After granddad died in October last year, I said I'd get around to writing something about him. One thing I wanted to include in that post was an older photo of him, but I never got around to looking through our old photo book, so I never got it scanned, so I never got that post written.

A couple of days ago my mum rung me up while I wasn't doing anything particularly productive with my annual leave - just playing video games while water fell from the sky and pelted people who ventured outside with liquid bullets. I was sort of dreading it'd be another call from this international telecommunications company asking if I wanted cheaper international calling rates to the Philippines (I received 3 of those calls from that company’s call centre that day), but it was my mum, sounding a bit stuffy, like she would when she'd been sick a couple of days.

She wasn't sick though - she had called me to tell me that grandma had died.

I've only ever had 1 set of grandparents. Those on my dad's side of the family I either never met or couldn't remember meeting because I was too young, so when I think of my extended family – cousins, aunties, uncles, grandparents – I think of those on my mum's side. My mum was one of 11 children, so barring my auntie and her family that live in NZ, I have some trouble keeping-up with the size and names of my entire family. Every time we'd go to the Philippines to visit grandma and granddad and co, there'd be new cousins to meet, and old cousins with new faces to get used to.

After my family moved to New Zealand, we didn't go to the Philippines a lot. I can also remember granddad and grandma coming to New Zealand once. All up, I could count on 1 hand the number of times I had actually spent with my grandparents. It wasn't a helluva lot.

So when I got the call from my mum this year about grandma, I didn't have any real reaction: I pretty much went 'oh', talked a bit more on the phone, hung-up, then went back to whatever I was doing.

It was like that for a few hours afterwards in that I didn't give the matter much thought. Then, I started to give the news of grandma's death more room in my head. What did I do? I didn't cry, I didn't even feel sick. I just Tweeted the news for the world to read, then I started to wonder why I wasn't feeling as terrible about the whole thing as I thought I should feel, or the way I thought others thought I should feel.

The same sort of thing happened last year when granddad died: I posted the news, but got on with things quickly, maybe too quickly, as if it never really phased me. I was offered bereavement leave but didn't take it because it didn't feel right to. Bereavement leave, as I see it, is for people who are grieving, which is defined as:

To feel grief (keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss) or great sorrow.

What I felt after both granddad's and grandma's deaths wasn't as strong as the grief described above, or a great sorrow.

I just felt sorrow.

The last time I saw them was Christmas / New Year's 2007/2008, which was the last time our family went to the Philippines together. In the Philippines, that period is like a week-long holiday - we'd have relatives come to our grandparents' (which is where we were staying) during all times of the day. When it came to Christmas Day and New Year's Eve/Day though, everyone was there. I remember seeing those who came to visit grandma and granddad, and saw what really close ties my extended family had: my cousins loved coming over to see grandma and granddad, and my aunties and uncles really enjoyed talking and eating and laughing with them.

I remember feeling a bit envious of the really tight relationship my Philippines-based extended family had, but mostly I felt very happy to see that what I had with my immediate family and NZ-based extended family was being duplicated there as well. Maybe it's just Filipino families (and other family-centric cultures) that are really close-knit and together - I keep hearing stories from many of my New Zealand friends about family dramas or families just not getting along, which only serve to remind me how good/lucky I and my whole family seem to have it.

So when I think of no longer having any grandparents, as well as feeling bad for my mum who has now lost her parents, I feel quite bad for all my cousins, aunties, and uncles, who are now missing those vital pieces of that close family puzzle that I saw all those years ago under a sunny Christmas Day sky.

I may not have spent as much time with my grandparents as I could have, but I have some very good memories of them both.

For grandma, my favourite memory was when my family went to spend Christmas / New Year's of 1992/1993 with them. It was the first time we had come back to the Philippines as a family since we moved to New Zealand, and during that visit, grandma made hot dogs for breakfast one day, and my brother and I really really liked it. From that day on, grandma would cook us hot dogs for breakfast, every day, for the rest of the days that we were there visiting. It quickly became the part of the day I anticipated the most.

For granddad, it wasn't really anything we did together that really stuck out, but something he said, or I was told he said. I was the first of my generation to have graduated from university, and I was told by my mum when she relayed the news to the Philippines that granddad was really happy and proud of what I had done. During our last family visit in Christmas / New Year's 2007/2008, a few years after my graduation, granddad came up to me one time and tried to say as much. Unfortunately by that time something had happened to granddad and apart from being sick and hospitalized every so often, he also became difficult to understand. I only got some words of what he said then, but I think I got the gist of it, because it was the only thing I really felt I understood from him during that entire visit without grandma nearby to translate.

I was afraid that I might have become some kind of emotionless robot given my lack of strong reaction from the loss of my grandparents, but maybe I'm feeling just the appropriate amount given my distance: I'm thinking of the rest of my family, particularly in the Philippines, how close they were to grandma and granddad, and feeling how much more it must hurt them over there; I'm thinking of the few times I did have with grandma and granddad, and how I felt with them then; and I'm thinking of how, with both of them gone, what it will mean to my family as a whole - my grandparents were the reason I went 'home' to the Philippines in the first place and are the link in the family tree that connected me to the extended family that I really like being a part of.

I'm gonna miss that. I'm gonna miss them. And that makes me sad.

Anyway, I still don't have those older photos that I wanted, but I went through the ones from my last visit and managed to find this one of my grandparents, surrounded by a very small fraction of the entire family.

Goodbye grandma, granddad,
'Scanner'

(continued from October is the best month - part 3)

That's pretty much the end of all my birthday stuff. Everything else that made my October so special for me was just all the events and gatherings that kept me busy pretty much every weekend in that month.

One thing was having 2 friends who had gone overseas, to pursue lives and careers, come back to New Zealand for a short visit, and the opportunities I had to see them again after all the time between then and when I saw them last (months for one, years for the other).

Another was that I managed to create a lot more baking successes in October than previously: a chocolate mousse cake to finish the last of the dark chocolate I had accumulated, a coffee cake, parfaits for the family, and a practice sponge cake for my guitar buddy whose birthday is this month.

I also managed to go to the temporary ice skating rink that the city had brought in for October. I hadn't been before and was hoping that my skiing ability would translate into making me somewhat competent. I did manage to fall over once towards the end when I wanted to see how fast I could go. I was just grateful my fall wasn't anything like my brother's, who, last time the city had an ice skating rink, broke his face open across one of his eyebrows and now wears a scar from the experience.

And of course, there was the Simply Ceroc ball and showcase over the long weekend, as well as all the Rugby World Cup games, both of which I've blogged about already. One thing I didn't mention was that one of those games where I watched and then went out with a couple of friends, ended-up with a video of me singing loudly and drunkenly somewhere on Facebook.

All of the above, and all I've written in the previous instalments of this blog post, (and maybe a few other things which have completely slipped my mind,) combined to create a memorable October for me. So when I see the ticker tape still draped about on the overhead power lines throughout the city, a reminder of this country's biggest sporting achievement in a long time, I let it remind me of the month that was, and smile a little more than I used to. Hell I even skip through a bunch of the more melancholy songs on my MP3 player (favourites of mine just months and years before) when I'm listening to it now.

I've found I can easily be broken from happy little trance though, like when I find myself walking behind a smoker and one of their puffs of smoke makes its way to my face, I instantly become annoyed, silently mouth the word 'motherfucker' behind their back (man or woman, I don't care: I am an equal-opportunity hater), and wish that their lungs would explode then and there.

Some things never change :)

(continued from October is the best month - part 2)

Further into October, my birthday a few days behind me now, I was spending the weekend with my family. Well, just my dad and brother - my mum had flown to the Philippines to visit grandma a week and a bit before since grandma wasn't feeling all too good then. It's been almost a year since granddad died and everyone's a bit worried for grandma, so away my mum went to check-up on her side of the family.

So it was just my dad and brother left in the family house in the suburbs, and my mum and I always joke about leaving the house in their care. Sure they can take care of themselves, but they're not the most proactively responsible members of the family when it comes to chores and general maintenance: meals are always eaten later because they start cooking when they get hungry, the washing/laundry never seems to be done as well when it gets done at all, and the fridge/freezer/pantry always runs dangerously close to being empty. I also doubt that they vacuum the house, or even clean the bathrooms in my mum's absence.

In the times I've visited when my mum's away, the house has never really been that bad, but there's always something missing about the way the house is held together when it's just my dad and brother, like the shiny veneer put in place by my mum's cleaning schedule is dulled without her care and that cracks start to show when the house is no longer receiving the same level of care. I jump to a worst-case scenario in my head, in that after an extended absence, my mum would come home to a broken home: the front door not closing properly, a large puddle of water not cleaned-up from a recent heavy rain, a corner of the rumpus room perpetually on fire, a family of wild animals making a nest in one of the rooms, and shit all over the place with the words 'there is no toilet paper' scribbled on the walls with faecal matter...

During this latest visit, I got the following text message from an unknown number:

Happy cake day. Look in your letterbox

Intrigued by the anonymous sender and their message, I went outside to the letterbox, and inside was a cake! It was in the shape of a meatloaf, but it was a cake! (some kind of lemon cake I would later discover) I sent my thanks back to the unknown number, and as I did, all sorts of questions came to mind:

1. Who sent the cake?
2. Who knew I was in the suburbs that weekend so as to deliver it to my parents' house?
3. Who knows where I live?
4. Is the cake poisoned?

A lot of my long-time friends would actually know the answer to question 3 - I had lived in that house with my family for almost 15 years before I moved out - and anybody with access to the internet knows the answer to question 2 since I publicized my location on Twitter the previous day. Suddenly the suspect pool got a bit too large for me to investigate, and thankfully the cake was not poisoned, otherwise I would have gone through my list of suspects much more earnestly.

So my birthday extended to the weekend that followed it with the mystery cake, and when my mum came back from the Philippines several weeks later she brought back a bunch of presents for me from a few of my cousins as well. We even had a belated family birthday dinner at the place we dubbed 'the new Maria Pia's' (Maria Pia's was the Italian restaurant I kept going to for my birthday, and the restaurant that had taken its place is also Italian).

Birthday day became birthday week, and birthday week became birthday month :) I was really liking where this month was going.

(to be continued...)

(continued from October is the best month - part 1)

I hadn't seen Katrina in a while. The last time I had was at her place when I tried to help her out by cooking dinner (one of my pizzas) since she was still just out of hospital and couldn't cook herself, and her family weren't yet home to help her out. That was at the start of August, while I was still in some sort of deal with my work that I could spend my Monday afternoons visiting her in the hospital.

Katrina has just been discharged then. She put out a plea for help, and a tonne of her friends answered the call. I thought to do my bit too, so used my last Monday afternoon off to visit her at home and make her dinner.

It's always weird cooking in someone else's kitchen: nothing is where you expect it to be, the microwave seems to operate on some completely foreign logic, and the knives are always too sharp or too blunt. I planned to make one of my pizzas there, and brought a tonne of my own stuff along since I was warned beforehand that Katrina's family's kitchen isn't the best stocked kitchen on the planet. So with some help from Andrea, long-time friend of Katrina and someone who I had talked to a bunch but never really hung-out with a lot before that day, she brought over some extra things: rolling pin, oven tray, baking paper because the oven tray had been severely 'seasoned', like a wok from a lifetime of use.

I had never used baking paper with my pizzas before, and the pizza base I rolled was a bit thinner than I'd normally make, so I think it was those 2 things that combined to create my stuff-up of the day: cooking the pizza and having it stick so hard to the baking paper that the 3 of us spent most of the dinner trying to tear the paper away from the pizza base rather than eating it, and because the base was so thin you actually ended-up losing a lot of it in the tearing process. Actually, Andrea and I spent most of the dinner trying to tear the paper away, Katrina had only 1 fully functioning limb (a left arm) so Andrea spent even more time tearing paper away from Katrina's pizza, and I eventually gave up and just ate the damn paper. Hey if red pandas can eat bamboo, then I can stomach a re-purposed tree.

Om nom nom

I felt pretty bad about what I'd done afterwards. I went out there with the intention of helping out, only to add some unneeded plant fibre to a cripple friend's diet. It didn't help that Katrina spent the next couple of days telling everybody about it, and Andrea made it a point to rub it in my face the next time she saw me.

So that's how my last encounter with Katrina went. I'd been meaning to visit again, but the fresh guilt from that last incident kept me away. With over 2 months since then, what better time to try make amends than with my day off?

I met both Katrina and Andrea for lunch at a bakery not far from the hospital where Katrina would be finishing one of her physio sessions - just one of many she was undergoing those days to help put weight back onto her legs. When we went to order lunch, the girls surprised me by paying for my meal :D

As I was eating my free lunch, they surprised me again by giving me a birthday card and presents - a cookbook written by Pete Evans, one of the hosts of My Kitchen Rules (which is a show I watched very closely this year and mentioned a couple of times), and a book about chocolate which is part recipe book and part history/background of chocolate. I was actually reading through the chocolate book last night and it made me so hungry for some sort of dessert that I went out of my way to make a chocolate cake at 9:30 in the evening!

And just as I finished my lunch and thought all the surprises were over, one of the bakery folk came over with a slice of chocolate cake that had a birthday candle in it, and the girls started singing Happy Birthday.

I went home happy that day: a bag of presents in one hand and a birthday-boy grin on my face. The feeling followed me all the way back home. Once I got back home however, the sickness I had been pushing away and ignoring all lunch time pounced back on me. Suddenly I had only enough energy to make it to close the door and collapse on my bed, bag of birthday presents still in hand, and sleep for the second time that day.

I woke up maybe an hour later, still feeling tired, the stuffy nose really sticking this time around, and with a new symptom: a sore throat. I went to my computer, answered all the birthday messages / e-mails / text messages left for me, and that pretty much concluded the day of my birthday.

(to be continued...)

The Rugby World Cup was over a week ago, but remnants of it still remain throughout the city: the World Cup logo still flies prominently beside street lamps, country flags are still visible in shop windows, cars still carry the All Blacks flag proudly attached to passenger-side windows, and the aftermath of the parade - ticker tape and streamers all the colours of the visible light spectrum - occupy cracks in the footpath or are still tangled in the power lines that give life to our fleet of electric buses.

I've been walking through the city a tad happier than I normally do, a small smile making its way onto my face if I allow my mind to wander and think about everything that happened in October.

The biggest thing for me was of course my birthday.

Birthday cat is not amused

Yes, I'm one of those October-born people, throwing all our birthdays into one month of the year to make peoples' calendars look super busy and to annoy gift-buyers. I passed my last birthday milestone a long time ago, which I reckon is the 21st. After that, card-makers stop being specific about your age and you find yourself receiving a lot of non-numbered birthday cards until your age starts resembling a new decade.

I didn't really know what to do this year for my birthday. I've already written that my normal birthday traditions have gone out the window, so I thought to do the only other thing I could still continue to do - take a day-off from work - and see what happens after that.

Melissa was in the country on the day of my birthday for the first time since... 2003? She took me out for breakfast, meaning that on my day off, I had to get up early. On any other day I might have complained, but I thought I better get as many waking hours as I can out of my birthday. That, and I'm not one to turn down free food.

Free breakfast on my birthday; a good start to the day :)

After I walked Melissa to her work so she could start her day of working and I could continue my day of not working, I went to my favourite place in the city to kill time: the library.

When I sat down to read through my current book, I found myself unable to stay awake. Sure waking-up at my normal time on a day when I would have normally slept-in might have taken away some valuable sleeping hours, but I didn't just feel sleepy: I was sniffling a bit more than usual, and I felt really tired already. Oh no, I thought to myself, don't be sick, don't be sick, not now, not today...

The only other thing I had planned for the day was to meet-up with Katrina, who I hadn't seen since she was discharged from hospital, at which time I tried (and failed) to make her dinner since she was unable to cook herself and needed help until her family were able to come home (they were all away at the time). I needed to be well enough to travel some 20km to visit her at the hospital after one of her physio sessions, and my stuffy nose was looking to ruin that.

I didn't catch-up on my sleep at the library (I didn't want to look like the homeless guy sleeping in the library since there was already one there in the far corner), and I didn't want to catch-up on my sleep on the train to the hospital either (I didn't want to miss my stop, which I had done several times before when I'd slept on the train), so with a few hours to go until I had to meet Katrina, I went back to my place, collapsed on my bed, and fell asleep.

I woke up with time to spare before the train I planned to catch, without that nagging fatigue I had at the library, but I still had that damn stuffy nose. So this is how it's going to be huh? Fine then. I told myself, and off I went to the train station with an extra handkerchief, just in case.

(to be continued...)

Last night was 2 things for me: the 'All Black Tie Ball' for the Simply Ceroc weekend (the year's major event for the dance classes I attend), and the Rugby World Cup 2011 final between New Zealand and France.

When I signed-up to the ball, I wasn't thinking that much about the Rugby World Cup. In-fact, the Rugby World Cup didn't really enter my mind until the weekend it started, so when I learned earlier this year that the final and the ball were on the same night, the thought that went through my head was, 'meh'. Regardless, the advertising for the event said that they'd have the auditorium next to the dance floor open for us to go watch the game on their giant screen. That didn't really factor into my decision of going to the ball, but as the world cup final drew nearer, I'm glad they did it.

