Weeds

On Sydney's rail network a Tangara motor carriage has seats for 112 on the middle six cars, and 98 in each of the driving cars. I counted them one trip. That's 840 seats plus approximately 10-25 people standing around the doors of each carriage during peak hour when every seat is taken. That's a total of ~1100 people per train at 8am on a work day morning. That means that on every rush hour train there's - on average - three people who are having their birthday and feeling like they at least deserve a seat.

I caught a 6:45am train into Sydney on Friday morning and took one of the last seats that remained by the time the carriages reached Hurstville. The population caught me by surprise; I was expecting it to be a lot less crowded at that early point of the day. Thus, a lot more people than I was planning experienced me eating soggy cereal out of a tupperware container with a tea-spoon on my way to work. I couldn't tell if all the looks were of disgust or jealousy. I think the only common denominator that floated behind their brows was the phrase "South Australian..."

This weekend I've had to struggle with first world problems like weeds invading my (landlord's) lawn and spam bots posting junk to my personal website.

Gardening and PHP are pretty unrelated, but the realisation I had while on my bottom ripping apart tangles of Oxalis pes-caprae (with my only goal being to give the grass underneath some light) was this: Wether it's Nigerians or plantlife, all living things are just greedy for resources. Sunlight, seats, money, Vespene gas. My trip to Costco this morning also seemed to back this up.

On the plus side, I was fortuitous enough to see eels in the wild today. And I bought 14 wholemeal Lebanese pitas for $1.89.