Boring soccer updates may be over, for good. I played a friendly game tonight, and my torn ligament, or whatever it is, decided to make a return visit. Worse than ever, too, despite being pretty much idle for months.

It's right where my right leg joins my hip, and I feel it bad whenever I kick the ball with my right leg, especially if I kick with the side of my foot. What stinks is that I can still run just fine, and am playing as good as I ever have. I just can't kick the ball. (And that's kind of important in soccer.)

I'll go see a physio, but I don't have a lot of hope, since I think it's a ligament tear. I suspect my options will be:

Learn to kick with my left foot exclusively.

Quit.

Become a goalkeeper.

I'm not depressed about it -- yet. I'm just angry right now.

Other Tasmania trip points of note:

While staying in a hotel in Hobart that had a small kitchen, Marjorie asked me to boil some water while she took a shower. What I didn't realize was that the kettle had its own separate base unit that you plug in. Instead, I put the thing -- which has a plastic bottom, btw -- on the burner, then left the room to go deal with the car situation. She came out of the shower to find the room filled with acrid smoke. I totaled the kettle, and left melted plastic all over the burner. It's a damn good thing I'm so good looking, and don't have to get by on my brains.

We arrived home sometime after midnight. While opening the front door, we disturbed a mynah bird that had been roosting in a rafters of the front porch. He shat on me and flew off. Welcome home!

If it's 4 a.m., it must be Regis. A friend of mine is right now trying to become a contestant on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire", at a taping at Disney World. He wants me to be his "Phone A Friend" person, so I might be getting a call, as early as 4 a.m., from -- well, I thought it would be Regis Philbin, but that just shows how long I've been out of the States. Meredith Vieira. The odds are slim that he'll be one of the ones randomly selected from the audience, but you never know. I'll be ready to Google the answer if I don't know it offhand.

I have been away from the States for a while. I just realized that last week marks two years since I've set foot on U.S. soil. Zowee. Later this year, we'll be heading back (now that it looks like I won't be getting World Cup tickets :).

Update. He didn't make it in. Oh well.

By the gods -- facial hair!. I didn't shave over vacation, and Marjorie apparently has a thing for Mennonites as she asked me to shave it this way.

My man sack. Girls are on to something. Over the break I bought a over-the-shoulder carry bag, and I already can't get by without it. What aversion do men have to being able to carry things?

Why do dogs always develop nicknames in addition to their given names? For whatever reason, Laika is almost always refered to as "Sweet Girl" or "Dingus McDognus" in our house.

We booked our trip to Tasmania just just a few weeks back. We called a bunch of places asking about rooms, and they all pretty much laughed at us. Finally someone explained to us that the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race was going on, and the hotels in town were pretty much chockablock. Finally we started calling pubs, and found a place that agreed to take us.

When we arrived in Hobart and drove to the hotel, we found the room to have just a sagging single bed, crumbs in the carpet, etc. So we declined and tried looking around for somebody with a cancellation. We even tried neighboring towns. Finally we realized that we weren't going to do any better than sleeping in the car. We got a tip from a guy in a hostel about a good place to park along the river. So we got a bottle of wine and headed down. "Stick with me, babe," I told Marjorie. "With me, it's class all the way. Spending New Year's Eve in a Hyundai Elantra drinking wine from a thermos cup."

There were dolphins in the river, which was cool. We ended up crashing out at about 9 pm. Fortunately it was raining, which was conducive to sleep. We half awoke at midnight to the sounds of fireworks, and a few people in the park whooped it up for a while, but the rain soon drove them home.

We slept in until almost 9 am. Our booking the next night was in a caravan park down in Adventure Bay on Bruny Island, so we headed south, caught the ferry, and arrived around noon. Ah, showers and a soft bed. Bruny Island has some crazy wildlife, including white wallabies and lots of rare bird species. We took a few hikes and basically relaxed for a few days there.

The next day was unplanned, so we just decided to get a nice place in Hobart using the money we saved sleeping in the car on New Year's. Our rental car picked that evening to die on us. Consider all the remote places in Tasmania, it was fortunate for us that it happened within a block of our room. Hertz sent a man out who couldn't fix it, so they had a new car waiting for us the next morning. Good on 'em.

We then headed up to Bicheno, a nice seaside town with some great tidepools that we spent a lot of time exploring. We picked Bicheno because it is near Freycinet National Park, which we explored the next day. I love that one of Tasmania's biggest tourist attractions can only be reached via a hike.