I signed up to the ball because my friend Melissa - the one who actually got myself and another mate of ours, Alexey, into dancing in the first place some 3 years ago - wanted to go. Despite being our progenitor, Melissa had never been to the ball, whereas Alexey and I and had been to 2 each in our time, so when Melissa got me to sign up to accompany her, this ball became the main motivation for going to dance class at all this year - I had dropped-off the ceroc radar for a good 6 months last year (when work started to eliminate any semblance I had of a social life) and so I felt I needed to get back into classes so that I wasn't totally useless come this weekend.

One nice thing about the ball is that I get to wear a suit. I don't really get many occasions to don suit, so when I do I usually end-up wearing a bit of a "I'm wearing a suit!" smile from the simple idea that this is probably the nicest-looking I will ever get. The location for the ball isn't far from my place, so I walked through the city towards it, wearing a suit and my silly little grin.

Now that Melissa and I had 2 events to balance, we went to the ball with one eye always on the clock: doors to the ball opened at 7:30, dinner starts getting served at 8:00, kick-off for the game was at 9:00. We arrived on time, got a dance in, and it was during that dance we could smell the mains meal being lined-up at the buffet table not far from the dance floor. Melissa was particularly hungry, so mid-dance we manoeuvred ourselves across the dance floor between other dancing couples and right up to the edge closest to the buffet (I had actually failed to lead myself and my partner between a moving crowd several times earlier this week, so was very happy to have not stuffed this up here). When the song ended, we promptly let go of one another, ducked under the barrier at the edge of the dance floor, and were practically the front of the line at the buffet.

We got back to our table, ate away, and were almost done by the time everybody else managed to grab something to eat. A decent line stretched away from the buffet, and we were wiping the food from our mouths ready to go to the auditorium to watch the All Blacks play France.

Things were looking up: we got to the ball on time, we secured a nicely-placed table, we managed to weave our way through several dancing couples towards the buffet, we beat the crowds to mains, I was wearing a suit, everything was going right for us.

We made it to the auditorium, everyone really got into the mood by standing and singing the national anthem and cheering with the haka, but then we sat down and everything started to fall apart.

The game was a nail-biter: we had the lead, but it was never convincing, and the French were putting-up one helluva fight. By half-time, I was resigning myself to the fact that we could actually lose, and then riots would run through the streets and all the cars outside would be flipped-over and/or set alight by the ensuing mob - move over Vancouver, we'll show you how a real sporting-loss riot can be done.

When we all returned to the auditorium for the second half, the cheering had audibly died to make way for a collective nervousness. Someone behind me made the comment that you could feel the tension in the air, and that tension also had the ability to slow time to a crawl. At 8 points to 7, a 1 point lead to the All Blacks, that last 30 minutes to the second half became the longest 30 minutes of my life. I thought I was watching the clock too often before to make it on time to even get here, now I was watching every passing second of game time with both of my eyes, swearing at one point that I saw the clock go backwards.

We won, eventually, and the tension was replaced with cheers of relief more than anything. We were so very lucky, and we all knew it. We exited the auditorium and Melissa and I had to sit back down at our tables for a while to let it all sink in. I'm not one prone to nervous habits like nail-biting, but after that game Melissa had worn down 9 of her fingernails, and someone else I danced with later that night had chewed through all her fake fingernails, enjoying a healthy diet of acrylic to go with dessert.

Melissa and I left the ball soon afterwards to join friends who were partying in the streets. On the way to where they were, we saw people climbing trees, cars honking everywhere, impromptu chants, scrums, and one guy push himself down one of our main streets on an office chair. Oh and man hugs on every corner. Even in my suit I wasn't immune to the bromance, and was dishing-out a bit of man-love myself, in between the whoops of victory and photo-bombing peoples' shots in my hired finery.

It's 4:52am now. I got home and started writing this about 2 hours ago. I'm out of my suit, showered-off all that sweat from dancing which came from dancing away my nerves from the rugby, and now I'm just glad. Even though I wasn't biting my nails (or tightening my sphincters as some friends tweeted), I was staving-off epic disappointment and maybe some kind of heart attack with that 1 point lead.

I'm not sleepy, even though my normal bed time was over 5 hours ago. I've said before that I'm not the biggest sports fan, but thanks to my dad who got the family into those pool games and me really into the spirit of things, I've witnessed history and now I want to know what happens next.

Sleep can wait.

I made myself a birthday cake earlier this week (I did get other birthday cakes on my birthday - an anonymous cake in the letter box and a surprise cake on my birthday - so I don't feel like a total 'forever alone' sad sack by doing this), and one thing I've been doing with my more recent cooking endeavours is, once I have a product I'm actually proud of, I feed some to my guinea pig.

Awwwwwww

No, not an actual guinea pig, but a human test subject. A pregnant human test subject. If my food's good enough for a pregnant woman (a group who seem to be the fussiest eaters these days. I don't know what it was like in my mum's day, but I'm pretty sure the women of that age ate whatever the hell they wanted and babies turned out fine), then it's gotta be good enough for everybody else right? I didn't actually seek out my pregnant friend for this reason, it just happened that she works near where I work and I could get a hold of her for lunch to try the dessert I made that time.

When I made my birthday cake - a marbled coffee cake with a layer of chocolate frosting in the middle, inspired by that site and a chocolate history/recipe book I got for my birthday - I asked my guinea pig if she'd like to try some. Before I could even list the ingredients though, she had already made-up her mind:

coffee = ick
?

don't hate me

I was actually quite sad to learn that she couldn't stand coffee and because of it she wouldn't be going anywhere near the cake :( I mean, I don't like coffee either, but in any form that isn't a drink, I can enjoy it. I sat at my computer with a sad face for a bit too, glad that the facade of Facebook chat was sitting between us so she couldn't see my disappointment.

I needed to find new test subjects, so in my disheartened state I overcompensated for the loss of 1 person by texting/messaging way too many others.

The cake ended-up being shared between 5 other people with who I was so eager to share it with (maybe because I was still all *sad face* over my guinea pig not wanting cake) that I ended-up with just 1 slice for myself.

Only because I lied to myself

For the last month and a half, our little country of New Zealand has been host to the Rugby World Cup - a tournament between the top 20 rugby nations of the world. About this time last year, my dad, seeing this as an opportunity to be a part of something big, asked the family if we wanted to attend the World Cup through a package deal which would get us tickets to every pool games being held at the local stadium. I remember how I felt at the time - rather reluctant and not as enthusiastic as I could've been. I thought about it and finally settled on saying 'yes' to the idea, forking over a large sum of money to my dad, large enough for the bank to wonder if the transfer was legit.

I'm not the biggest rugby, or even sports person in my family. If there was a game on you're very likely to find my mum and/or brother shouting obscenities at the television if things aren't going their way, or just shouting at the television if things are going their way, and me cleaning-up the table and washing the dishes all by myself if it happens to be that we've just had dinner. This happened a lot when I lived with my family, not it only happens if I'm over for the weekend.

The year passed, September came around and with it, a crapload of tourists descended on our little city. Now I don't mind the tourists, but there was just something a little different about this bunch - they were mostly wearing their country colours, proudly proclaiming from where they were and who they're supporting. I thought it was kinda neat seeing so many people supporting their country, but for my first Rugby World Cup game, it wasn't a New Zealand one, but South Africa vs Wales.

I have virtually no connection to either South Africa or Wales: I have a friend from South Africa, and a temp who worked in our building years ago during her OE is from Wales. That was pretty much it. But I liked what I was seeing happening on the streets of our city: people here flying their colours and who were actually here to watch the rugby, as opposed to all those other occasions where the main event has taken a back seat to just another reason to party, eg: The Melbourne Cup, The Rugby Sevens, and any event with the word 'tasting' in it.

So I thought I'd get into it, and crowd-sourced my allegiance to Facebook and Twitter:

RWC game this weekend: South Africa vs Wales. Who should I cheer for?

The response was overwhelmingly in favour of Wales, so in the days leading-up to the game, I bought a Welsh flag-cape and brought it with me to the game.

It wasn't the first time I'd been in the stadium, but it was the first time I'd been in the stadium when it was full, and the atmosphere was so much more electric than the smaller crowds I'd normally been a part of. I fell-in with the crowd so easily and within minutes I was shouting, chanting, standing, clapping, mexican-waving, and going all-out at the top of my lungs and whatever the equivalent is for arm-waving. I was louder than the rest of my family and I surprised myself at how quickly I got into the swing of things.

The game was great, and I really thought we (Wales) were gonna win; the score being so close and everything. I had a helluva time, and was sad to have to part from it and go back to my apartment, sleep, and then go to work the next day (it was a Sunday night game).

We had more games to go to, and this carried on for another 3 weeks: I picked a side to go for, I got a little souvenir for that side to take to the game, I went to the game and supported that team until my throat ran dry. I was a mercenary selling my support to whichever team I wanted (usually the underdog) and I had a blast every time I did it. The last game we had tickets for was a New Zealand game, so I did get the opportunity to cheer for my own country for once.

That last game was over 2 weeks ago, and even though I haven't attended a game since, I've been watching the games with friends or family, choosing a side (when it wasn't a New Zealand game) and trying to be the best fan I can. I'm still not the biggest sports person in the family, but I've really got into the swing of things with the Rugby World Cup.

I guess it also helps that New Zealand is in the final for this weekend, for the first time since... what, 1995?

Souvenirs from each game. Missing: my 'backing black' jersey

After the South Africa vs Wales game all those weeks ago, I brought my Welsh flag cape to work and pinned it to the divider beside my desk. People pass by and wonder aloud who the Wales supporter is, obviously not drawing the link between myself and Wales because I extremely un-Welsh-looking :P When I hear those comments though, I just smile and think how glad I am to have chosen to go to the rugby after all.

When I went shopping for all the ingredients for Black Forest Gateau 1.0, and knowing full well that I'd make the cake again right afterwards, I went and bought 3-times the ingredients needed to make the cake: 1 lot for the trial cake, 1 lot for the improved cake, and 1 lot for 'in-case-shit'. It worked well for the most part, and I was left with some extra cake ingredients that I could use in other baking. For the other part however... well let's just say that the recipe I was working off said it needed a block of dark chocolate, so I bought 3. I ended-up using about 5% of a block of dark chocolate after 2 cakes were done, leaving me with 2.95 blocks of dark chocolate and no clue on what the hell to do with it all.

Yes, there was the obvious idea of eating it all, but I'll confess right now that I don't really like dark chocolate that much - I'm more of a milk chocolate person. I can't really eat a square of dark chocolate by itself without having the bitterness of it trigger the neurons in my brain responsible for sending a signal my facial muscles to make a screwed-up face.

You should see the face I make when I drink something with a strong alcohol content

In an attempt to use the dark chocolate, the first thing that came to mind was to bake brownies. I did that, twice in the span of a week, each batch consuming half of the 0.95 block of dark chocolate. That left me with 2 more blocks to use.

Not wanting to make another 4 batches of brownies (if 2 batches in a row was making subsequent oven-cooked food smell of chocolate, I didn't want to know what doing that another 4 times would do), I asked around for ideas on what to make using the rest of the chocolate, and someone came back to me with some recipes that promised to use entire blocks at a time: a dark chocolate cheesecake, and a chocolate mousse cake.

These seemed like good ideas to me, so I looked-up recipes on the internet, set a time to attempt the cheesecake, and invited the idea-girl over to help me out (me not being all that great with baking, and she being a very experienced baker), promising a front-row seat to a surprising success... or an epic failure.

One thing I did try to plan was to have us try the cheesecake before we had to go (we both had a Rugby World Cup game to attend that night), but I never knew just how long a cheesecake had to spend cooking and cooling in the oven. Neither of us had a chance to try the cheesecake before we had to go, but all that waiting made my apartment smell almost like the brownies I made before.

Once home from the rugby game though, I went straight for the cheesecake, taking it out of the fridge and immediately not liking how it looked out of the cake tin: the top was tough, reminiscent of the edges of brownies (which in some recipes you have to cut off) and it kinda sunk in the centre. The inside looked better, but when I went to taste it, it was like eating a slightly soft piece of dark chocolate; bitter, and not at all sweet :(

I learned that night that substituting the white chocolate for the dark chocolate wasn't all that good of an idea since the original recipe relied on the white chocolate for it's sweetness and so had very little sugar in it which I didn't at all make up for when I switched chocolate.

I don't know what came over me, but after the dark chocolate cheesecake fail, I was determined to get it right; part of it being that I wanted to prove to the friend who came over that I can actually bake, and the rest of it just my usual stubbornness. So the next day during down-time at work, I collated cheesecake recipes and ideas to make my own cheesecake, no longer caring about using the dark chocolate, but just determined to not be beaten by a damn cheesecake!

This cheesecake is my proverbial cactus

I filled-up a page of one of my old drawing books with a recipe, some notes on lessons learned, and then made some mini-cheesecakes (I basically made miniature cheesecakes filling-up 2 or 3 spots in a large muffin tin instead of a full-on cake). When those didn't turn out according to plan, I took down more notes on what went wrong, what I can do next time to resolve it, and the next day I tried again.

This has been going on for every night this week since the weekend. I come home from work with a detour to the grocery if I need more ingredients, and then start on the next iteration of mini cheesecake.

Unfortunately, success is still out of reach.

Feeling a bit defeated, but still wanting something to show for my efforts, I put together a dessert from the leftover cheesecake ingredients and whatever the hell else I felt like using. What results was a sort of parfait: biscuit crumbs in the bottom, middle, and top layers, the cheesecake filling making up for most of the middle, and various leftover canned fruits throughout. Hell I even added sprinklings of the dark chocolate of which I still have roughly 0.8 blocks worth.

There are a few glasses of this hybrid dessert cooling in the fridge right now and, for something that's effectively the by-product of several failed cheesecake attempts, I'm feeling pretty good about it since without the failed cheesecake, all that's left in those glasses are the parts that I became good at in the last couple of days. It's basically everything that I didn't screw up.

I've asked another of my friends to be my guinea pig for tomorrow - we're meeting up after lunch to try this dessert. One thing that's worrying me about our meet is that my 'guinea pig' is pregnant - I'm praying very hard right now that what I've developed doesn't cause miscarriages.

My guitar buddy was making me dinner last Sunday - her reaction to an argument we had where I thought she had zero cooking ability and she was determined to prove me wrong - and some time during the making of the meal (potato gratin w/ chicken schnitzel and some steamed broccoli #NomNomNom (oh dear... I just hashtagged my own blog post)) she came to the following conclusion: that I'm very easy to please.

I was just off to one side, watching her cooking and thought: Man, this is awesome. I need to provoke more people into cooking for me. Smiling happily as I watched dinner being made before me with minimal effort on my part, I got to explaining that free food - dinners, lunches, paying for a dinner/lunch - was something of very high value in my family.

Going out to dinner is often the thing my family would do come any special occasion, usually for birthdays or commercial holidays like Father's/Mother's Day. We'd pick some restaurant that we hadn't been to before or, as in the case of my birthday, that we'd been to every year since my 21st, and have an enjoyable night poking fun at the others' most recent fails (which is on-par for Rabina-family dinner conversation. It's like those celebrity roasts where they take turns digging into someome).

Then when it comes to lunches during the working week, my parents and I would meet for lunch every-now-and-then and take turns paying. You could tell whose turn it was to pay because one of us would be wearing a dour expression, while the other 2 would be grinning from ear-to-ear.

When I was the one organizing lunch with one parent and I'm ringing the other to ask if they want to join, the question is always the same: "Are you paying? :D" (and yes, I can hear the :D over the phone line)

And my brother's no different either: in a text last week for when he was asking to come over to my place to watch the New Zealand vs Japan rugby game, he wrote a follow-up text which read: "And dinner too? lol"

The Food Channel might be the only thing my mum and dad can agree on when channel surfing on those random weekends I decide to visit them in the suburbs, and I may have confessed to watching My Kitchen Rules on more than one occasion, but as much as we enjoy watching the wonderful and extravagant things those shows present to us, not one of us spends an exorbitant amount of time or effort on creating our meals. It's like we put as little effort as possible into creating a meal so that it meets the minimum for whatever health guidelines we're following at the time, and where the consumption of it wouldn't knock too many years off the end of our lives.

I used to think we were just lazy and other families had epic dinners all the time. Turns out that when you have to make your own dinner every day, you try not to put too much effort into it - something I quickly learned when I moved out of home.

Maybe that's what makes those meals - the free ones or the ones where someone else is cooking - so damn special? Maybe it's not the food at all, but the idea that you don't have to do any cooking, or spend any of your own money, and yet food just magically appears. If that's the case, then anybody can appreciate the value in getting a meal for free; my family just happens to take it to the next level.

So there I was, watching my guitar buddy cook dinner for me and thinking that this might be the best day I've had in recent history. Then I thought about it some more and remembered back to last Tuesday when I had lunch with my friend the hug nazi and she paid for both of our meals with the aid of one of her vouchers - now my budget spreadsheet is in love with her.

It might not be the food at all, but rather the idea that someone else is taking a little tedium out of your own life by using a little time and effort from their own. It may not be the most spectacular thing in the world, but framed like that, it makes for a pretty powerful gift I reckon.

So whether it really be that the way to my heart is through my stomach, or that I'm just easy to please; if you're buying or making me my next meal and I start to beam like I've just won the Lotto, know that I'm just really appreciative of the gift you're giving me, even if you haven't realized it yet.

