten to witness someone else committing it, I have a rare treat. Many times this blunder occurs in person, often through a bungled customer service attempt, or maybe in the form of a completely understandable slip of the tongue brought on by low blood sugar and physical exhaustion during a particularly long "activity"(or so I've heard). My point being, there's not always a record of the event to share. Today, there is.

A financial investment company committed this classic blunder this week when they sent a certain Burwinkle woman an e-mail about a webcast they were putting on to educate women about handling money. I captured response. Enjoy.

Dear Vanguard, 

Let me try to express to you the depth of my disappointment and [REDACTED] moment I had this morning when I saw the subject line "Women and money: What you need to know" in an email from you. 

I understand that as a college educated, 29-year-old woman working in high tech, who also happens to be the higher wage earner in the household, that I might not be your target demographic for this webcast. However, I would urge you to take a moment to reconsider how you're targeting your female customers, as this subject line smacks of condescending sexism. Perhaps it's a poorly worded subject, but the impression it leaves me with is that Vanguard as a company feels its female customers need extra help in dealing with really hard things - like money and numbers. 

I'm sure that someone in Vanguard knows this, but here are a few things that are true in 2013: 

- More women than men are completing college educations (where we learn about things like math and economics)
- Women are better investors than men, on a factor of 4-6% (Forbes, the Economist)
- Gen Y women, on average, tend to have a much better grasp of financial principles than their male counterparts (there's a great article on this by the Davidson Institute)

These are your future customers (and they are me).

Back to my original point, I admit that I'm dealing with a very limited view of your strategy. Perhaps next month I'll receive an email that says "Men and money: What you need to know." If that's the case, accept my apologies for the long email. But please do keep in mind how these gender-specific emails can come across (no matter what gender you are). And perhaps revisit how you promote your resources and make sure that you're offering to help people for the right reasons. For example, maybe what you should be promoting is planning for the loss of a spouse or financial planning for single parents. 

My grandmother (who is herself a pretty savvy woman) makes cupcakes for the customer service people in her life who treat her right. You, Vanguard, do not get a cupcake today. 

Please feel free to contact me via email if you have any questions or would like to chat further.

Thanks,
[REDACTED]

One of my favorite parts is what's hidden in that last paragraph, the implied warning, so to speak. What this particular Burwinkle woman doesn't say is what can happen to those customer service people who don't treat her grandmother right. Let's just say some of them have...sought other employment opportunities.

Justice dispensed.

Week recap

Nothing majorly exciting happened this week, but there were a few things that I thought were picture-worthy and fun!

On Monday I went for a celebratory lunch with a co-worker at a cool little cafe in the CBD. It's a unique, funky kind of place - definitely a shakeup from my usual kind of lunch!

Look at these cute little stools! They look really funny when people are sitting on them.

The next fun thing to happen was on Thursday, when we had a fascinator making party at work. As I learned last year, fascinators are the thing to wear for Melbourne Cup. Atlassian is throwing a big Melbourne Cup party again this year, so the event team at work had a little party to make our own fascinators.

There were some inspirational ideas laid out on the table, along with a bunch of supplies. As I have only worn a fascinator once and certainly never made one before, the ideas were also very aspirational. VERY!

It was pretty fun to hang out with some drinks and snacks and do our best to out together a fascinator. I was fairly pleased with how mine turned out. The final product will be revealed in a few weeks on Melbourne Cup Day! =)

Another work picture: on Fridays we get "special" candy. This is on top of the usual candy selection, so it's basically boxes of full size candy bars to choose from. What!?

My last favorite picture is this one of a VW wedding limo that was parked outside the hotel next to our apartment. How cute and fun is this!?

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Happy birthday, Opera House!

Sunday was the 40th birthday of the Opera House. And, of course, Sydney being the city that it is, there was a big celebration!

Somehow, I got Toby to come with me. Maybe it was the promise of getting some breakky first. We went to a little cafe in the Rocks with a good courtyard where we got to soak up some of the great weather.

Toby said I couldn't take a picture of him. So here is his food.

Next stop was the Opera House. Apparently the idea of celebrating a building's birthday appealed to lots of other people!

Obviously this isn't Toby's ideal scenario but he was a good sport.

There was a giant birthday cake and lots of speakers/presenters.