Our last day was spent driving up to Launceston, to catch a late flight home. Again, see the pictures for a more vivid experience than my flat prose can provide. Tasmania was maybe not as different from Melbourne as we had hoped, but is definitely interesting in its own right. I wish every place was as focused on preserving their history and ecology. Traveling there, one finds oneself pondering deep questions, such as: What is life all about? Could I survive alone in the wilderness? And, is it possible to make a White Russian with soy milk?

(Birds we spotted: Tasmanian native-hens [which, as you could never guess from their name, are native to Tasmania], green rosellas, Australian gannets, little pied cormorants, white-faced herons, black swans, mallard ducks, Australian wood ducks, kookaburras, pied oystercatchers, sooty oystercatchers, masked lapwings, tons of silver gulls, Pacific gulls, a flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos, musk lorakeets, a ton of welcome swallows, either a pink robin or a flame robin, New Holland honeyeaters, many superb fairy-wrens, some unidentified terns, and lots of unidentified birds of prey. We walked through the habitat of the exceedingly rare forty-spotted pardalote but didn't spot any.)

Mark didn't shave the entire time we were in Tasmania. Last night I shaved his beard with creative license, now he looks Amish. Funny. I suspect it will only last the morning. We'll post a picture if he allows it.

Tasmania. We just got back from our trip to Tasmania, where we spent New Year's and the week after. More detail to follow, but in the meanwhile, enjoy some pictures. Hope everyone had a nutty New Year's.

Marjorie and Mark get dey wing on. Tonight we made our best effort to recreate our favorite Atlanta tradition, Wing Night. When my parents came to visit (and I still have yet to blog about our trip together), they brought me some real buffalo wing sauce, which is not available here. (Well, they have Hooters wing sauce at USA Foods, but it's wrong on several levels.) Not owning a deep fryer, we cooked the wings on the grill, then doused them in sauce. We cooked tater tots (potato gems, in Aussie parlance) instead of fries, and used creamy Italian dressing (also brought by my parents) instead of bleu cheese. But the celery sticks were true to form, and the beer we chose (James Squire Golden Ale) was perfection: slightly microbrewish, just like the pitchers of (? we forget!) that we used to get at Taco Mac. A tas-ty TREAT!

The email you never received:

Subject: New friend request from Mark

Mark wants to be added to your Friendster friends list. By becoming friends with Mark, you will be able to send Mark messages and connect with his friends.

He would have invited you a long time ago, but, c'mon, "Friendster"? The name alone makes it seem like the sort of thing that Mark, in less enlightened times, would have labelled "totally gay-wad". It sounds like the kind of thing sent to you by the same sort of people who tell you that Bill Gates will send you $1000 for forwarding on this email. However, Mark and his wife both like meeting new people, and if Friendster helps, then why not? But he would rather not risk annoying you by putting an invitation in your email inbox.

So if you are doing the Friendster thing, drop him an email or leave a comment and he'll send you a proper invitation.

Go Knights! My old alma mater played their first ever bowl game this weekend. Sounds like it was a great game but with a disappointing result. They even had the highlights on TV here last night.

It's hard to get in the Christmas spirit when:

There is a largish planet between you and the bulk of your family.

It's the middle of summer.

Flies have taken over. (Okay, there are no "swarms" here but they're still pretty bad.)

You have to work the next week.

A large, dead tree in your backyard picks Christmas eve to start falling over. What's worse is that it's a tree that for some reason -- elephants? -- evolved prickly thorns all over its branches, and even its trunk. I've been at it with a saw for much of the afternoon.

Still, we're making do. This is traditionally the day to gorge myself ill on my grandmother's pierogies. We found some pierogies here to do the same, but tomorrow's supposed to be hot, so we decided to cook the turkey today.

Merry Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanza/Festivus/Newtonmas to family and friends everywhere!

Year-end music wrap up. Oh, it's been a sad year. I just had a look at the Pitchfork Top 50 Albums of 2005 and I've heard, let's see, none of these albums. Not a dang one. I am official OLD and OUT OF TOUCH. Phooey. I've heard of one of the top ten bands, and that's only because he went on a rant after the New Orleans disaster.

I dunno, I filled out my collection of the back-catalogue of a few artists I already like, like Lucinda Williams. I listened to a fair amount of new stuff on Pandora. I saw a few concerts (Finn Brothers, Polyphonic Spree, PJ Harvey, Mudhoney, the Shins). But, musically, as far as new stuff goes, this year has been a giant sucking dearth.