FINALLY! >:|

Now it seems as if every piece of software on my PC wants to update itself or download something over the internet (my calendar suddenly has all the appointments I loaded at work, iTunes wants to download all my podcast subscriptions 10 times over, and my firewall/antivirus is already getting a tonne of updates), so I'll let them all fight for bandwidth while I catch-up on my 'watch later' YouTube backlog.

15 days though... FFS! Last night when it all got resolved, it's as if Orcon finally got my message: I got a Tweet from them saying they think the problem is fixed now and could I please check (I was at work at the time, so couldn't check), I got a call on my mobile soon afterwards asking the same thing, and then a few hours later I got the same guy ringing up to make sure that it's OK now I was at home (it was, although it did cut out for about 10 minutes until I restarted the router), before another call from someone who was ringing to credit my account for the days I was without internet + extra for the inconvenience.

Where were all these people 10-15 days ago? :(

I'm glad it's over, but I think it'll take a while until the suppressed anger subsides. I'm still wary of the internet connection falling apart and find myself checking the internet light on the router whenever I pass it by. You know, just in case.

Day 15 without the internet... Blatant company-bashing: Orcon Genius sucks / blows / is not fit for human use.

---
Shortly after the trial cake, I was able to create a much-improved version of it for my friend's birthday. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it for show, so just imagine the same cake as before, but with fluffier base layers and a diamond of dark chocolate sitting atop a cream swirl in the centre.

So I had the cake down, but the birthday girl lived on the other side of the city, some 30 minute walk from where I live, and I thought to myself, I can't just walk through the city with an exposed cake. I need to protect it from prying eyes, car exhausts, cigarette smoke, and emos. What I needed was a cake box.

I never thought to ask around at the local bakeries or supermarkets to see if I could take one of their many cake boxes (they have tonnes of them just sitting in the back, surely they could part with just 1). All that came to mind was that I had, at the corner of my desk, a horde of packaging material collected from deliveries ranging from NZ-based online stores like Mighty Ape, to overseas giants like Amazon and the resellers behind eBay.

It's like I had been preparing for this moment my entire professional programming career...

So, in the lead-up to cake-making day, I carried as many boxes as I could back home from work, then spent my Friday evening making a cake box out of various-sized packaging material. 2 hours, the cannibalism of 3 smaller boxes, and several metres of sellotape later, this was the result:

Cake Box 1.0

It's a very crude-looking thing, but it did its job well: the box was large enough to contain the cake, the lid closed properly over the box to protect it from the elements, and there's even this slide-out 'tray' to take the cake out of the box if lifting it out will prove too messy.

The next day, cake complete and ready to serve, I carried the cake in the box through the harsh city environment*.

The birthday girl was very pleased with her cake, and I was pleased she was pleased with the cake. But even with the lovely cake before the both of us, I spent most of the time talking about the box! I mean, I'd made the cake before and blogged about it - I was done talking about the cake before I had even given it to her. The box however: it was new, I created it from scratch with other boxes, scissors, sellotape, and my crafting know-how. I almost drew comparisons between it and Frankenstein's monster: stitched together from other similar pieces, and... OK, that's where the comparison actually ends - I never breathed new life into the box since it was inanimate to start with and inanimate to finish.

Luckily for me, the birthday girl was nice enough to humour my OMG-I-made-a-cake-box obsession, and we talked about ways to improve the box for a good chunk of the afternoon. By the time I left, I had plenty of ideas swirling through my head for Cake Box 1.1.

---
* harsh for a cake anyway

Continuing from my last post, I'm still without internet :( 14 days without internet, bringing the total number of days I've been with internet in this last month since switching to Orcon to 9. That's right: 9 out of 28 days. So a warning to people thinking of switching to the Orcon Genius plan: don't. Not yet anyway - give them a few months to sort out all the initial problems, and then decide.

(The first time I join the 'early-adopter' boat, and it sinks the moment I set foot in it. *sigh* Just my luck eh?)

Anyway, I've been keeping myself relatively busy without the internet, and to survive the last weekend without it I went to my parents' house to leech their bandwidth :P

That's wasn't the only reason though: Sunday was Father's Day for New Zealand, and for Father's Day I thought I'd cook him (and the rest of the family) a pork roast that I saw on My Kitchen Rules.

As well as distracting me from my internet-less life for 1 hour a day, 3 nights a week, My Kitchen Rules is just another in a series of TV cooking competitions that I've been watching for no real reason except that I find myself channel surfing on a quiet night, and then come across the cooking show such that I keep coming back to it the next time it's on until the season/competition is done. Much like with the last Masterchef Australia - I just happened to see an episode half-way through the competition, and before I know it I'm watching the final and rooting for some guy who I didn't know just a few weeks before.

When I was starting on the pork roast, a voice started replaying in my head: it was Dylan Moran from his comedy show I saw just 2 weeks before when he was saying that we've all been "Masterchef'd to death", and it's unfortunate I can't even remember the context in which that line was used.

But he was right: the original pork roast recipe when taken straight from the My Kitchen Rules website was so 'chef-y'/restaurant-ish that I had to dumb it down for my mediocre cooking skills and middle-class tastes:

• Duck fat? WTF, I don't even know where I can buy that! Replaced with butter and oil.
• Fennel seeds? Couldn't find it at the local supermarket. Removed from the recipe.
• Jerusalem artichokes? Out of season, so not currently on store shelves. Removed.
• Prosciutto? Whoa, I'm not on that kind of salary. Replaced with bacon (which we didn't use in the end).

So what started as "Pork Cutlets With Caramelised Apple Sauce, Peas, Jerusalem Artichoke & Apple Puree" became "Pork shoulder roast with apple sauce, mashed potatoes, peas, baby carrots, and crackling". Regardless, the family was impressed, dad included. Although he was probably happier about not having to have to cook for the first time in... forever.

In the last couple of weeks I initiated a switch in ISP from a landline + DSL plan, to a naked DSL + VOIP plan from Orcon to remove the cost of having a landline that I barely ever use. Let's just say that it hasn't been the smoothest transition I've ever experienced; in the 3 weeks since I was switched, I've been without internet for 2 of them.

The first time, the new router (supplied by the Orcon - you can't use your own) simply broke and started emitting a clicking noise that reminded me of an electronic heartbeat, a dying one at that, which in turn evoked imagery from The Tell-Tale Heart. I was sent a replacement router soon afterwards, and that incident left me without internet for 4 days.

The second time, which is happening right now, the router is fine, but the problem I think lies at Orcon's end in that I can't get an internet connection because I believe I actually don't exist in their system anymore (my account information has all gone missing from their customer account pages). This incident so far has left me without internet for 8 days.

In the interim, I've been doing most of my browsing at work (hell I'm blogging from work right now) and just adding videos to my 'Watch Later' playlist which is backing-up pretty significantly - I'll need a good afternoon to myself just to get through them all. When I'm not at work, Facebook and Gmail are done through apps designed for my dumbphone.

8 days so far without internet, and I'm not actually missing it as much as I thought I would.

For one, I've had some sort of activity on every day/night - work (obviously), birthday dinners, comedy shows, out-of-town-friend lunches, watching My Kitchen Rules, and catching-up on all my TV shows. So I've been keeping pretty busy.

Secondly, I've noticed a beneficial side-effect: my vivid dreams have returned.

Looking through my site, I've only mentioned my dreams in one post, and in one story e-mail. To summarize, my dreams consist of several of the things I've come across in previous days, and are very heavily influenced by visual media like TV, movies, and video games. For example, I remember telling someone about a dream I had where I had to track-down some intergalactic criminal in a spaceship shaped like a pyramid (Stargate). And just last night, I had a dream involving dragons (Game of Thrones) and large-scale battles viewed from a top-down/isometric angle (Warcraft 3, Command & Conquer 4).

No matter what the setting, there is a recurring theme in my dreams in that they're always as action-packed as a Transformers movie (with a plot that's probably on-par with Transformers) and involve me trying to save the day or save the world for reasons I don't question except that there are bad people out there screwing things over for people who don't deserve it.

When I was younger, I remember trying to get some interpretations, any interpretations, about my dreams. There were so many "answers" from sources about falling dreams, drowning dreams, being-chased dreams, and so on, but never anything about performing ridiculous heroics. I've tried formulating my own ideas, but what the heck am I supposed to make out of fighting vampires/gargoyles with my friends while the village they attack is being evacuated, or rescuing another friend from a mist-filled ghost dimension with the help of 50-cent and the G-Unit?

I would like the internet back though - I feel very disconnected from the world right now and the narrow view of it that my phone provides just isn't enough. But can I keep my dreams too? Pretty please?

We all have our traditions: visiting the family on a major holiday, going to the midnight mass on Christmas Eve/Day, having eggs for breakfast on Saturday morning, etc. They can be something to look forward to, or something to dread, and you put it in your mental calendar regardless of the effect. One of my own traditions was something started on my 21st birthday, when I had dinner with my family at a little (yet quite popular given the size of the place) restaurant known as Maria Pia's.

I never intended it to become a tradition - I just wanted to eat at an Italian place for dinner on my birthday - but the staff and food made such a good impression on us that when my next birthday came around, I thought, Yeah what the hell let's go there again. So we did, and again the next yet, and... you can see where this is going. I even took my friends to that place one year, and another time I had a friend take me as a belated birthday present.

Another unintentional tradition that started around my 21st was that a friend of mine, the same friend who took me to Maria Pia's, and the one who I've often referred to as 'hug nazi' throughout this blog, would always be out of the country on my birthday. She does love to travel, and I never really thought much of it until I started noticing that it always happened around my birthday: OE, someone's wedding, a job, whatever the excuse, something would take her out of the country or she would make sure she was out of the country.

When she started to realize the pattern herself, she actually started to feel guilty, and it was that guilt that had her take me to Maria Pia's as a belated birthday present for after she got back from her latest overseas adventure.

With my birthday now within my range of foresight (which doesn't really look that far ahead), it's looking like 2011 will be the end of both of these traditions.

For the last year, hug nazi was overseas for work (the cause of her missing last year's birthday) and has recently returned, with no plans to go away for the foreseeable future. I brought this up in a Skype call between us a few months back, and while she was happy to be around for my birthday for the first time in... forever, I was feeling a bit odd about it, simply because it felt like we were breaking tradition. I even considered taking myself out of the country for my birthday, just so we'd be in different timezones so technically it would still count, but I'm already booked to be here because I've got tickets to the Rugby World Cup around then.

And earlier in the week I found out that Maria Pia's has closed. I went so far as to tweet that "...a part of me has just died", and then went to the site of Maria Pia's earlier today just to see what happened to it. Sure enough there were signs saying that it was gone and a new restaurant would be opening in it's place.

I brought this up with my guitar buddy over dinner a few nights ago, and she and some others at the table suggested that I could invent my own Maria Pia's atmosphere come this year's birthday (and kick hug nazi out :P ), or simply start some new traditions.

New traditions. Starting something new. Both exciting and slightly frightening prospects. Repetition makes us good at things, makes things easier, and tradition is really just repetition with a predictable time period - it's easy, you know what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, you have some idea of what to expect, and it's safe.

I'll admit: I'm pretty risk-averse - years of getting figuratively stabbed in the face after putting yourself out there will do that to you - so to have these 2 things suddenly vanish has made me a little uneasy. I tried listing the number of other traditions or little rituals I have, and either my memory is really crappy right now, or I only need the one hand to count them on. After all this time of trying to be the one my friends could rely on, to be the rock to help others through their own transitions, it turns out I have very little to rely on myself.

Is that irony? Or is that just some kind of imbalance that I need to sort out? Either way, I predict I'm going to have one of those thinking moments in my immediate future.

The thinker... and a statue of some dude thinking

If you go to the dentist on a regular basis (yearly for me, mainly because I've never been able to say 'no' to them scheduling me again after another visit. That, and they take much better care of my teeth than I do) then you're familiar with a routine that they follow. Mine goes something like this:

1. Sit in the chair.
2. Update my contact details.
3. Ask me if I've been taking care of my teeth (regular brushing, flossing).
4. Take x-rays (every second year).
5. Remove tartar from in-between teeth with a vengeance.
6. Gargle/rinse with toothpaste-tasking liquid.
7. Reschedule to do this again next year.

I've never had that fear of dentists - knowing that they're doing and how they go about it helps (if they have to remove tartar from between my teeth with a metal pointy thing because the only thing tartar will respond to is a metal pointy thing, then so be it) - and actually enjoy getting my teeth cleaned-up. It's like that feeling after a new haircut where you put your hand to the short hair at the back of your neck and push up against the grain of your hair - a feeling you only get after a new haircut. The dental equivalent is that when the gunk from between my bottom front teeth gets removed, I suddenly have a small gap between my teeth that I can feel with my tongue and spend the rest of the day just trying to see how little of my tongue I can actually squeeze between that gap.

Anyway: the clean-up I like; the asking me if I floss daily and then me having to be honest and telling them that no I haven't been flossing regularly and have been neglecting their advice for over 20 years: I don't like, mainly because it then makes me feel guilty for not listening to them and that I'm now making their job harder than it should be and that it's attitudes like mine that make up all those terrible dental hygiene statistics and blah blah blah...

(Seriously, my conscience reacts to the smallest things and has way too much say in how I live.)

Fuck you Jiminy Cricket!

I'm just glad that I only have to do this once a year, because any more often and I might just have to start avoiding my dentist. My teeth would not be happy about that.

Now, on a completely related tangent (bear with me), I go to Subway on a regular basis; much more often than my dentist, like every week. There's a routine there too, and it goes something like this:

1. Ask what bread/meal you're putting together.
2. Ask which cheese you want in it.
3. Ask if you like your sub fresh or toasted.
4. Ask what salads you'd like in your sub.
5. Sauces?
6. Salt and pepper?
7. Any other things? (turn it into a meal, buy cookies, etc)
8. And if you swipe a SUBCARD®, ask if you've registered it online.

It's that last one that gets to me. Why? Because I haven't registered my Subcard.

The last 3 times I've been to Subway, I've been asked if I've registered my Subcard and each time I've had to say 'no' and each time I've felt slightly worse about not registering that I actually avoided Subway for a bit just so they wouldn't ask me to register.

It reminds me of the dentist, when the nurses ask if I've been flossing my teeth, because it's advice I should be taking (keeps my teeth cleaner / is really the only way to check what's on your card), and takes virtually no time at all to do (5 minutes each night? / 5 minutes once and that's it!). I can't get angry at the nurse/cashier either because it's their job to make sure I'm flossing/registering and I can't just hate someone for doing their job (unless their job is evil, of which dental nurse / Subway cashier is not).

So today, sensing I needed to eat something relatively healthy because all I've got waiting for me at home are meat and potatoes, I decided to go to Subway for lunch, but first, went online to register my Subcard. Then I went to Subway, worked my way through the sandwich-making queue, got to the end to pay for my sub, swiped my registered-only-20-minutes-ago Subcard, prepared myself to say "YES OH YES THIS CARD IS REGISTERED MWUAHAHAHAHAHA" (or something like that), and...

...didn't even get asked if I registered my Subcard.

What do you do when visiting someone at the hospital?

I've never had to visit someone in the hospital before. Sure, I've been in hospitals but never as a visitor. So what was I supposed to do in this situation?

Most of the time when going into a situation in which I have no actual grounding in, I turn to what I know of it from the movies or TV. In this situation, the scenes that came to mind were of white halls crowded with anxious visitors stuffed into a waiting room: someone cradling an injury with their own blood caked on their hands, a family all seated sombrely with at least one of them pacing back and forth in the space they occupied, some teenage girl who looked healthy if not for the dark sunken eyes and vacant stare masking the reasons for her being here. All of them ready to tell you their story if you just sat with them and gave them a moment.

And all in slow motion, while the protagonist walked calmly and unhindered down the hall to their destination.

None of that happened here of course: the walls weren't technically or even arguably white, there were no mysterious-looking characters in the waiting area, none of them looked at all eager to give me the time of day, and it all happened in real-time as I strode hesitantly between them to the enquires desk. Sometimes in the movies the people would bring in balloons or cards or cuddly toys with get well messages scrolled on them. I had none of those either. I was obviously ill-prepared.

2 hours before...

Lunch buddy: "So what are you up to this afternoon?"

Me: "I'm gonna visit a friend of mine in the hospital. I asked work for the afternoon off so I could go, but I don't know what to do. I mean, don't people always bring get well cards or balloons or something like that? I'd do the same, but I think she'll have tonnes of those already."

Lunch buddy: "Food or baking is always a good idea."

Me: "What about Subway cookies? Do you like Subway cookies."

Lunch buddy: "Yeah, yes I looove Subway cookies."

The receptionist gave me instructions worthy of a GPS unit for finding Katrina's room. I repeated what I was told, and the receptionist nodded her approval of my understanding. I followed the instructions, but not quite to the letter, otherwise I would've ended-up in what looked like a wheelchair closet.

I eventually found the room, counting-off room numbers in the labels above the doors like I would when counting mailboxes on a street, searching for an address. Some of the rooms looked unoccupied, while another of the rooms contained a family reunion.

Standing before Katrina's room, I took a deep breath, and crossed the threshold.

