I am now trying to cover as much ground as I can in my lunch hour each day. One good walk is up to the Huon Valley Butchery on the edge of West Hobart. It’s pretty fancy, I won't be buying meat there a lot, but they are friendly and I know they have their own abbatoir at Cradoc and take animal welfare very seriously.
This corner is just nearby. It's a beautiful group of three houses on the corner.
The other day after dropping Marcus at soccer (he has to be there 45 minutes before kick off) I went for a wander through New Town, where I hadn't walked for years. I saw this amazing bus stop.
You can hear the bzzzzt bzzz bzz bzzzzt just looking at the pic can’t you?
Being downtown for an extended time, I am walking past this facade a lot. I haven't been in a position to take a photo myself, so I have scooped this pic from here, thank you to whoever is responsible.
Fitzgeralds was a statewide department store chain that was just ubiquitous in my life growing up. The Burnie Fitzies took up half a block of town, and I bought most of my clothes and records there.
Later after I moved to Hobart I worked at the ad agency who did all of Fitzies TV, press and catalogues; where I made my notorious typo in a cosmetics ad; “come in and talk to one of our beauty conslutants” which was 100% accidental.
Fun fact; for a time there was a Fitzgeralds at Forest Hills in Melbourne! But shortly after that the parent company based in Adelaide rebranded the whole lot as Harris Scarfe and the whole chain fell into a bit of a snooze. The Hobart store is a poorly-patronised rump of what was once there.
If you have any great memories of Fitzies I'd love to hear them. I liked how you could buy a leg of lamb, a Soundgarden CD and a six pack of Rio underdaks not just under one roof, in fact inside a 10m radius.
Back to the sign; the shape of these characters are fascinating. That's a G in the middle below. Talk about minimal.
And look at this R below. Its common to build an R from the P but this is brutal!
I am writing this at my new job, at a place called Red Jelly. It's a big ad agency in Hobart but its kind of a secret - not many people know it's here and what it does. There's about 50 staff, 4 of whom are named Chris. Half the place is dedicated to the national liquor chain Dan Murphy's. Dan's generates a hell of a lot of press ads, outdoor ads, point of sale and odds and sods, and it is owned by Woolworths (as is another liquor chain BWS but that's another story). There are dozens of other clients but the big ones seem to all be Woolworths subsidiaries, including Countdown which is the name Woolworths uses in New Zealand.
Before starting here about two months ago, I had been working from home for about three years, long enough to get right into a groove. The days flew by every day, punctuated by meeting the kids after school, walking the dog, meeting clients, and doing the work. Although business varied between quiet-ish and brisk-ish, I never found that I was sitting around with nothing to do. If it was sunny I did washing, and if I felt like cleaning toilets I could do that too. Or take the wave ski out.
For my first 6 weeks here I was working on the Tourism Tasmania spring campaign at a manic rate, with no downtime at all. Once that was finished I was shifted into the Dan's room, where all around me Whisky Guides and outdoor ads for Far North Queensland are being created. There is a rhythm to the week in here and lots of flat spots.
It feels different to browse the net when you should be doing something, versus doing it to fill in time. One is a guilty pleasure and the other is just ... not something I usually do. Feels weird.
So, I am going to give myself a range of things I can do while I wait for the ping of email or the approach of the account manager. Such as – blogging.