If Laika, our dog, could talk, most days would sound like this:

Morning:
Me: Good morning. [Scratches Laika behind the ears.]
Laika: Good morning. Thanks for the scratching. You don't mind if I follow you around while you get ready, do you?
Me: That's fine.
Later.
Laika: I see you are ready for work now. Give me my rawhide chew, and I will run out back to eat it alone, because that is my instinct. Then you can close the kitchen door and go do whatever it is that you do.

Afternoon:
Laika: Hooray! You're home!
Me: Good to see you too, girl!
Laika: Hooray! You're home!
Me: Yes yes, okay, good girl.
Laika: Hooray! You're home!
Me: Settle down.
Laika: Let me lick your face!
Me: No.
Laika: Let me lick your face!
Me: No.
Laika: Let me lick your face!
Me: No. Oh, okay. [Lick.]
Laika: Hooray! You're home! Can we go to the park?
Me: Mind if I put my things down first?
Laika: Can we go to the park?
Me: Can I go to the bathroom first?
Laika: Can we go to the park?
Me: Give me a minute, would you?
Laika: Can we go to the park?
Me: Oh, okay.

(Back from the park. Mark is eating a piece of cheese.)
Laika: That cheese looks good. Can I have some?
Me: No.
Laika: Can I have some cheese?
Me: No.
Laika: Can I have some cheese?
Me: No.
Laika: Can I have some cheese?
Me: [Sighs.] Okay, here you go.
Laika: That was quite delicious. Can I have some cheese?

(Later.)
Laika: You can't take my toy away.
Me: You're right, and I don't want to.
Laika: You can't take my toy away.
Me: Yuck, get that slobbery thing off of me.
Laika: You can't take my toy away.
Me: Yes I can. [Yank.] See? Now go fetch it. [Throw.]
Laika: [Fetches, returns.] You can't take my toy away.

"Where do you find all these awesome websites?" I get asked that a lot at work, when I pass on a link. Here's where:

Blogdex - most popular links culled from people's blogs.

SlashDot - the best techie news site, with user comments.

Digg - sort of cross between the first two. I check this more and more these days.

del.icio.us popular list - sites people are saving as favorites.

Got any others you like?

The hazards of using your second language. Today, one of my Asian cow orkers (while heading off to lunch) said: "Well, I'm off to get some grubs." I hope he didn't mean that literally but I stifled my laugh just in case.

Weekend summary:

Friday night: Mark's other office Christmas party. We discover after arriving that partners were not invited, so we make an early evening of it. Indian food in town at Gaylords; my dish, yummy, Marjorie's, not so much. They also served ketchup with their papadums.

Saturday: Mark up early to watch the World Cup draw (Australia drew Brazil, Croatia, and Japan [ouch]. USA's in with Italy, Czech Republic, and Ghana [double ouch]). Afternoon: shopping, massages. In part of Mark's ongoing quest to try every type of spa treatment, he subjects himself to the "Traditional Stepping Massage". This did not involve the tiny-footed Asian girl as I had envisioned but rather an older Chinese guy in socks who proceeded to work me over thoroughly like the roughest soccer game I've ever been in. But it was surprisingly envigorating.

Sunday: Rollerbladed down to the Espy. Burgers on the grill. Then we set up the tent in the backyard just to try it out. Laika seemed to get the idea of camping, but was too excited by the surrounding possums to settle down, so she got the boot early on. The possum twittering drove Marjorie in soon after that; I made it to 5 a.m. or so, when the morning mynah birds drove me inside. Now I realise the real reason people have houses: they're to keep out the animal noises while you're trying to sleep.

The local paper has a short article and photo about last weekend's photo shoot. I won't say who I am in the photo except to say that I'm very freakin' visible.

This morning I got up at 5 am, shaved my tongue (the office Christmas party was last night), and went into town to get naked in front of a bunch of strangers.

It was a hoot, but damn cold. There were, I'd say, sixty of us. All body types; all ages; tattoos, piercings... One woman was there with her five year old son, who was a good sport most of the time, but was not happy to have to lay on the grass. It took about 40 minutes in all. The worst was posing on a bridge over the Yarra river, where we were exposed to the wind. Plus, I ended up having to lay in a wet spot (it rained last night). Brrr! Also, it started drizzling at the very end. The only witnesses were a group of joggers, one person on a hotel balcony, and a mostly-empty tram.

The calendars should be ready in about a week. Be warned, I might post some scans!