Nobody was there.

What would a movie protagonist do? I wondered. So I went to the window of her room and looked through the gifts that sat on the windowsill: cuddly toys, Get Well Soon balloons and cards, flowers, blocks/boxes of chocolates, and a radio set to static? I considered leaving my Subway cookies in amongst them, maybe leaving a note to say I had been here, but Katrina had to be around here somewhere - the description I was given of her injuries would prevent her from really going anywhere.

4 days ago...

Facebook chat buddy: "hey, you been in to see Katrina in hospital yet?"

Me: "Wait, WHAT?"

Facebook chat buddy: "yeah Katrina is in hospital, where have you been Em?"

Me: "Under a rock it seems. Why's she in hospital - what happened?"

Facebook chat buddy: "she was in a car accident 3 weeks ago. shes pretty banged up, she cant remember the accident or the few first days after it. the car is a write off. she has 2 broken legs [...] broken arm [...] and a fractured pelvis, plus multiple bruises and stitches."

Me: "3 weeks?!"

Facebook chat buddy: "yes three weeks, where have you been man, in your own lil world"

I asked around and was pointed in the direction of another room in which Katrina was known to spend some time in - to get away from having to spend all day confined to her bed she'd later tell me. She spotted me before I could recognize her - I was walking down the hall to this 'Day Room', which let in a lot of light from the outside, and there was a figure in a wheelchair, obscured by the contrasting glow of daylight to the inner gloom of the hospital. She looked towards me and held her gaze, and from that I could tell it was Katrina.

I sat in a chair opposite her, taking in the room, Katrina, her injuries, and her mood. I didn't need stage directions or movie cues anymore; I know what to do when I'm around friends.

So we talked, joked, laughed, and I teased. I surprised myself at how 'normal' I acted around her: I held-back no wisecracks, nor any snarky comments. Wheelchair-bound or not, my wit made no distinction and didn't bother to spare her at all. I was glad I had all of that to say and do, because on some other level, her situation made me feel sad.

Here's someone who, last I remember, was worried about adjusting to her new job that she had to move city for. Now she's worried about standing on her own legs again. In an instant, in a car crash that she can't even remember, her world was suddenly reduced from a city and its surrounding suburbs, to a hospital room and its surrounding hallways.

A lot of movies/tv/books have used the word 'unfair' when describing similar things, but I don't think that's the right word, just because so many things are unfair on general principle. (It's like describing water as 'wet' - it's true, but it's unnecessary.) It just sucks. It's shit. Shit happens.

Shit happens, then you move on. But somewhere between those two steps, when shit happens to someone I know, there's me feigning a sad face and posting sad panda photos to make the other person laugh, while I hide an actual sad face underneath it all.

*sigh* Week 2 of annual leave is over. What did I get up to this week?

I've already blogged about the piano and recorded myself playing it yesterday. The piano, although very minimalist-looking in size, still takes up a large chunk of the wall of my bedroom where most of my random crap used to sit: bags, books, papers, my heater... pretty much anything that didn't fit in a cupboard or sit on a desk lived in that spot. Now the piano is in that spot, and everything else is on my bed. I had to brush that all aside to make enough room to sleep last night, then this morning I had to put it all back on my bed so I could safely navigate my own room.

So the piano probably isn't going to live where you saw it in that video. I only put it here so I could do the recording since I don't actually have a proper camera; just a webcam and a stereo cable. It's going to have to go in the lounge where there's lots of room. Although most of that room is now taken up by packaging material and the gigantic box in which the piano came in. The box is large enough to work as my coffin - I might have to bend my knees a little, but when I looked down into the box yesterday, empty of the piano and full of space, it was like looking into an Emanuel-sized hole in the ground...

Apart from that, the only other thing worth really mentioning was the Wellington Open Day today, which I just came back from, where a bunch of places throughout the city were available for tours/visits for the price of a gold coin ($1/$2). There was one place in the list of attractions which I had never been to before, the City Gallery, so made that one place to visit, and with the help of a friend who came along with me, turned today into the visiting of places I haven't been to before.

We started at Downstage Theatre (I've only been in the theatre part once when I watched a show there last year), where they told us a bit about that theatre and its history, and took us on a tour of the backstage (haven't been there) including the lighting grid above (definitely haven't been there).

Next was a bar called Motel (been there once before) where there was the option of trying to create the cocktail they showed us, the Red Snapper. The drink is like a Bloody Mary (tomato juice), but with tobasco sauce, amongst other things. Now I would've thought that years of Indian curry lunches with workmates would have prepared me for tobasco sauce (I can now eat the hottest curries without wishing to cut my tongue from my mouth to separate me from the pain). I thought wrong. After the first sip, I kept opening my mouth and breathing out in a futile attempt to get the heat of tobasco sauce away from my throat. The bartender saw my reaction, watered-down my drink for me with more tomato juice, and my friend was kind enough to take a photo of me when I wasn't imitating a fire-breathing dragon.

My new arch nemesis

After that we had lunch at a restaurant called Sweet Mother's Kitchen, a restaurant I had been trying to get to eat at several times in the past couple of years, but each time without success - it's just way too busy and way too popular a place to eat. The furthest I'd ever got in the past was to the counter to ask if they had seating for the number of people in the group I was currently with, only to be told that they might have a spot if we came back in an hour. This time however, they said yes, and were able to seat us. I guess it helped that there were only 2 of us this time, but with each step I kept voicing my excitement: "Yes! They have room at Sweet Mother's Kitchen!", "Yes! I'm sitting down at Sweet Mother's Kitchen!", "Yes! I'm eating food at Sweet Mother's Kitchen!"

I didn't eat as much as I normally would for lunch (Motel also had tiny sandwiches which I ate plenty of when I was trying to dampen the tobasco sauce) but settled on pumpkin pie, which had to be the sweetest pie I have ever eaten (not being familiar with American sweet pies).

Lastly, we went to the City Gallery where we were taken for a tour through one of their current major exhibits, and where our tour group included a couple wearing bear costumes. (Did I mention that the weather is a bit crap today: cold and rainy? No? Well, the weather is a bit crap today, so dressing-up for warmth was a good idea.)

From Japan, where else?

So that's my 2 weeks of leave done. I did a bunch of stuff, but did I actually get done what I planned to get done?

Nope.

Then again, when my plans included items like 'Watch all of the Harry Potter Musical on YouTube', maybe it's better things ended-up this way.

In my last blog post I mentioned the piano shopping I was doing during my annual leave that, unfortunately for me, will have ended by the time you read this. Back to work on Monday like everybody else... *sigh*

From the major music stores in the city, I was able to quickly cut it down to 2 digital pianos that, for my price range, had pretty much everything I was after: a full range of keys, weighted, with a good grand piano sound, and some options for a sort-of beginner piano player like myself. If you're interested in model numbers, they were the Yamaha Arius YDP-S31, and the Korg LP-350

The Yamaha grand piano sound is what I grew up on, and because of that the Yamaha had a head-start over every other keyboard I came across. The weighted keys though felt a bit tough and kinda bouncy, which weirded me out.

The Korg was the opposite: great feel, but the sound from the built-in speakers felt like they missed the grand piano sound in some notes, particularly the higher ones.

So I spent a lot of time going back-and-forth between the 2 music stores that had these models, and soon enough the staff there were able to recognize me by sight. I brought my headphones to each store, tried to remember the way the pianos felt and sounded as I went between one store to the other, trawled the internet for reviews and opinions from others, and generally spent a crapload of time getting nowhere.

Then, last Sunday, I went indoor rock climbing for a friend's birthday which turned my arms into jelly. It was the best thing to happen to me in my hunt for a digital piano.

With my arms now useless, struggling to lift a glass of coke to my lips in the lunch that followed (well it wasn't that bad, but avid readers of this blog will have learned that hyperbole is my friend), it made a difference when I next went to play those 2 pianos. First, I went to the Yamaha, and the tougher resistance in the keys made it an effort to play. I actually got tired on that piano and thought, Screw this. I'm going home.

The path home from there went passed the other music store with the Korg, so I decided to give the Korg a play anyway, thinking I wouldn't get a whole song finished before my fatigued arms would fail me and droop to my sides in defeat. I sat before the Korg, played and... made it all the way through the song. Huh, I thought, let's try another. So I did, and I got through that too.

I never noticed how much I was struggling with the Yamaha's keys until I had virtually no energy left. I don't know whether that speaks volumes about my lack of upper-body strength or that my purchase decisions tend towards the things that need the least energy out of me, but that was the tie-breaker: I went with the Korg.

I bought it on Tuesday, then waited for the delivery of it every night since then (the colour of the model I was after had to be sourced from another store, but they said they should be able to get it overnight). Like a child on the night of Christmas Eve, I couldn't go to sleep because I kept anticipating the delivery of the piano the next day. In the day that followed, no call from the music store. So I waited the next day, lacked sleep once again, and it still didn't come. This went on for a while - while enough for me to lose sleep over several days in a row such that this morning, even after the full 8 hours of sleep that I normally need to function, I woke up feeling exhausted.

After getting some breakfast in me to provide the energy I needed that sleep wouldn't provide, I got a call from the music store that they would be around with the piano in the next half an hour :D

I was very glad that I could get it before I had to go back to work on the Monday. I even went so far as to record me playing (badly) on it:

So, 2 weeks of leave, and this is what I have to show for it.

And so my first week of two weeks annual leave has just finished (and to start it off I began this sentence with a conjunction to piss certain people off with whom I had a discussion/argument about it earlier this week). There's nothing particularly special about the leave; I'm not doing any travelling or visiting any distant relatives, I'm just taking some time off now that the project I've been working on for nearly 2 years has finally been released to the customer. That transition took place over Queen's Birthday Weekend (a long weekend 3 weekends ago now, for which I was also working), and I seriously feel like I need a break.

I was supposed to have written this blog post yesterday, but as part of a ceroc friend's birthday celebrations I went (indoor) rock climbing with them and then lost all function in my arms. Heck, once I got home I couldn't even pull my socks up my legs without getting my fingers locked into some tight grip/claw shape because I didn't have the strength to straighten my fingers into their normal position.

So in this first week of leave I've managed to go rock climbing, discover I have very little upper-body endurance, and return to dance classes. I've also cleaned almost every corner of my apartment (there used to exist a thin film of dust and Farmbake cookies that settled over the carpet like geological strata - not any more!) and do a little more work on this website to make it more responsive. Mainly though, I've been shopping around for a new digital piano to upgrade from my existing keyboard: an old 5-octave Yamaha keyboard my parents bought me for my 15th(?) birthday to help me with the whole self-taught piano thing I was going through at that age.

It was the first instrument I learned to play (if you discount the ones that the numerous primary schools I attended taught all their kids) and really stuck with, even if it was an on-and-off sort of thing. I'd learn the occasional tune, practice and play it to death until I could play it blind-folded and annoy my family who had to put up with hearing the same songs over and over again, then move on. When university came around the piano-playing took a back seat to my studies and I picked-up the guitar which I thought of as an easier way to take music with me. I stuck with the guitar for several years until my guitar buddy and I stopped our practice sessions. Then, without much motivation to continue the guitar, I returned to the piano.

Compared to the musicians I listen to or those I pay to see at the occasional concert/orchestra, I'm not very good, and being self-taught means I lack all the theoretical background any normal music student would have received during their life. For example: I only learned what constitutes a chord, and how to make a triad, last year in an after-school beginners keyboard/piano course that I signed-up to because I was accused of having too much free time. What I thought of as a chord or triad, I saw as a pattern on the keys of a piano; what I knew in my head for a chord progression, I saw once again as numbers and a series of patterns that followed some sort of hidden formula or rule that to me just sounded nice.

Music for me was a series of patterns, numbers, and shapes. Without the theoretical/educational background, I didn't have any other way to express what I saw.

It was only once I started hanging-out with musicians or other musically-inclined people that I gained names for these things - I no longer had to refer to things as 'that pattern' or 'that hand shape' and I could use the names given to them by other musicians and feel a bit smarter for speaking the proper lingo.

I learned to play songs that went beyond the old Yamaha's 5-octave range a long time ago, but couldn't afford the next step up. If I couldn't get away with transposing the entire keyboard down/up an octave to compensate for the lack of keys, I would imagine myself playing those notes and the sounds they'd make during the song as I played it. I'd also grab some time on a proper piano whenever I could: sneaking a go on the super-expensive grands that sat on the floor of a local music shop during my lunch hour, or shooting out after dance classes to play the terrible-sounding upright that lived in the room next to where lessons were held.

Now that I'm on a break, have some money, and am back into playing the piano now that work has calmed down significantly, I've been digital piano shopping. Hopefully I'll have something before my second week of leave is up :)

6am waking-up in the morning...

No, it's not Friday. It's Sunday, very early in the morning by my standards, and I'm at work.

---
The room was still covered in darkness when I awoke, the alarm from my cell phone at the lowest volume setting, yet creating what felt like a loud plea for me to wake in the relative quiet of the early morning. My hand reached out from its warm spot under my duvet and protested what it was doing when it met the cold of the morning air. My arm continued to reach however, not needing input from my sleep-addled brain as it had performed this manoeuvre many times before - locating my cellphone on the bedside table, flipping it open (I've still got one of those clamshell-type phones), and pressing the button that would silence it's pleas to rouse me from my sleep. I would have normally gone straight back to sleep after that, returning to whatever dreams I had momentarily left by the time my arm returned to its place under the warm duvet, but something in my head kept prodding me and preventing me from sleeping:

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

It was just as annoying as my cellphone alarm, but I didn't have a routine to turn this kind of buzzing off; I couldn't reach a metaphysical arm into my brain and press the button to turn off subconscious thought. So I just lay there, listening to its pleas:

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

Who else's subconscious is a penguin with crash cymbals?

Why? I wondered back. Why must I wake up? It's too early, it's a Sunday, it's the LONG WEEKEND! WHY? But my questions were useless; the subconscious never answers questions, it only makes requests.

And it almost always wins.

I opened my eyes. Then I wondered if I did that right, because all I could see was the same blackness that stared back at me through closed lids. My eyes wouldn't open any further, so I tried turning to find something I could train them on, and there, on my ceiling, was a single streak of light from a lamp on the street outside.

I came to several conclusions then: that it was cold, that it was early, and that the sun had not yet risen. I also remembered something else: I had to go to work.

So I got out of bed, faced the frigid daggers of single-digit temperatures that were waiting for me the moment I shrugged off my duvet, and started my usual morning routine at the pace of a shambling zombie. My eyes never opened fully, despite my repeated attempts, and I managed to make my way through getting changed, eating breakfast, and brushing my teeth, amongst other things. I remember looking into the mirror through the slits in my eyes and looking upon the 6am version of myself: sunken eyes, frazzled hair, no will to carry on, and only the wish to sleep. That last one however, was normally the subconscious' job, but it was still intent on getting me to work instead.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

It seems I wasn't awake enough by my subconscious' standards and it could see through the charade that I placed before it to try to get it to shut up; the zombie-Emanuel marionette on display wasn't enough to appease its simple request and high standards. I didn't think my state of mind would have met the medical definition of awake or conscious either, but it was all I could muster at such an early hour. Like Superman, I draw-upon the sun for my powers, but the sun was still a while away from shining its grace on my little corner of the world.

By the time I left my apartment to begin the walk to work, the sky was still the same shade of black as the shadows of a dark alley where unwitnessed murders would take place. There is no colour to be found in an early morning city: only the glare of artificial lights and a million shades of black. I looked down at my pants and couldn't tell what colour they were, couldn't even remember what colour I put on when I got changed this morning. Zombies apparently don't have a short-term memory. Funny, I thought, considering their insatiable appetite for brains.

I haven't had to wake up this early in a long time. The streets, normally packed with other people making their way towards their own work, were empty of humanity. I was reminded me of those old spaghetti western movies that I used to watch with my dad, and I half expected to see a tumbleweed float by - incongruous in a city setting, but not out-of-place for the current context.

A dark shape skittered across the road - a plastic bag.

Hmph, appropriate. I thought.

Urban tumbleweed

---
So yeah, I'm at work, at an unusual time and day. This weekend, the system that I've been working on for almost 2 years is being released and I'm here to help oversee the transition. Although there's actually one of the more senior and knowledgeable guys here to cover that, I'm sort of the backup, the 'throw-ideas-at-me' guy. So with nothing to really do until we get a phone call from the few people on-site to report something odd going on with the transition, I decided to do some blogging.

The light at the end of the tunnel that I've been chasing after for so long is finally here, and it feels like all the weight and stress of the previous months is finally leaving me. I should really be more stressed, considering that now I'll be moving-on to doing live support and production fixes, but it just feels so much better to see the end of something that's acted like a vacuum to my spare time and social life - sucking it all away from me until I only had work and the next working-day left to look forward to.

So fingers crossed that nothing catastrophic happens; catastrophic to the system we're deploying, not catastrophic to the planet. Hell, I'm more worried right now of our phones ringing than I am of a meteor striking the Earth. That saying about how silence is golden? For me, at this very moment: totally true.

After having learned about the sport some 4 years ago, I've finally got around to reading-up on Handball. My friend Claire, the same person who was the subject of the previously-linked story e-mail and who was the one who brought the sport to my attention, has a game this weekend and has invited pretty much everyone under the sun to watch and support her team, which just happens to be the NZ women's team.

