Before entering October, I told myself that I'd hold-off the blog posts so I could save-up some interesting stories to write a birthday-themed story e-mail to my friends. It's been over a year since I last wrote one, mainly because in place of writing short stories every couple of months I've resorted to writing even shorter blog posts every couple of weeks. I guess if you do a word count comparison on either method, it kinda balances out.
Thus explains this month's lack of blog activity; I don't wanna repeat stories both on this site and in my e-mail, but at the same time I don't really know what stories will make the final cut, so I'm hoarding everything to myself right now.
It does kinda say something about the pace of my life though: it's pretty slow. So much time between fun and exciting things that I have to take an entire month's worth of events to come-up with a decent length story e-mail.
I mean, when I was in primary and intermediate school, one of the first assignments you'd get at the beginning of the school year was to write an essay (with the word count of said essay steadily increasing with your age) about what you did over the summer break, which for us southern hemisphere folk is over December/January, so you always had a lot of material to draw from: Christmas, presents, the special meals, New Year's, visits to/from (extended) family which often meant going overseas... you get the idea.
Of course, when I was younger, everything was exciting and worth telling the world (or your teacher and friends) about. Nowadays, being all grown-up means that you fall into a routine, and things that form a part of the routine aren't always worth telling others about.
In my own efforts to keep the happenings of the grown-up world just above the threshold of boredom, I keep a running thought at the back of my mind to try mix things up at the most mundane of times, eg: thinking with my stomach, writing "hilarity ensues" in my bug reports, spinning in my chair... little things to remind myself and others that it doesn't have to be "same shit different day" all the time.
But it's not my everyday life which will make it into my story e-mail - I doubt my friends want to read about me installing large software packages over the course of a day again. Nor do I think they want to read things like:
Today, I heard quacking from the street. I looked outside my window and saw a lone female duck walking along the grassy part of the footpath of our street. In spring, you usually see ducks paired-up, so I wondered where the male duck was. The thought bothered me for the rest of the afternoon.
One thing I foolishly thought that I'd have more of when I moved into my own place, was time. Oh how wrong I was.
When I was younger, I had this habit of finding waaay too many hobbies and messing around with waaay too many different things.
Maybe it's just the thing to do during those teenage years; experimenting to find out who the heck you are and who the heck you want to be.
Only a handful of hobbies from that era have survived - drawing and playing the piano (whereas digital art, writing, playing the guitar, and computer programming could be considered post-high-school pursuits) - and yet I haven't yet found the time to improve on a single one.
OK, so it doesn't help that when I moved-in, I went and bought an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and since then Devil May Cry 4 and I've borrowed Gears of War from a workmate.
Now I'm contemplating Guitar Hero 3, although the smarter part of me is telling me to curb the spending.
Despite the new distraction/s, I've found that most of my time is getting lost to cooking. Yes, cooking.
Slightly motivated by a story I heard of a family friend who moved back home because they missed the real homemade stuff their mother made, I've been stocking my fridge and cabinets with raw ingredients and making genuine attempts to recreate the meals that I grew-up with and then some. The good thing is I've found I'm not a total failure when it comes to cooking, and have even had a friend who lives nearby over several times to eat the leftovers. The bad thing however is that there are always leftovers because I'm not yet used to cooking for just myself, and so always end-up with this elaborate meal for a family of 4.
Food aside, there is one hobby I've managed to progress, but only because I've hit a bit of a lull at work: the RSS feed for the Writing section is now done (unlike the other feeds, I couldn't fit entire stories into the feed because they all rely on special formatting which you can only get by visiting the page), hurrah.
While I was re-tagging my news posts, I noticed that I've never actually posted anything about the goings-on with the Writing section. The main reason for that being that it's mostly stories I've written to friends which require some level of inside knowledge, and thus it wouldn't go down too well with others. Although recently (a couple of months ago) I did write something which I think anyone can appreciate.
After being told something strange about a McDonalds burger, I decided to run a semi-scientific investigation and review of the burger. My findings and final write-up (complete with pictures) can be found in the link below:
[EDIT]: Arg, just found out something else while checking that the recent CSS-crusade didn't break anything: many of the Writing pages look messed-up in Internet Explorer 6. Seems I still have some work to do. Or, you IE6 folk could upgrade to IE7, or go get another browser :P
[Update]: IE6 fixed-up.
