Australian Open 2008 - Day 6

Woke up with a mild hangover (as was to be expected based on my last post) so my punishment was once again to get up and go running to sweat away the booze.  It is a good jog and I won't really complain.  A 4 kilometer track isn't a long one, but if you add in the walk to the track and back to the hotel, it ends up being fairly close to 5 total miles, so I consider it a good workout.  Besides, I am not exactly the most well versed in road running (having cut my teeth on low impact elliptical and then treadmill) so it is much tougher than my normal workouts.  I hate that the gym at the hotel is so substandard, but then you get what you pay for. ;-)

Called Colleen as she was settling in for the evening.  It works reasonably well to be able to call her as one of the two of us is ending out day.  When I call her in the morning here, it is her evening and vice versa.  One of the few times the time zone difference is manageable.

Really a boring day in all honesty.  Being hung over, I chose to take the opportunity to do laundry.  It is one of the nicer bits of the serviced apartments here at The Medina Grand is that it includes a washer and dryer in the room.  Now, that sounds odd.  I could send out my laundry and get reimbursed for it like I do at other events, but I'm always leery of it coming back in one piece.  Doing my own, I get to make sure it is washed the way I want, and that it is handled with a bit more care than some place doing it in bulk.  I left with the load of whites in the dryer and the load of colors in the machine.  I should be able to get them dried when I get back to the room.

Bitter disappointment struck.  OK, that's a bit of melodrama.  I finally had decided that I'd actually contact The West Sydney Razorbacks directly to find out where to find their merchandise in a store.  It is hokey that I wanted to have one because they are Razorbacks and so is Arkansas, but I don't really care.  Their response was in my inbox as I arrived and the only place to buy their gear is through Soul Sports and only on-line.  They seemed to not care that this was the only outlet for their gear.  Oh well, best I can tell there are few people here in Melbourne that watch the stuff anyway, so I don't know how the league survives.  Maybe I will break down and order something through that site, but somehow I really doubt it.  I typically don't shop for clothes on-line.  A personal choice to be sure.

Walked in to work in the heat.  Well, heat isn't really the right thing to say.  The weather has been breezy and mild.  Mild enough that when walking home late at night, it has been almost cold.  At least I have the jacket provided.  I know I'm glad I did bring some long trousers, though I wish I had a third pair.  A short night, punctuated by Roddick advancing in straight sets to end the evening.

Walked to the hotel an odd way for me.  We chose to go down Flinders, which means we walk along the length of the train station in some area that is notorious for backpackers and indigents.  I was not disappointed.  As we walked past one of the intersecting streets, we got to witness pure drunken street violence as two Eastern bloc sounding youths were screaming at one another in broken English.  I saw three punches thrown, though for the most part it resembled a slap fight.  In the end, one of the drunk men ran down away from us with the other shouting something at him in a language I didn't understand.

Got back to the room for my second disappointment of the evening.  Something was wrong with the permanent press cycle on the washer and the thing was still dumping water into the agitator but not filling enough to allow it to move to the next cycle.  That meant I had to work it manually to get it to spin out enough to actually let me put the clothes in the dryer.  Oh well, I can fall asleep to the white noise of the dryer spinning and get up in the morning to fold more clothes.

Cheers!