Knowing Wikipedia and my browsing habits, I'm trying not to learn too much about it, or get caught in some sort of link-following tangent and end-up reading about some completely unlrelated subjects like the Catholic Church (3 clicks from Handball) or triskaidekaphobia (4 clicks from Handball). I'm trying to learn just enough so I can understand what the hell is going on so that come this weekend, when I'm watching the game, it doesn't just look like a game of basketball being played with a smaller ball and a soccer net.

I seem to be learning a lot this past week. Not only is there the handball, but over the weekend I also learned that for over 20 years, I have been trying my shoe laces wrong. Well, not really 'wrong' per se, but using a 'weak knot' as Terry says in the video below (I'm sure someone else can post the link to the proper term for these different knots).

When I came across that video I showed it to the rest of my family (I was staying with them last weekend) and within minutes all 4 of us were scrutinizing our shoe-tying techniques and discovering that each of us has a different method for achieving the same result. I mean, if you think of tying your shoes as 2 parts - the initial over-under knot, and then the bow - here's how each of us gets this done:

Me: right lace over left, right bow over left
Mum: left lace over right, right bow over left
Dad: left lace over right, left bow over right
Brother: right lace over left, left bow over right

Between the 4 of us we cover every permutation, and because both my dad and I tie in the same direction twice, we both come out as having the weak knot. We thought this was a bit odd because we all agreed that it was my mum who taught my brother and I how to tie our shoes, so we don't know how both of us could have deviated from whatever it was she was trying to teach. Then again: my brother is left-handed, and I avoided laces for as long as I could, opting for good-old valcro shoes well into my primary school years, until I had the courage to face the intimidating snakes that lived to cling to my feet.

So from yesterday, whenever I had to tie my shoes, I opted to tie the stronger knot, and I'm having some difficulty in doing so. I mean, tying my laces is an automatic operation which requires virtually zero participation from my conscious mind - I just put on a shoe, send my hands towards the shoes, and presto: instant knot. Now, I have to actually think about what I'm doing, and the change in movements is really awkward, like trying to write with my left hand awkward; the movements feel unnatural, slow, hesitant, and by the time I'm done I've got a really loose version of the stronger knot because I couldn't keep the proper pressure down on the initial knot to prevent it from getting undone.

But I stuck at it because I have 2 pairs of shoes, work ones especially, which keep getting undone around half-way through the work day (so I'm walking around the city for lunch with my laces untied quite a lot more often than I'd prefer). This morning I put on one of those shoes, took maybe 5 attempts to get the stronger knot done, and went to work to put the knot through its paces. Every now and then I'd steal a glance at my feet to see how the knot was holding up, and it stayed tied for the entire day. I was impressed.

I think it'll be worth the additional and conscious effort - it'll just take a really long time to get it feeling all natural and automatic.

It reminded me of another book I recently returned to the library (the one that cost me $5 to borrow, and only then I was limited to 7 days. It took me 8 to read it, incurring a late fee, so at $6 total that book was easily the most money I have ever spent at the library). In it, the main character has a side of her brain damaged in an accident, and so after some surgery suffers from 'left neglect' (or a hemispatial neglect of the left side) in which she no longer becomes aware of the left side of her body, or anything to her left. What's strange is that at first she doesn't even know that she has this left neglect - the other half of her brain is filling-in all the gaps in her awareness, and so the story is about how she has to consciously retrain herself to remember that there is a left side, to look left, to think about and command that left leg to move while she's walking, and a whole bunch of other things that many of us just do without having to think about it.

Sure my shoelace-tying doesn't compare to those with actual neglect, but if at my age I'm finding it difficult to break something my mind and body have done for over 20 years and 'unlearn what I have learned', how do you even start retraining yourself to make use of a side of your body that your mind doesn't believe exists?

Living in the city has made me weak.

I spent the last week-and-a-bit living in the family home out in the suburbs to make sure the place didn't fall into disrepair while my parents were away on holiday in Australia. That included doing things like: watering the plants so they maintained the colour of chlorophyll rather than the colour of the sun, and keeping my brother company so he wouldn't do things like scroll large prophetic and doom-impending messages on the walls with his own faeces.

So 2 weekends ago I brought a bunch of my stuff over there so I wouldn't die of boredom, and in that first day I was subject to the first of several things that I have not missed since moving into the city: hay fever.

I've had hay fever since I was 8 (may have been 7 at the time, you know how all those long-ago memories start to merge and mingle), and I remember the visit to the doctor then and being told that there wasn't anything I could take for it. That itself was a shock to me because every other time I went to the doctor a visit to the pharmacist always came afterwards. The doctor's advice: I might grow out of it.

Almost 20 years later, I can say with absolute certainty that I didn't grow out of it.

There was a time when I thought the hay fever would leave me, and that was during my late teens when I was getting used to, of all things, cigarette smoke.

No I don't smoke, but around the same time I was diagnosed with hay fever, I also learned that if I spent too long around smokers (my parents did have some friends who smoked, and of course they'd take my brother and I over with them and then get all of us kids to mingle, ie: leave them alone, while they hang-out, and over the years some of my friends did pick up the habit), I would spend the next 48 hours vomiting. This was proved time and time again, and followed me well into high school. Towards the final days of secondary education, I remember being at a party and talking with people outside, some of whom smoked. I was dreading the thought of having to find that vomit bucket and get it ready for when I woke up the next day after inhaling all this cigarette smoke, but when the next day came and my urge to throw-up was well below my urge to punch a kitten in the face, I had genuine hopes for losing other long-lasting afflictions, like my hay fever.

I find it odd that I got more used to cigarette smoke, which will likely kill me, than I did to pollen, which won't kill me but just make me miserable for a few weeks in a year. I often took antihistamines to combat the symptoms (and have a certain former-pharmacy friend to thank for telling me about the cheaper-yet-just-as-good-as-the-brand-stuff antihistamines), but since living in the city I haven't really needed to take them since the ratio of things that produce pollen versus things that don't is very much in the favour of hay fever sufferers like myself.

So when I got back to the family home and went out into the backyard to look over my dad's garden (he's got a few of my basil plants growing there now and I wanted to see how they were doing), I triggered the hay fever bomb and spent the rest of the day blowing my nose into tissue paper that was 1-ply too thin to contain the force of snot as it sped out of my head.

Thus began my week of house sitting.

I woke-up last Saturday morning with a very sore throat, which could only mean one of 2 things: I tried and failed to sing Katy Perry's Firework again, or I was being a loud and tipsy version of myself. I could have easily been doing both (that second one often increases the chances of the first one happening), but after letting my mind rack-up enough waking minutes to start thinking proper thoughts and not dream-addled fairy tales, I remembered: I was being a loud and tipsy version of myself.

The night before I was at a friend's little birthday drinks get-together, and the only person I really knew who was going to be there was the birthday girl herself. This seems to be happening a bit more recently - where I go to social gatherings where I will know only 1 person (at least, 2 if it's a good day) and that person will be the one who invited me in the first place. This would usually make me a tad nervous, but I think somewhere in doing all those ceroc dance classes, I've become a lot more comfortable talking to people who I didn't know an hour ago.

One of those things I've become accustomed to doing is to just let whatever thought is occupying my mind, based on the current topic of conversation, to come out. OK, so it's not as clear-cut as that (I still had to learn what to filter and what to let through), but it's like the internal censorship board within my own head takes a break for a couple of hours and lets through a lot more MA15+ material than normal.

I already do this to some extent in my day-to-day and work life, so I've had a bit of practice. If anything, it's taught me that once you start with your own thoughts on something, the other person/people can take that as a sign to say what they're thinking. If you ever worried that your own thoughts might be a little strange or borderline incriminating, just wait until the other person/people say what's on their minds and then be surprised at how much more ridiculous the things they're thinking can be than yours.

Case-in-point: that night I made a 'your mum' joke (it's a staple in my conversational repertoire), and after a few more different takes on the joke from others poking fun at other members of one's immediate family, eventually reaching to extended family, someone chimed in with words that amounted to: "Hold on, can you legally marry your cousin?"

I may have opened the floodgates, but it wasn't me that provided the water.

So it was a conversation killer... in any other setting. Instead, people got out their smartphones and started looking up the information on the internet while the rest of us who had phones that can barely connect dots, let alone connect to the internet, argued very loudly about it until someone could provide a comprehensive answer. Once someone did - quoting the New Zealand Marriage Act like they had at least 1 law paper under their belt - it became a bit of a recurring theme for the night. We were guys were all over the topic, whereas the birthday girl looked a bit ashamed at the company she managed to put together.

That wasn't the only time many of us got out our phones though. Maybe half-way through the night, a late-comer brought us the news that Japan had just suffered an epic earthquake. Our initial reaction was that he was talking about the one from a few days before, but no it was one that hit just moments before and that so much shit was hitting the fan: tsunami warnings across the Pacific, oil rigs in Japan on fire, towns being destroyed by multi-metre waves, and so-on. At that news, many of us got out our phones for more information or, like in my case, to find-out if our friends in Japan were OK.

Odd, that I had more friends affected by that earthquake all the way in Japan than I did by the earthquake just a few hops south in Christchurch.

I went straight to Facebook, and after maybe my 5th login attempt (my login e-mail is a .com, not a .cow) I found that my friends were alive and, while not as 100% as they would normally be, they were alive. So with my mind at relative ease, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, disconnected my phone from the internet, and carried-on with the night at hand.

So I may have over-done it with the 'say everything that comes to mind' thing, because the friends of the birthday girl were already quite open and very engaging, strangers or otherwise. Not every situation requires that I dial my sarcasm levels up to 11 (an 8 will often do, or even a mild 5) and not every situation needs me making loud or potentially inappropriate comment about someone's mother.

I didn't really need to overdo it and give myself a sore throat the following morning. I could've saved my voice the extra hurt and instead used it for another attempt at Firework.

If the .nz part of the domain of this site hasn't already given away my location, I am in New Zealand. I'm not, however, in Christchurch where much of this country's and some of the world's attentions are focused due to the destructive earthquake that took place there earlier this week.

Also, I don't really know anybody in Christchurch. I have been there before, several years ago, but the 2 degrees rule (where anybody living in NZ is only 2 degrees of separation away from anybody else in NZ thanks in part to the size of our country) is the only way I can make any connection to the city:

• My landlord told me last night that his daughter was just driving away from her house when the quake struck. That was lucky for her because her house is now in ruins.
• And several friends have brothers/sisters or other friends there who for the most part have been confirmed as alive and well.

Despite my lack of connections, I find myself drawn to the latest news coming out of there: when I get home from work I start watching the 6 o'clock news (even though both our major news channels have been doing nearly-all-day coverage), eating dinner through it and the extended coverage that follows. I eventually manage to pull myself away and do something else, only to grab a bit of the late night news before I go to sleep, whereupon I bid Christchurch goodnight. Then, in the morning, instead of my usual ritual of turning on my Xbox to play some music while I get ready for work, I tune in to the breakfast shows for an update on events that happened through the night.

It's all that I hear about, and understandably so: with the death toll now over 100 and the number of missing still at 200+, it's easily the country's worst disaster.

I wasn't like this in the beginning. When the news first reached me via Twitter and other work mates after returning from my lunch break, I said, "What happened to Christchurch? Another earthquake?" I'm not a person who rolls their eyes (it's something I actually have to think about doing to accomplish), but when I think back on my reaction I always imagine me doing so.

Now, I've been using my Twitter and Facebook accounts to retweet/forward information (particularly to friends overseas), I'm dressed in as much #redandblack as I can muster (which isn't really a lot), and I'm 2 clicks away from forwarding a large chunk of my last paycheck to the national Red Cross.

Yet I still feel particularly useless from where I sit: here I watch and read about people doing all they can to save lives and all I'm doing is absorbing information and writing about it on this blog during work hours. I'm too far away to help with the various volunteer efforts, I'm hesitant to donate blood because the news is saying they need it while the blood service is saying they don't (I also stopped donating some years ago when, despite my very high iron levels (180+ on some scale I can't seem to locate right now), I discovered that every time I donate I fall to the ground and can't get up for the next couple of minutes. But hey, if they need it, I can suffer being on the ground for a few).

It's restlessness, I know. Even if I did manage to find my way into Christchurch, I have no appreciable skills to contribute to the effort, and will likely be more of a hindrance than a help. I mean, what good is a computer programmer when you don't have electricity?

On that note, with all the support and 'we're behind you' efforts/messages being largely organized through the internet, I hope that the people of Christchurch know how worried about them the rest of New Zealand really is.

If anything, this whole ordeal has made me want to fast-track those First Aid training courses I've been trying to get work to sponsor me for since I came up to them with the idea last year. I'm a little useless where I am now, but it'll help should I ever find myself in a bad situation. When that happens, at least I'll be ready.

There's something special to be said about receiving mail from a friend. That is, old-school snail mail. Why? Well for one it happens so rarely that it's a surprise all on its own: my mailbox is visited more frequently by bank statements, bills (for that 1 company that has no facility whatsoever to e-mail me my bills), and a constant stream of parking infringement reminder notices for someone who didn't even used to live here before (when I kept sending those ones back, I eventually got a letter asking 'if you know the whereabouts of [the guy who keeps racking-up parking fines] please contact us').

So when my guitar buddy asked several of us for our addresses so she could send us Christmas cards, I got pretty excited. Then when nothing arrived some 3 weeks after Christmas, I became pretty disappointed.

I asked her about it, and she did send me one to the right address. It just never arrived. She managed to have more luck with everybody else - even one guy in Europe received one of her cards - so we thought, Oh, just a one-off postal service fail.

Before this, I've had very good experiences when it came to sending/receiving letters/packages. Whenever I've imported something from overseas, it has always arrived before the sender's estimate, and with virtually no damage from the shipping/handling process. And whenever I've sent something overseas, the person on the other end has always received it at most within the ETA (eg: Christmas cards to Germany, England, letters to Belgium, Japan). Hell I have even sent actual money in an envelope overseas, then had it sent back and it was all still there!

I've generally had more faith in the postal service to ensure that things reach their intended recipient than I have with my cellphone provider to ensure that my text messages arrive within 24 hours of me sending them.

So, still feeling pleased about the postal service, and with that one-off Christmas card fail behind me, I packaged-up a book and a short letter to another of my friends who is feeling a little under-loved in Japan.

I sent that package on the 25th of January, with an ETA of 6-10 working days.
She received it yesterday, the 20th of February, with a stamp on it that read:

Missent to Vancouver, Canada.

In the past I've talked about how I show my age by sticking to buying CDs instead of buying digitally via iTunes or Amazon. I've even fallen out of grace with some friends by admitting what I've bought. The more egotistical side of me even goes on to think I'm one of the reasons the brick-and-mortar CD retail store is still around.

Well, as of a few weeks ago, that all changed. I installed iTunes.

Sunnovabitch

This isn't the first time I've tried to install iTunes. I've tried maybe 2 other times in the past year, but each time, for unknown reasons, the iTunes installer would just die on me. The instant I OK'ed the install location (which was just the default), the installer would give me its equivalent of the fail whale, before giving me 1 choice: Quit. (It's not really a choice if there are no other options now is it?)

I didn't really want to delve any deeper: there was likely something screwed-up with my Win7 64-bit install, but I didn't care; I didn't really need iTunes to help me with any part of my life that wasn't already covered by some other program or process on my computer. I was installing iTunes to pique my curiosity and trial a different media player.

But this all changed where, in the last few months, I started following a lot more independent or lesser-known musicians on YouTube. Now I love YouTube, but every rose has it's thorns. I've already ranted about how crude YouTube comments have been. I mean, where else can you find an abundance of lines like:

Uhhh...? no one forced you watch it. Please murder yourself.
- (source)

Anyway, one of those musicians posted a cover of Avril Lavigne's new single, What the Hell, that was so different from the original and gave it so much meaning that I probably added another 100 to the video's view count. Eventually, I was compelled to buy it to show my appreciation towards the artist, so I downloaded the iTunes installer again, ran it, prepared myself for it to fall over and... whoa, it installed properly.

I told my brother about it installing successfully, and he asked me, "You didn't install iTunes 10 did you?" Turns out I did, which is the version he hates with every fiber of his being for a whole lot of what he considers "UI fails". This being my first ever iTunes installation (and probably the only reason it installed properly on my computer), I kept it. When a new version comes out, I'll just be impressed by it a whole lot more (or unimpressed by it a whole lot less) since what is the 'norm' for me is already a lot lower than those who were able to have previous versions of iTunes to remember.

So I bought the song, tweeted about it, and now I'm hooked. A whole new world of music is now available to me and they just make it so damn easy to lose my money in it. Even though I keep a budget spreadsheet to track my own expenditures, there are just some things that I don't track, namely small ticket items like gum or the coins that I give to some charities on their street collection day. iTunes songs are less than what I give those charities, hell they're even less than a pack of gum! So they never really make it into there and I don't feel I've spent anything until Apple e-mails me a receipt for my past week's worth of purchases and I look at them all and think, Oh damn...

Ah, I had a lovely break last week. There wasn't any particular occasion; the city had its anniversary day so we got Monday off (yay 3-day weekend), but I took the rest of the week off as well. I called it my own Christmas / New Year's holiday since I was unfortunate enough to be the guy working over the actual Christmas / New Year's break, drawing the short straw because of my lack of plans and lack of dependants.

