Anthony Eaton's Blog: Musings from an Outer-Spiral-Arm

Okay, I know I've been even more lax than normal this week. In my defence, by November 24 I need to have read, processed, marked and provided detailed feedback for:

1 x 100,000 word Doctoral Thesis
3 x 30,000 word honours thesis
66 x 3-5000 word creative writing portfolios
66 x 1500 (ish) word reflective discussion posts.

Plus, any day now, the final revisions for Daywards are going to land in my letterbox, and these need to be back no later than two weeks from now in order to actually get the boo...

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In keeping with my weekly posting routine, this is my first post in a little under a week. But you know that already, don't you? Truth is, at the moment (and just for something completely different) I'm horribly behind in just about every aspect of my life. This wasn't helped by last week which included:

a) The aforementioned job interview (no word on that, yet. Fingers still crossed, and cramping slightly...)

b) Me delivering my first ever academic 'Work-in-progress' paper to the rest of the f...

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Our American friends introduced us to this. It's a children's book by writer and illustrator Sandra Boynton. It's also a song - as are a lot of her books. Actually it's a pretty neat exercise in cross-marketing; the books are gorgeous, the songs quirky and sung by a vast array of interesting people, but that's all beside the point.

This song, however Personal Penguin has seriously got into my head. Toby loves it - he dances - so it's on high rotation in our house at the moment. It's fun, cute,...

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This morning I sat for my first job interview since 1994. (Which, co-incidentally, is why I haven't managed to get much up in the blogging department during the last week or so...)

I have no idea how it went.

But I can share some advice on how not to kick off an interview:

***

Interviewer A: So, Tony, thanks for coming in. Can you start by telling us why you're interested in this position?

Me: Three reasons - firstly, because I feel I'm uniquely qualified for... actually four reasons, come to thin...

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2 Things currently making me *very* nervous:

1. Job Interview. You might remember a while back I was in the process of responding to selection criteria. Well, with a bit of help from my friends, I obviously got them right, because next wednesday morning I have a job interview. For a real job. Here at the University. Full time. For at least seven years.

I'll be honest; I'm crapping myself.

The last time I sat a job interview was in 1994. That consisted of a ten minute chat with the principal of t...

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I'm back! Two weeks in the good old U.S of A, and now here I am, back in my little office at Uni, having just spent the last four hours working through a frankly frightening backlog of marking, and with the half-edited draft of Daywards sitting on the corner of my desk, glaring threateningly at me.

So it occurs to me that I *really* should post something about the trip, but the further I get from it, the harder it becomes, so here's a sort of edited highlights package. Kind of like the 'year-i...

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Just Don't. That's all for now. Details later, when I'm less in the mood to strangle someone.

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1. I was really, and I mean really looking forward to flying on the new Airbus A380 - we booked our flight especially after checking to make sure it would be the A380. And then we got to the gate in Sydney, and it wasn't. It was a fairly clapped out old 747.
But, even more disappointing:
2. Standing in the immigration queue at LAX, surrounded by homeland security officers with guns and grim expressions, I look up and see Kyle Sandilands standing at the head of the queue. Just my luck that the o...

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So tomorrow morning at 0900, Imogen, Toby and I get on a plane to L.A. (well, technically we get on a plane to Sydney, which will then connect with the plane to L.A, but you get the general idea...) We're off to visit my sister and her husband and two little girls (one of whom we've never met, and the other of whom is my goddaughter) in Houstin, Texas. This should be awesome.

We're flying on the new Qantas A380, which probably doesn't mean much to a lot of people, but which - to an aviation geek

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The Girl In The Cave has just been released in Chinese! I discovered this when two copies of the Chinese edition arrived in the mail today. This actually proved to be the perfect end to a very surreal day, which included (among other things) me keeping a sick parrot in a box in my office for several hours. But that's beside the point.
The funny thing is, TGITC is the only book of mine not to have done all that well here in Australia (It's still on its first print run, six years after it was origi

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