I really wanted to stay until we all sang happy birthday, but the speakers were going on and on. So we moved on and went to see the ferry that brought some other ceremony participants. Since we couldn't hear the speaker anymore, we didn't really understand the connection of these people to the Opera House. We just chalked it up to an Australian oddity and enjoyed.

One last picture to celebrate the birthday!

And then we headed home. But, bonus pic, we saw some Americans on the way back!

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Bushfires

Thursday was another unseasonably hot day. It was also windy and dry, which meant high risk of bushfires. And unfortunately there were some really big ones outside of the city.

By mid-afternoon, the sky was a weird orange-brown color in the city. The effect was really strange: in the office the light was golden, almost like the light was coming through stained glass. I went outside for a look and took this picture. The sun is actually in the clearing in this picture, but the smoke hides the actual sun.

I could catch a glimpse of the smoke clouds looking towards the Blue Mountains.

By the time I left for the day, there was no mistaking the smoke. The city was bright orange with this horrible cloud blowing in from the mountain fires. It was almost unreal to see.

Here are more pics from the Sydney Morning Herald.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/danger-rockets-to-catastrophic-as-winds-catch-bureau-unawares-20131017-2vpjp.html

Unfortunately many of the fires are still burning over the weekend, and lots of people have lost their homes. We are hoping for cooler temperature and rain soon, and most importantly that people are safe.

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Night Noodle Markets

It's hard to believe that a year ago we were fresh to Australia and were meeting the Draegers at the Night Noodle Markets.

I remember that night because it was one of our first Sydney activities I decided we should go to. Little did Toby know it was only the beginning!

But I haven't totally broken him, because he actually suggested that we go to the Night Noodle Markets for dinner on Wednesday.

It actually seemed like there were a lot more food stalls and beer tents this year. And there definitely were a lot of people!

Lots of good decorations too!

And of course we found some food.

And, as we are not amateur eaters, we finished off with some ice cream: burnt fig honeycomb for me and peanut butter pretzel for Toby. They were both super good, and embarrassingly my favorite food from the night.

This is what it looks like when Toby has had his share of fun at an event and is ready to be done.

I know this stance well

It was a really fun dinner out, and I can't wait to go back next year!

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Dinner at a burger joint

Due to a total lack of planning on our part, we had nothing to eat for dinner on Monday after work. So we decided to go check out a new burger place that opened recently in Kirribilli.

It's a small little place but we got a seat at the bar.

It's vey much an American-type burger place: all the typography and decor are throwbacks to old American diners. Not only that, but we both noticed the menu items were in American English: French fries weren't "chips," and floats weren't "spiders". And yeah, I think it's totally creepy that floats are called spiders here!

And in keeping with the American theme, our food was super unhealthy. But I had something I hadn't have in over a year: corn on the cob! And I also ordered the mac & cheese side, which was the first non-homemade mac & cheese I've had here. They were both pretty tasty!

Toby went for a veggie burger and fries. Despite the trouble with eating such a tall burger, he was happy with his food choice too.

Of course, nothing closes out a super unhealthy meal like a milkshake.

We'll have to eat salad for the rest of the week's dinners, but it was a fun taste of home!

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Latin festival!

It was a weird week for weather. On Thursday it was crazy hot - almost 100 degrees! Then on Friday, it was kind of cool - cool enough for long sleeves and jackets when Toby and I went for a fun dinner after work.

But Saturday was perfect weather: nice and sunny but with a good breeze to keep things comfortable. Which was great, because it was Latin Festival day at Darling Harbour!

So I headed out and left Toby in the cool and shade at home.

What could go wrong leaving this person home by himself?

I decided the weather was so great that I was going to walk to the festival. It took about 45 minutes but it was so gorgeous, I enjoyed every minute.

There were three stages for the festival, but the main area was in the park behind the harbor.

There were about 8 different food stands, all with food from different countries. Of course I thought I should try some, and I couldn't resist getting the vegetarian fajita from the "Mexican Plus" stand. I should have known better because it was terribly disappointing. It made me so sad, I didn't eat very much of it.

Even though it looks ok, the beans were in BBQ sauce??

So I decided to redeem that by trying arepas con queso from the Colombian food stand. That was much more tasty: corn tortilla with cheese on it!

By far my favorite part of the festival, though, was the performances! While I ate my food, I watched a tango demonstration.

There were two other stages around Darling Harbour: one had a fun mariachi-type band, and the other one had a lot of dancing demonstrations.

It was a fun visit to Latin America for the day, but it was very clear I was still in the land down under!

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