So what did I do? Well, constructive stuff surprisingly: I worked on improving this website's stability (5 days without an error page! Fingers still crossed.) and other features for myself, I started writing this idea I had for a story based on a song my guitar buddy and I came up with last year, and because of said story I did a bit of extra subject matter reading which unfortunately had me read some pretty bad books. I also trimmed and replanted what used to be my 2-feet-tall basil plant into 2 much smaller / more manageable plants (gave a lot of leaf cuttings to my family, had basil in almost every meal the weekend that I spent with them).

As for things that fall into the unconstructive basket: I bought Castlevania: Lords of Shadow :D

Towards the end of the break, I spent the weekend with family, and upon returning to my place, found the living-room window smashed from the outside and a helluva lot of glass on the floor.

Hello there neighbours and 118km/h north-westerly winds

While the possibility existed, I didn't really think my place had been broken into; there were signs that wasn't the case. Instead, my mind, and everybody else's who I mentioned it to (landlord and property management company included), got to wondering: what the hell caused that hole?

Without CSI-like knowledge or a CSI-like flashback of events, it was a difficult question to answer. The blinds were down at the time, so whatever smashed the window was likely bounced back out after it did its job. Everyone had their theories: bricks, epic strong winds, a water balloon which defied physics and obtained the mass of a brick (that tiny red thing on the window sill in the right shot was a deflated balloon), etc. The most common theory though, was that it was a bird.

On hearing the bird theory, my mind made the following logic leaps: bird > bird hurling itself towards my window > bird breaking shit > bird must've had a temper > Angry Birds.

For the 5 of you out there who don't know what Angry Birds is, it is quite possibly the most popular iPad/iPhone game ever (with ports for various other devices being made) in which limbless birds, controlled by you, hurl themselves at terribly-constructed structures to kill the limbless animals that live inside for the satisfaction of watching large numbers appear on screen proportional to the damage your bird has done.

Thinking about that game, things started making an odd sort of sense in my head. I didn't imagine that someone had been hurling birds at my apartment building in hopes of knocking it down, but thought that the birds of the world, having had enough of being portrayed as projectiles for destruction thanks to the game, decided to get their revenge, ironically, by acting as destructive projectiles.

Why the hell they picked me, I'm not sure. I don't even own an iPad/iPhone. Hell, I imagined myself sticking my head out the broken window, turning my head towards the birds above and shouting: "WHY ARE YOU TARGETING ME!? I DON'T EVEN LIKE APPLE PRODUCTS!" Unfortunately for my imagined self, there were Apple fanboys crowding the streets and alleys outside, so instead of birds throwing themselves again at my other windows for my remarks, there were Apple fanboys throwing their iPods, white earbuds and all, at my face.

It's not a just a music player, it's also a weapon

The window isn't fixed yet - living several stories above ground makes proper repairs a bit difficult. My dad and I, with the help of a lot of spare tape from a friend who lives up the road, covered the hole with thick plastic and backed by wooden shelving from the kitchen. We kinda went overboard on the tape as well, the visible surface of the window covered with more tape than plastic.

A glazier came over the next day, remarked on the good job of the tape and shelving overkill, and replaced it with a temporary pane which was simply glued to what was left of the window, and sealed with 4 bits of tape. Suddenly the job my dad and I did to cover the window lacked both practicality and elegance.

At least I have a sort of window now. I just owe my friend a helluva lot of tape.

This morning I was wondering what to eat for brunch after a trip to Moore Wilson's (think grocery-slash-specialty-store. It is a supermarket, but it's got a lot of the good stuff that you won't find in your normal supermarket, like special ingredients that you'd only find in restaurants or mentioned on the Food Channel). I skipped breakfast since I woke-up pretty late, and I did kinda want to eat out anyway. So across the street from Moore Wilson's is the Brooklyn Bakery, and it was in their cabinet of delicious-looking sandwiches that I was searching for my between-breakfast-and-lunch meal.

While the picture above wasn't taken from the Brooklyn Bakery, what they had on display was very similar; lots of breads/buns/paninis filled with all manner and combinations of cuts of food. The one I eventually settled on was right next to an egg and bacon roll (which, when I looked at it, decided not to have because I had eggs for breakfast yesterday), so I went up to the counter and asked for "a roast vege sandwich please".

I also asked if they had any nice cold drinks (it's been very hot the last couple of days) and they suggested an iced chocolate. I didn't even know they did those, but it sounded like a cold version of a hot chocolate (which is what I usually get at cafe-type places instead of coffee because I'm not a coffee person) so I thought to roll with it and come what may.

When I sat down at a table a thought struck me, I ordered a vegetarian sandwich didn't I?, and it wasn't the first time in my life that I mentally smacked myself for choosing the meatless option.

My history with vegetarian food has been very hit and miss. Examples of misses include:

• eating falafels on World Vegetarian Day - they look delicious, but they taste so very bland
• choosing this pasta dish at a family dinner - it ended-up being basically tagliatelle pasta with nuts and spinach in some indistinct sauce
• there was a lasagne and I can't remember exactly what was in it, but it was mostly tomato sauce

There are more instances which I can't remember, but in each one I chose the meal on purpose - either to expand my eating options or to just try something new - and in each one it was followed by a feeling of still being hungry maybe 2 hours later: a tell-tale sign that my appetite wasn't satisfied. Disappointment came soon afterwards.

Those experiences have tainted my view of vegetarian food and always makes me reluctant to try again.

As for 'hits', there have been so few that I can remember all of them:

• ordering the 'Tuscan' bagel at Wholly Bagels - eggplant, pesto, mushrooms
• eating non-meat sausage rolls at a friend's flatwarming
• picking the spinach and feta omelette for lunch with a friend

Yes, that's it. Just 3. In my entire life.

What made those moments positives in my impression of vegetarian food in general is that they tasted really good, and they didn't make me hungry soon afterwards. And in each of those 3 cases, I picked them completely by accident.

With the Tuscan bagel, I thought the eggplant was some sort of special meat I hadn't eaten before (I've eaten eggplant, but not presented in that manner). With the fake sausage rolls, they did such a good job of imitating real sausage rolls that I didn't know they were vegetarian until I had gone through at least 2 of them and the friend who was cooking them up told me. As for the spinach and feta omelette, it was the nicest looking thing in the food cabinet at that time and place that wasn't a salad.

How I discover good vegetarian food

What was the roast vegetable sandwich going to fall under? Well it wasn't a complete accident (there were meat options right beside it after all) and I chose it because it was the most colourful of the sandwiches there*.

Did choosing it for the colour make it an accident? Not entirely. I hadn't had breakfast yet, so was it going to fill me up? I didn't know. So when the sandwich arrived, all warmed-up from the toaster, I was hesitant, but I was hungry. I dug into it, and... it was one of the best vegetarian meals I have ever eaten.

---
* I'll explain that in a future blog post; it needs a whole new entry for itself

So it's been a pretty gloomy news week in New Zealand with the country having its own mining disaster without the happy ending that Chile had; flags flying at half-mast all over the place; moments of silence before sporting events; etc. Coupled with my last blog post where I started complaining about my workload again, my outlook on life has been 10 shades of grey all week.

But they say it's all about balance right? And there have been some little things here and there which have managed to keep my spirits above the red line of despair and medication. For example:

It's Christmas shopping time (it has been for well over a month now as far as retail stores are concerned) and in trying to find something for myself (which usually means looking for snow globes) I spotted this in amongst the novelty calendars at a nearby bookstore:

An insult a day keeps the emo away

After a long day at work yesterday (the day of the Big Bad News about the miners for all NZ) my friend Claire invited me to watch the local football team play at the stadium on a free ticket. Turned-out that ticket was her dad's season pass, so I had to pretend to be her dad which is nigh impossible because of the similarity in age and difference in skin colour. It also led to a few jokes about me being 'her daddy'.

...and what does he do?

And today, when I was going back to work after a lunch w/ my dad (his turn to pay! :D ) I came across a cafe that a friend of mine absolutely loves (and for those of you who can't read sarcasm between the italics: she despises the place. It might have even been one of the reasons she moved to Melbourne). Well, what was left of the cafe anyway; the place was empty and in the window was this note:
http://whaleoil.gotcha.co.nz/2010/11/22/bob-jones-give-that-man-a-medal/

The second thought to cross my mind was, "Oh Linda's gonna love this!" (no italics, no sarcasm) so I e-mailed her the details and hoped that the timezone difference was enough to make that piece of news be the highlight of her day.
(the first thought to cross my mind was mainly onomatopoeia of laughing noises)

And finally, there's always YouTube:

Last Friday I was in one of those 'yay it's the end of the week' moods that pretty much anybody who has some regular work looks forward (or in the case of some of my friends, Friday/Saturday since their schedule has them working Sun-Thurs). That in itself isn't special since I get in that mood pretty much every Friday, but it was also combined with a bit of a 'I wanna splash-out a bit on lunch' mood that accompanies a successful working week.

What made this week particularly successful? Well for the first time in 2010, I have reduced my workload to only a handful of items; after almost a year of having too much to do, I can finally count the number of things I have to do at work without having to require a second digit.

So for lunch that day, I went to one of my favourite feeling-like-spending-a-bit-more-on-lunch places, Sierra Cafe.

Sierra Cafe, Mezzanine floor of Capital on the Quay, Lambton Quay

For clarification, I'm not rich, nor does my job pay me a helluva lot. And for those who have to translate my definition of 'splashing-out on lunch' into their local currency and personal circumstances, here's some rough numbers:

• the cost of my lunch nowadays is between 5-10 New Zealand dollars, leaning more towards the upper part of that range given the recent tax increase on goods and services
• 1 New Zealand dollar ~ 78 US cents
• the price of a McDonald's Big Mac combo is around $8 ($8.90 now I think?), the burger itself is around $5 (see: Big Mac Index)

A normal spend on lunch for me is around $8 NZ. Anything above $10 means I'm either buying a drink (I often bring my bottle of water) or having lunch with the workmates. And if I'm spending $15+, then I'm feeling rich for no particular reason and am 'splashing out'.

The meals that I go for at Sierra are definitely in the $15+ range.

I don't often go to Sierra or places like it, simply because if I kept spending too much on lunch I'd run my own budget into the ground. I more often find myself at fast-food places, especially those at the food court near my work, and it's at those places I'm not too surprised that I've been recognized by the staff as a regular there. I can think of 2 places at that food court where the people behind the till can recite my order to me before I even open my mouth, and there's been one time in recent memory where being a regular got me special treatment.

So it surprised me that Friday lunch time when the guy behind the till recognized me as someone who likes going there. He also noticed I'm not a coffee person (when I do go there I usually get one of the fruit smoothies) so he got me a coffee card, said I could use it to purchase any drinks whenever I'm there, and before he handed it to me he stamped about 8 of the 10 stamps you need to get your free drink, saying "That should make up for all the other times."

I like free stuff as much as the next person, and even though I didn't get anything for free, I got my special treatment for being a regular - I was put on the path towards a free drink; a path normally reserved for caffeine addicts, of which I am not :D

A friend of mine had her birthday recently - a dinner on the Saturday night, with her birthday proper on Monday - and she had herself a little pile... OK, a rather large pile of birthday presents that took up a substantial amount of room on the dinner table at the restaurant. When I rung her up on Monday to wish her happy birthday (I didn't spend long at the dinner since I had to be somewhere else so didn't get much time to talk to the birthday girl), she said she had quite a lot more stuff on top of all that which I managed to glimpse at her dinner and said that this is probably the year she's ever received the most presents from friends and family. I laughed and said that my pile of presents has been dwindling as the years go by.

My comment came from the obvious thought that kids ask for a lot of stuff; I was no different when I was young, wanting pretty much every Transformer and large Lego set under the sun. But when the call ended, I gave some thought to what I've actually received this year under the 'birthday' umbrella.

The earliest birthday present I received this year was in early July! You see my friend, the Hug Nazi, has this sort of tradition that when my birthday comes around, she will happen to have some plans that will take her out of the country and miss my actual birthday. This has been happening every year without fail since I turned 21. This year was no exception.

To absolve herself of the guilt of missing my birthday yet again, she took me to the zoo for the red panda encounter - knowing full well that red pandas are my favourite animal (it was on a zoo trip back when we were 20 or some young age when I spotted them and they instantly became my picture definition of the word 'cute').

Cute - adjective

Then nothing until my birthday on which I replied to all the birthday messages I received over Facebook / Twitter / text message.

'Birthday week', as I called it on Twitter, continued as I received a short letter, Lego man, and penguin-shaped tape dispenser from the hug nazi via snail mail from Japan (does she really feel that guilty?), and she also got her boyfriend (still in NZ and not living far from me) to deliver to me an old magazine with an article for making pasta - Italian cooking is something I'm also quite into.

When I got back to work, one of my workmates gave me a cream bun that she baked herself, and when I had the weekly lunch with some of the friends I've made through work, the guys paid for my lunch.

That weekend, I had my family take me out to dinner at my favourite Italian restaurant/trattoria - another birthday tradition I've kept since turning 21.

Then nothing again for a while and I thought it was all over, until this weekend where I received a gift card that made me go "Whoa" like Keanu Reeves does in pretty much every movie he's ever been in (they do say that gift cards are kind of a cop-out when it comes to gift giving, but if you can get the right one it's totally just as good as getting a present), and another present some 6+ years in the making.

The latter came from another friend who also knows of my affinity for red pandas. Soon after that visit to the zoo back when I was 20, a short New Zealand TV series about zoo animals aired and had some soft toy merchandise to go with it. I went and bought the red panda soft toy from my friend's work when she let me know that they had stock and she held one for me until I could come by. That gave her an idea for a birthday present for my 21st which was to make a red panda painting.

I never had a 21st birthday party though, so the half-finished painting was left on the back-burner for several years.

She moved house recently, and while packing found the old picture and resolved to complete it this year. She did, and her card stated that it was several things: a very belated 21st present, a 'sorry my grandad died' present (more on that in a future blog post), and a 'thank you for helping with the computer science papers at uni' present.

Some things make me feel really blessed. This is definitely one of them.

When I look back throughout the year and think of all the things I got for my birthday, I don't know where the heck I get away with saying that I've been getting less and less stuff. Sure, as I age I find myself asking for less and less; especially now that I have the means to take care of myself and get most of whatever I want: clothes, food, the occasional video game, etc. But to make up for it, I've found that those around me like to give more and more of what I need - sincere birthday wishes, good times, and tokens representative of the what I mean to others.

It's a pretty good trade-off if you ask me.

After all this time, I still don't really know what it is that makes me decide to blog about something. It's been a month since the last post and in that time I just started thinking that I was too busy to write here. While others I know are doing the whole 30 Days of Me thing (for which they have my sympathy and understanding if it becomes difficult because, as I learned with Blog Every Day April last year, blogging every day for 30 days is hard), I've been sitting back and lapping-up the content that they and the rest of the internet has been putting up there.

Today however, I was hit with a few 'I should write about this' feelings, the kind that makes me want to find the nearest computer, hit-up my site, and start throwing my thoughts into the electronic ether (now going by the buzzword, 'the cloud'. Did you imagine someone doing air quotes just then? Yeah, same here). At that moment, the nearest computer was in my hands (carrying work laptop to work), so I quickly finished the rest of my morning walk to work, plugged the thing in, waited the obligatory long-enough-to-make-a-cup-of-tea start-up time, and before I could start up my browser somebody came up to me and asked me a work question - the first of many which made me soon forget about blogging entirely.

During my lunch break, I was once again hit with that blogging feeling, and remembered what it was in the morning I was wanting to write about. Sentences started forming in my mind and I was editing drafts in my thoughts as I made my way back to work at the end of my lunch break to sit down at my desk and not blog some more.

So what happened that first time that made me want to punch some keys for God's sake? Well, I pretty much admitted that I am a big fat pushover.

I ran into a friend (read: walked passed and didn't realize it was someone I knew until I was 2 metres away, at which point I turned around and back-tracked) on my way to work this morning with my heavy work laptop in it's bag in one hand and a 30 Seconds To Mars track playing in my ears. She was standing with workmates and a bunch of equipment, all of them waiting for a taxi that may or may not have forgotten about them so they can carry all this stuff to where it needs to be through the schizophrenic Wellington weather. When I stopped to talk with her the usual conversation ensued (How are you? Haven't seen you in ages! Why are you standing out here with a box full of LCD screens?) and somehow got to me telling her that I'm sort of dreading going to work today. The reason: the almost-daily project meeting that involves our testing crew.

Now it's not really the testers I'm afraid of - they're a great bunch and do a much needed job that adds tremendous value to the project - but when they're in the meeting, all the current problems with the system we're working on get highlighted and when it comes to letting everyone know about the issues in the area I'm working on, my overriding conscience starts to kick in and suddenly I feel like I'm not doing a good enough job. It doesn't help either when sometimes I'm involved in e-mail exchanges about problems with the system that are directed at me while CC'ing all the other testers and none of the other developers which then makes me feel like I have to defend myself against a 21st century electronic workspace flogging.

I summarised the above for my friend, and her response was pretty much to send some angry e-mails straight back.

I thought about it some, and quickly realized that telling people who annoy me to go suck donkey dick wasn't really in my repertoire. I mean, it would be funny if it happened, but it would only happen in my head, whereas in real-life I'd metaphorically turn to some strange angle and hope that whatever projectile was aimed at bruising my ego would glance off my titanium skull or just miss because I presented a smaller target. And so after making a lot of doubtful thinking noises, I admitted to my friend, "Hmm, that's not really me; I'm a bit of a pushover actually."

A bit? Well, yes, for very large values of the word 'bit'.

Why my brain told me to go blog about that, I have no idea why.

Guess which one I am in that picture. If you answered 'all of the above' you win a prize

The next incident at lunch time was when I was finishing-up my shopping to take advantage of a one-day store sale. The sales guy just ran my card so I could pay for my purchase, and as the Eftpos system was connecting to my bank account to rob me of my money, to kill some of the silence he asked me "Had a good day so far?"

I thought about it, and thought about it some more. I thought I was taking a very long time to think but obviously I wasn't because I managed to give him my answer before the Eftpos machine could confirm my payment. "Actually, no" I told him, "I've been having a pretty crappy day."

I don't know whether it was the honesty or because I didn't just say "good", but he was obviously taken aback by my reply. This isn't the first time I've been asked that sort of question, gave that sort of answer, and saw that sort of reaction. The last person was my neighbour (is that the right word to use when technically they live 4 floors above you?) and, I dunno, it made that conversation - and even the very short one with the sales guy - just that much more engaging.

I mean, when you have those 'How was your day? / Good.' exchanges, you can really tell that the other party isn't dedicating much of their brain to the conversation: their eyes are staring at some point in the distance instead of you, their body is still facing in the direction that they really want to go before they ran into you, and you can see them thinking about other things like what to eat once they get home instead wondering about how to reply to you. But when you mess-up the norm, then you've got their attention: they have to actually think of responses, and now they've got you on their mind instead of what it is they're going to make for dinner.

Once the Eftpos machine finally confirmed that it had left my bank account a little worse for wear, the sales guy wished me a really good rest-of-the-day and, you know what, it felt like he meant it.

Why my brain told me to go blog about that, I have no idea why.

Yesterday I re-read my last blog post - the one written with half a bottle of white wine running through my veins - and I learned something about myself: my spelling and grammar go to shite when I'm drunk.

For the spelling, I don't know why it should be; there's a decent check-as-you-type spell-checker in my browser from which I write these posts that underlines every misspelled or suspicious word with squiggly red lines that grasp my attention more effectively than any sexually-suggestive advertisements on TV (or it seems any word not part of popular culture since before 2003 - case-in-point: in the paragraph above, the word 'blog' is underlined in red).

As for the grammar: no Firefox extension as yet exists for giving assistance to my inner grammar nazi, so I'm left to rely on my own proof-reading ability which apparently also takes a back seat when the communicative hemisphere of my brain is fuelled by fermented grapes instead of reason and H2O.

So as I was reading what I vaguely remember writing the other day, I laughed, I cried, I cringed, and then I cried some more. I was tempted more than once to hit the Edit button on that post, but I thought it best that I leave it as is, thus turning that post into a lesson for my present and future selves of what had transpired here.

Bah, drunk again. I don't mean to make this some sort of running theme of posting blogs while I'm inebriated, but at the moment it feels like the best ideas are coming to me when I'm not thinking straight.

Once again, the reason for my slight intoxication is because there's some leftover wines at my place. No, a friend didn't leave it behind like last time - I finished that one off pretty quickly. This time, I bought this one myself. Why? Because I was told white wine was an ingredient in a good pasta sauce htat I oh so enjoyed.

If you haven't already figured-out from my food-related blog posts, I strive to make a lot of Italian dishes because I like Italian food. Oh 'like' is too weak a word for it: I've been to the same Italian restaurant for my birthday since my 21st, and when I was making travel plans for Melbourne for a friend's wedding and was told about Lygon St - a street lined with restaurants serving all manner of Mediterranean cuisine - I almost kissed my travel agent right then and there (oh nevermind that Lygon St is now in the news because of all those gang killings; that can all happen in the background while I'm chowing-down on some epic gnocchi dish for all I care).

Nom

Much like with my documenting of Pizza 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, I'm trying to do the same thing now with a white pasta sauce: create something which contains all the parts I love most about pastas based on white sauces. With Pizza 1.x, it was easy to list my goals because all of the things were based on very tangible parts With the pasta however, it's all a matter of taste.

I did however come across a pasta dish which approximated what I was after when I was at one of my favourite cafes one Friday lunch time, and so I asked one of the staff if they could maybe ask the chef to share with me the recipe so I could make something like that myself. She came back and relayed the words of the chef back to me: "...it's the same as your usual cream-and-bacon sauce, but with some white wine added."

Now I should've asked WHICH white wine they used, but because I'm not a wine connoisseur (holy crap I spelled that right while my head is swaying side-to-sode out of my rational control and in time to the music playing right now) and to my unsophisticated palette all white wine tastes like all other white wine and all red wine tastes like all other red wine - yet I can tell the difference between regular Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero... go figure - because the next time I went shopping I was planted in the middle of the wine section surrounded by more bottles of wine than there are stars in the sky, and without a damn clue as to which one to buy. So I picked one and hoped for the best.

I didn't hope hard enough.

The next time I tried my pasta sauce, I added the wine and, while it did add that little something that my normal sauces had been missing, it didn't add the right flavour, so now I'm stuck with this bottle of wine which I am now drinking down like water (and if my guitar buddy read that part right now she'd tell me off because she's trying to get me to slow-down my drinking since I still drink anything, alcohol included, like I do my Coke). I should really throw it out of just give it to somebody else who might actually enjoy it more than I, but there's another overriding part of myself that really hates being wasteful and throwing things out. So, down the gullet instead of down the bin it goes.

I don't know where it came from, but I really hate throwing things out or being wasteful. Back at my family's house my dad keeps a compost that helps fuel the garden he keeps in the back yard - I really like the idea of having our food scraps being put to good use. Also, they participate in the city's recycling program. The apartment building I'm in however, doesn't even participate in the recycling program, so every time I throw a piece of recyclable paper/plastic/glass into the massive bin at the side of the building I feel like I might as well eat a new-born baby for all the good I'm doing the world. So you know what I do to absolve my soul? I actually save-up my paper (all my utility companies still love sending me paper bills no matter how many times I click the 'e-mail me my bill' option on their websites) and when the pile is large enough, put it in my bag and TAKE IT TO WORK where they have a some semblence of a recycling program.

(I haven't even verified if the sort of recycling my work does is actually good, or if all it does is collate our various piles of waste into neat bundles of similar material and then ship it off to some overseas developing nation's slum where they drop it on unsuspecting children. If that's the case, then I might as well just throw the rubbish out and eat a new-born baby to spare the transport company all those wasted travel miles - cut-out the middle man.)

Get in my belly, I'm a terrible person

I did come to some sort of conclusion in my white pasta sauce endeavours recently, and I made a variation of that recipe (one that didn't include the wine which is why I still have so much of it to waste on myself) for my family when I stayed with them for dinner last weekend. Hell the meal even included ciabatta bread with pesto on the side. It was the most Italian my family could ever get and I swear I was peeing olive oil the following morning.

2 days after my return from the ski holiday, my first day back at work today, and I'm surprised how easy it is to slip back into my old routine: I went to work buying breakfast from Wholly Bagels on the way since I hadn't re-stocked my pantry/fridge/freezer yet (something I usually do on a Friday when waking-up late), I cleared-out a billion e-mails sitting in my inbox (something I usually do on a Monday to start my week clean), I went to the library at lunch time and got too many books again, and when I had finally cleared-out my backlog of e-mail love I went straight into programming like I hadn't left at all.

Sure, there were changes - new people brought into the team at work, my apartment mailbox filled with mail not addressed to me, and there was a note from the property inspector thanking me for leaving my apartment in such a nice clean state - but it's like there was a gap in the city just waiting for me to come back and fill it in.

I know, I've only been gone a week (or 7 working days if you count the Friday/Monday I took off before/after the ski week) so I can't really expect a lot to happen in that time, but having to wake-up in the morning in what was effectively 5 different beds over one-and-a-bit weeks and then coming back all relaxed (albeit sore - I was limping around the city today) made me look at everything a little bit differently as I walked to work this morning.

I guess what I'm experiencing is a little bit of disappointment; although the city had let me go to recharge my batteries, the city itself didn't recharge one iota. It isn't helped by the fact that the weather is still exactly the same as I had left it: grey, gloomy, as wet as a fish and as inviting as putting your hand on a hot element. And while I wore a bit of a 'ahh, I've just been on vacation' smile, it only made me notice the lack of smiles on the faces of others as I walked by.

So while the city may have left an opening for me to return to, it isn't so much a gap made by open arms as it is a gap left by grabbing-hands as it tries to fit this cog back into the machine. But unlike the feeling of being a rusty gear when I left for my vacation, I've returned a well-oiled cog.

The daily grind will get to me again - it always does - but not for a while; I'm going to make sure of that.

It's that time of year again - mid-winter and the school holidays for primary/secondary students have just ended meaning less people to crowd the mountain - time for another ski week! :D

Just like mentioned in last year's blog I set my out-of-office reply to something not-entirely professional (can't remember the exact words, but it had something like "...I'll revel in your e-mail love when I return" in it.), but unlike last year's blog I'll have a bit more skiing practice under my belt when I hit the slopes from Monday (provided the weather is good). I really enjoyed last year's ski trip, and I hope to repeat that wonderful time I had with this year's one.

What I don't want a repeat of however:

• Having the bus I took to get there hit a cow on the way up (we had to stop for another bus to come get us while we sat there in the dark with a blood-spattered and smashed bus. Sure the cow was much worse for wear (it died) but it was an inconvenience I think the passengers, the driver, and the cow could have done without)
• breaking my tailbone when I was learning to snowboard and not knowing it was broken for a month after coming back from the trip

For my friends and family, I'll do like I did last year and post daily injury stats to Twitter/Facebook. That way they'll know whether to have an ambulance waiting for me when I return.

Have you ever rung those toll-free phone numbers that food companies put somewhere on the packaging of their products so you can ask questions / give feedback / make complaints? Well, for the first time in my life, I actually rung one of those today: I rang Nestle/Maggi to find-out what happened to their Devilled Sausages Mix.

Devilled sausages have been a mainstay of the family dinner table for as long as I can remember: a meal enjoyed by all with its sweet sauce and soft apple slices, and a meal which I've taken to cooking for myself when I'm out of ideas yet still want to feel good about putting a little effort into preparing my own dinner. Using the sachets provided by Maggi (and yes, that specific brand after some time spent trying-out the others and not liking them so much), my family, and now I, have been able to churn-out a delicious meal within a short time and with almost minimal effort.

(OK, that last paragraph reads like something one of those advertising personalities that gives you meal ideas during the ads just before dinner time would say)

I thought I'd make devilled sausages for myself some weeks ago when I noticed some flavoured sausages at the back of my freezer that hadn't been touched for a looong time (let's just say the word 'months' is adequate to describe it; thank God for the refrigeration/freezing process!). Looking to the pantry, I couldn't find any devilled sausage mix, so added it to my shopping list and resolved to buy a few packets of the stuff the next day.

There wasn't any at the grocery either, and all I succeeded in doing was spending countless minutes standing like a statue before the section of the isle dedicated to all of those just-add-hot-water meals and sauces while I looked for something that just wasn't there. A trip to a larger grocery in the suburbs when I spent the next weekend with my family also proved fruitless, and when I relayed my story to my mum, we both started to worry that Maggi had discontinued the product.

Another pass at the local grocery gave me the same results, so I finally decided to ring-up the company and find-out what happened to one of my favourite meals:

"Unfortunately, the site we use to check stock availability is down at the moment, but I can ring-around, find-out if any stores in your area still have some." said the lady on the phone.
"OK, thanks." I replied.
"But don't worry, it hasn't been discontinued because it's one of our most popular products." she assured me.

I left my details with her and hoped for some good news.

Good news came in the form of a phone call the moment I returned to my desk after lunch.

"Hello." I said, answering the phone.
"Hi, is this Emanuel?" said the lady - the same Nestle/Maggi customer services lady who helped me earlier - on the line.
"Yup, that's me."
"Hi. I still can't check stock as the system is still down, but I checked our staff shop and we have some there which I can send to you to help you out in the meantime."

!!! I was excited! I gave her my address, thanked her at least twice, and put down the phone thinking ohmigod they're gonna send me free stuff!!!

I feel almost silly being so happy to receive a few packets of what is essentially powdered ingredients, but it's free stuff, and it's free stuff that I WANT. After all those weeks of trying to find this particular combination of powdered ingredients, and given my recent disappointments, it feels good to end on a high note for once.

I believe the sound I should be making at this very moment is *squee* :)

I said to expect an influx of blog posts last week. By 'influx', I did mean more than just the 2 posts that followed, but the break between was with good reason: I attended my friends' (both bride and groom are long-time friends, so is that the right apostrophe placement?) wedding over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Heck, I was even asked to share in reading a cute poem from Winnie the Pooh during the ceremony!

So while I was there, listening to the lines that bride and groom recited to each other about affirmations of their love to last until the end of time, or until a meteor strikes the Earth and exterminates all human life, I began to notice that my cheeks started tingling, and then aching. Ow, I thought, what's going on? It didn't take me long to realize that my cheeks were aching because I was smiling.

I'm not one of those stone-faced never-smiles types, but having my cheeks hurt because I'm smiling too much isn't an everyday thing for me. I did recognize the feeling though, and thought back to the other times that this happened:

• a wedding in Feb 2004
• a wedding in Feb 2008
• another wedding in Feb 2008

A very visible pattern starts to emerge.

So while some people cry at weddings, I just smile a lot more than usual; so much it hurts.

So while the rest of the country was out enjoying their holiday by being far away from their places of residence and causing traffic congestion on all the major highways, I spent Easter at home with family where we went out to watch Clash of the Titans and then order pizza for dinner. OK, that's pretty average-sounding, but our family doesn't watch movies together very often nowadays so the movie was a plus for us (we actually wanted to watch The Hurt Locker but it isn't in NZ cinemas yet. Clash made for a good substitute and we were thoroughly entertained by it).

On top of those activities, I used an afternoon to roll an egg down a hill.

Despite the Wikipedia article claiming the world-wide appeal of the tradition, I had never heard of egg rolling until about 2 weeks before Easter.

I was having lunch with a friend (the one who inspired me to write the Dirty Laundry story e-mail) and when we got to talking about what we were gonna do for Easter, she mentioned her home-country (Scotland) tradition of egg rolling. I responded with an inquiring look and the words "Egg rolling?!?" in a high pitch voice that you'd more likely find in a pre-teen child. She answered with basically what it says in the History section of the Wikipedia Egg Rolling article - that it was a symbol of the rolling away of the rock from Jesus's tomb - adding that it drew strange looks from her New Zealand friends when she did it last year.

Me being one to try new and silly things, I said I'd give it a go.

So fast-forward 2 weeks to Easter weekend. It was the afternoon and already I was screwing-up because I dropped my egg too hard into the pot of water causing a small crack to appear when it hit the bottom which let seep a little yolk. I kept telling myself that the crack added 'character' to the egg, making it look like it was battle-hardened and prepared for the challenges it was going to face.

When I had a cooled-down my battle-hardened egg, I took it outside with me and started surveying the neighbourhood for steep inclines.

I should have probably researched the topic a little more before I even began. When egg rolling was explained to me, the first assumption I made was that it was done using uncooked eggs that would splatter when they reached an obstacle or the bottom of the hill. My second assumption was that the rolling was unassisted and that you had to find a hill steep enough so that with an initial push, gravity and science would take care of the rest (Wikipedia article instead showing children pushing the egg along a non-steep lawn).

When I told her of my first assumption, 'laundry lass' said that you could use hard-boiled eggs and I felt a bit stupid at not having thought that. I didn't tell her of my second assumption because she probably already suspected I was lacking a few brain cells with my first assumption and I didn't want to give proof to her suspicions.

So while I couldn't find a nice steep grassy hill, my family's house was on a nice steep concrete road.

Steep roads - Wellington is full of 'em

Lesson learned: concrete wreaks hell on an egg shell. I pushed the thing once to send it on its way, and I could see the egg falling apart as it went down the road. The egg never made it all the way to the bottom, more often stopping by veering left or right and hitting the gutter, but when I picked it up to take back up the road to roll again the shell was badly cracked, even peeling in places. The initial crack that it received in the boiling process didn't seem so bad any more.

So I did this countless times on several streets around the neighbourhood and subject my poor egg to a lot of stress, resulting in what you see below.

"They see me rollin'..."

Like laundry lass, my actions drew several stares from people, namely strangers and passers-by: a group of girls just walking down the street, my neighbour washing his car, and the drivers and passengers of every car that narrowly missed my egg; pretty much everybody except my family who really didn't want to be associated or seen with me at that moment. It's not every day you see a guy taking photos of an egg and rolling it down a suburban street.

So, how did you spend your Easter?

Mid-March came along, and I started wondering if there would be a Blog Every Day April (BEDA) this year. In anticipation, I started stockpiling stories and topics to write about, which explains the 3-week gap since my last post. That, and I kinda directed my creative efforts into 2 story e-mails: one of which is the Dirty Laundry story mentioned in the last post, and the other which I'm holding-off from posting until the fallout it created has died-down significantly.

However, as April crept closer, the proponents of last year's BEDA movement (young-adult fiction author Maureen Johnson and a tonne of her fans of which I am one) made no mention of it, and Google doesn't seem to point to any bandwagon for us lost BEDA-2010-hopefuls to jump on.

And as March 31 became April 1st, and all I got was a bunch of sites doing the April Fools' thing, my hopes for BEDA faded, and a part of me breathed a sigh of relief while the rest of me made a sad face.

I really enjoyed BEDA last year: the challenge, the semi-rushed creative process, and the reading of blogs of other BEDA participants, particularly those of my BEDA Buddies - people grouped together to read and comment on one another's blogs in an effort to keep us all going for the whole month.

Then again, I also enjoy getting a good night's sleep and wasn't looking forward to updating the 'Blog Every Day April' category on the sidebar since modifying categories is still a bitch without the site updates I'm still working on.

So, without BEDA as an outlet for my stockpile of stories, expect an influx of blog posts over the following days as I work through the backlog in my brain and the photos I've collected on my phone.

Ad for a building, not your mum

In a previous blog post about a certain donut from my childhood, I made the following observation:

Everything is a lot larger back then compared to now (that's what she said?)

Last weekend, I managed to do something else that proved this claim: I walked through my old primary school.

My family moved around New Zealand a bunch when I was younger, so this primary school / grade school / whatever-the-hell-you-call-the-educational-institute-you've-been-enrolled-in-at-the-age-of-9, was the second-to-last primary school of mine before I moved on up to intermediate. Anyway, when I was there, I really liked the place: I made a lot of friends, the teachers were nice, and there was a lot more tree-climbing variety here than my previous school (which only had really tall trees and a policy of cutting-off the lower branches so that adventurous children like myself would be discouraged from trying to scale them). The neighbourhood and life in general around that time was really good too, so a lot of stuff from then, including the school, really stuck in my mind.

I also injured myself a lot on the school grounds that year (a remark from one of my teachers at the time in a student evaluation form: Emanuel needs to learn to control his movements more) and so made several trips to the sick/medical bay from wherever it was I happened to get injured. So I became very familiar with the distances that needed to be travelled from all corners of the school. Sometimes, a blood trail would be involved, and once I got patched-up, I would follow the the blood trail back to where it was I got hurt, familiarising myself with the distance I walked (or more likely rushed in a mild panic).

Good thing vampires didn't lurk in schools back then

So, on the way to a BBQ which was very close to my old school, I decided to take a small detour and visit the playgrounds, buildings, and trees that composed much of my life at 9 years of age.

The first hurdle was trying to actually get into the school as the entrance that I had used all those years before was now blocked-off by recent (whereby 'recent' I mean 'anywhere in the last 16 years') housing developments. After following the perimeter of the school fence some way while trying to not look like a dodgy guy who stalks schools, I found a new entrance into the main field, and from there started my exploration of memory lane.

Ah, there's the tree I fell out of, and there's where I got a bleeding nose... And after getting from the field to the netball/tennis courts: And there's where I grazed my elbow really badly. That left a good mark for several months.

It wasn't all reminiscing about injuries: I walked passed my old rooms, remembering how much bigger I thought they were when I was 9. One memory in particular was when we put a rain gauge on the outer wall of our class, having it secured to the building by means I couldn't remember. I remember placing it at what was then shoulder height and seeing how close it was to the ground. Now I stood there looking at the same spot, my mind creating a phantom of my younger self in-front of me, my shoulders now much further above the ground.

All the old buildings seemed smaller, and the distances between points were much shorter too as my longer stride let me cross what I used to believe were large concrete/grass expanses. I was a giant in a small person's memory; several sizes too small for me to fit in, yet I felt oddly at home.

I finally walked out of my old school through the teachers car park where my classmates and I once left thumb tacks behind the tyres of an unknown car on April Fool's Day, feeling like for the first time in years that I had really come a long way.

(continued from Strawberry Fare(well) - part 1)

So in part 1 of this story I explained that I was at Strawberry Fare for a goodbye dinner for an overseas friend I had met through dance classes, who was returning to their home country the following day. Actually, I lie - I spent most of last blog post explaining why the Strawberry Fare restaurant was such a big deal for me and the weird way in which my stomach finds new places to store food when it's overflowing - but that's where I left off, saying that it's the second overseas-friend-goodbye I've had to do in the span of a month.

The first goodbye had no fanfare surrounding it because a terrible rainstorm and hurricane-strength winds decided to defecate all over the plans we had for their last weekend in New Zealand with us. I had to settle instead for a very long conversation from my cellphone in which I must've spent 3-months worth of my normal cellphone credit just talking about pretty much everything while avoiding the saddening topic of their imminent departure.

For that person, the whole 'I miss you' feeling didn't really kick-in until they were back home (Belgium) and had a go at me over Facebook chat, berating me for not having Skype and a webcam/microphone like a good IT person should.

Now synonymous with my feelings regarding friends who don't live within a 20-mile radius of me

Of all the lessons I've learned as part of the 'growing-up' process, having to say goodbye to people is still the one that gets to me the most. Hell, the first time I learned it, it spawned my first space pic and started my whole foray into using the digital space art medium as an outlet for general angst.

Despite the years since then and the number of people I've had to say goodbye to, it never really got any easier.

So there I was, dinner at Strawberry Fare, already feeling a bit tired because I had been at work all day (and on a Saturday too FFS!), and being all selfish about how this farewell was going to impact me.

"My social calendar is gonna be empty now with you going away." I managed to say to the goodbye girl sometime during dinner when she sat beside me. "You're 1 of maybe only 2 people from dance class who ever invite me to anything!"
"Aww, you'll be alright Em." she said.

Will I? I wondered. The only reason I have anything on my calendar now is because I've signed-up to keyboard/piano classes to fill-up my free time. While relearning a long-rusted skill is particularly exciting, it's no substitute for general hanging-out with friends.

So, hugs were exchanged, a kiss on the forehead was made, and I tried ever so elegantly to walk out of the restaurant, after paying for my epic dinner/dessert of course, when said meal was sitting in my expanding stomach and causing me to waddle once again like a penguin.

It made for an awkward exit, made even worse by the fact that I walked into the door when I turned-around to leave.

Meh, close enough

Well, making people laugh isn't the worst last impression you could make right?

I went to Strawberry Fare last night! :D

OK, so I guess I should explain why that is such a big deal for me. It started a long time ago, back in high school...

*cue flashback sequence harp tune*

Back then, I had a friend (still have, although I don't see her much nowadays since she moved city, although I'll be attending her wedding come April!) who often went to Strawberry Fare. Now, her family didn't go there so often as to think that Strawberry Fare was all they ate every Saturday evening, but enough times to make you think that it was one of their favourite places.

Strawberry Fare is a dessert restaurant, specializing in gigantic meal-sized desserts - yes, you can swap-out your dinner for one of their desserts and feel full. Every time my friend would come back from this place she'd regale us with tales of how decadent the dessert was, or how sweet the cakes were, etc etc ad infinitum. The stories fed-upon my curiosity and my sweet tooth, building atop each other from high school through university, and eventually my mind painted a picture of a place bathed in glowing reviews and surrounded by an aura of good times to be had.

The details of the stories faded once my friend moved away, but the feeling they left inside me stayed for a long time, and were still with me when I would finally eat at Strawberry Fare in late 2008.

(Note: I have mentioned the Strawberry Fare story before in my post: Too. Much. Food. as part of Blog Every Day April 2009. If you've already read that one, then think of the following paragraphs as filling-in the gaps of that story)

I was with a bunch of people who I knew mostly through work. We had eaten dinner at a nearby restaurant already, and were actually pretty full (we ordered and shared food expecting 1 extra person who didn't turn up until near the end). That late guy though, having not eaten as much as us, said he'd stick around for dessert. Somebody came-up with the idea of going to Strawberry Fare for dessert, and all of my senses heightened (imagine a dog's ears going up in alert) and focussed on that suggestion.

"Yes!" I said, not heeding the fullness of my stomach. It's only dessert, I thought, it can't be that much, despite what everyone else has been telling me for last almost-decade.

So the group all headed for Strawberry Fare, anticipation building inside me like a child on the eve of Christmas.

The desserts all looked pretty expensive, so at first I thought this place was overcharging. I stuck with a pretty safe bet - a cheesecake, elegantly described in a blurb that contained more words than there were actual ingredients in your average cheesecake - and when I made my order the little cynic inside me started disbelieving that a cheesecake could cost so much.

The little cynic quickly shut up when I got served THAT MUCH cheesecake.

Not the cheesecake I got, but to help you with the scale of things, imagine each pixel up there is a centimetre in real life, and that the plate it's on is the size of the moon

I was full, but somehow that didn't matter anymore. I had to go on because a) I was finally at Strawberry Fare and was learning that all the legends were true, and b) I am going to have to pay for this at the till later.

So I ate. I got through half of the cheesecake before my stomach reached capacity and started calling-in favours from the nearby organs to use them to store any excess food.

*return from flashback*

So what was I doing there last night? I was there for a goodbye dinner/dessert for an overseas friend returning to their country of origin (USA); the second overseas friend I've had to say goodbye to within the span of a month...

(to be continued, because I really shouldn't be up this late when tomorrow is Monday and I gotta go to work; Monday is bad enough already without me adding sleep-deprivation to the mix)

Question: what the hell is FQ?

No-longer-on-dial-up girl's Facebook status made mention of her being exciting about it being out. FQ? I thought, WTF? Last time she did this, it was ANTM, which, thanks to Google, I was able to find-out meant America's Next Top Model.

So I started thinking that maybe it's another TV show, but nothing that came to mind had a 2-word title with the first word beginning with F and the last word beginning with Q. Google wasn't much help this time either, pointing me either to fashion publications, or letting me know that it's the SMS version of "fuck you".

So I just asked her what FQ could possibly mean, and she dodged the question by pointing-out one of my eccentricities instead.

There are just way too many acronyms for me to keep up with now. I don't know whether to blame computing (where almost every new technology or idea conceived can be shortened into a TLA (three-letter acronym) or XTLA (extended three-letter acronym)), or the trend towards laziness in our written language that I mentioned in my last blog post, for this over-abundance of acronyms.

There was a time when I used to refuse putting my written words into acronyms. This was when I was first introduced to the world of IM when a friend of mine suggested I install ICQ on my computer, circa 2000 AD. From then I was exposed to a new language; a language of LOLs, ROFLs, OMGs, and emoticons. For a long time I replaced LOLs and ROFLs with "hahah" and the like, and expanded every word I could because I thought I was 'above' degrading my English. (Looking back, I realize I was just being a pompous jackass in the same way some people say "I don't have a television; I read.")

I did eventually succumb to the use of acronyms in chat messages, texts, e-mails, and this blog. Hell, I even say LOL in real life. I did draw a line somewhere: I continue to refuse using those kinds of acronyms and smilies in more important communiques, like essays, reports, documentation, or other formal messages. And in all of this I continue to use proper punctuation and grammar, because nothing makes baby Jesus cry like reading a headline that says: Students failing because of Twitter, texting

lolcats definitely haven't helped the situation either...

Aside: the first acronym ever given to me over ICQ was ASL (age/sex/location), by some random Australian girl who found me just 1 day after I had installed ICQ. I had to ask her what it meant, because Google didn't exist then. She was the only random IM chat buddy I ever had.

So I still don't know what FQ means in the context of no-longer-on-dial-up girl's status update. Ideas?

Number of acronyms in this blog post: 23

It's a bright sunny day in my little corner of New Zealand. I'm looking out the window on this lovely Saturday morning and up above are blue skies and white fluffy clouds, the Metservice says it's 22.9 degrees Celsius, and my watch is telling me that now is a good time to go fishing (yeah, something to do with setting my longitudinal position and the phases of the moon, don't ask me to go into detail).

The only problem with this picture is that the window I am looking out of is not any of the ones at my apartment, but rather the ones at my work building. Yep, I'm at work today :(

While I'd rather be anywhere but here, I don't hate coming to work on a weekend. On the rare occasion that I do find myself walking to work, it's usually morning when the streets are pretty empty, and when I arrive at the building it's nice and quiet and there's usually nobody else around. I find that the quiet of the weekend and the feeling that this city's population has magically been cut in half help me sort-out my thoughts for a much more productive couple of hours than the busy office environment usually does.

The office may be empty, but today, and for the last couple of days, the streets are anything but.

There are a bunch of big events going on: 2 AC/DC concerts, a Them Crooked Vultures concert, Wellington Cup Day (horse racing, although the focus of such events is never on the horse racing), next week we play host to the Rugby Sevens, and to top it all off, docked at the harbour are some very VERY large cruise ships with LOTS of tourists.

So the streets are packed, it's hella busy outside, and when I walked around during my lunch break the other day my ears honed-in on several foreign accents, mainly American. Accents weren't the only odd thing that day; a massive line coming-out of the Wellington Cable Car was the other:

I don't think anybody in this line is from around here...

Long lines aren't a very common sight around here. When they do appear, they're usually leading towards an upper-middle-class retail/department store with some sort of epic store-wide sale going on. We don't often get 60 metre lines streaming-out from what is effectively a 7-minute tram ride between the CBD and this city's gardens.

But maybe I'm just being too cynical. Tourists aren't a bad thing - I even enjoyed being one the last time, despite being mistaken for a local and asked which way to the immigration offices - and my lack of enthusiasm towards The Cable Car is probably because for years I used it as one of my methods of transport to/from university, thus relegating one of this city's best attractions to the background of public transport vehicles that help this city function.

Maybe I've just lived here too long.

A friend of mine, upon learning that I live by myself, made the claim that I either had to: a) lose some part of my sanity, b) develop a coping mechanism, or c) find some strange hobby, in exchange for my solitary living situation. He was of the mind that only eccentrics live by themselves, and that by choosing to live by myself, somewhere along the way I have unwittingly sacrificed a part of my facade of 'normal behaviour'.

Of course I denied everything, distancing myself from his crazy theory, particularly option A, as hastily as I could. That of course left me with options B and C which, if you stretch it, aren't really that far removed from option A.

Thinking about it though and looking back on the things that have happened since moving out (the first time), it turns out that the guy wasn't completely wrong.

Coping mechanisms developed:

• talking to myself
• singing out loud
• blogging more often
• watching Home and Away
• joining, using, Twitter

Hobbies developed:

• baking
• giving-up on baking
• bringing baking back into my life, but in a very reduced capacity
• renewing my guitar playing
• making meals, and having some pride when doing so

So with that last bullet point, I didn't actually develop cooking skills after moving out, but before that moment cooking always felt like a chore. Now though, it feels more like something I need to perfect; a skill I need to improve and which I really enjoy doing so. The dinner I made for myself tonight is one such example.

Motivated by the idea that I could never get everything I always wanted out of a pizza, or that if I could I'd have to fork-out extravagant amounts of money for it (OK, so pizzas aren't expensive, but the combination of all of the things I liked would have made a pizza more than I would be willing to pay for it), I decided to combine all of my favourite parts about the pizzas I have ever eaten, into 1 epic pizza:

• home-made base
• herbs in the dough
• thin base
• cheese-stuffed crust
• toppings all the way to the edge (or in this case, right up to the cheese-stuffed crust part)

My epic pizza prototype: Pizza 1.0

Throughout the pizza-creation process, I read-aloud the pizza base instructions that I've pretty much already memorized, and sang-along to whatever music was playing through my TV/Xbox. And after putting the pizza into the oven, I was so excited about it that I told the world via Twitter.

(Unfortunately, in my haste to try-out my new creation, I forgot to take photos of it after it was cooked. Whoops.)

The verdict? I need to work on the cheese-stuffed crust part of it - I either didn't use enough cheese or the right kind of cheese because what I had inside the crusts melted and thinned-out, leaving a not-very-cheesy hollow crust - but everything else was exactly how I liked it.

A quick internet search has given me some ideas to try for Pizza 2.0 (use mozarella cheese, or cheese strings), but today has really illustrated just how right my friend was about what has happened to me since living on my own... and here I am blogging about it.

*sigh*

First of all: I'M BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!

I've missed my soap *sniff*

And for those of you who didn't understand what I mean by that, I've moved back into the city this weekend, meaning I can get back to watching Home and Away, enjoying showers that have water pressure high enough to actually penetrate my hair and reach my scalp, and not have to worry too much about train timetables. In short, the things I wrote about when I left the city the last time in this old blog post, are back in my life. (Except I may have missed the boat on the Home and Away front since it'll go on a break over Christmas / New Year's, leaving me to watch something else in its stead, most likely The Biggest Loser if last year was anything to go by.)

During the move though, I discovered something quite interesting about my dad: he can't hear some common high-pitched noises.

As we were both waiting in my new place for the movers to come along with the rest of my stuff, we got to playing-around with the glass-top (or maybe it's some kind of ceramic?) kitchen hob. The buttons on it are touch-sensitive, and as I discovered how to turn it on, my dad read aloud the passage in the instruction manual that said that each press of a button is "...accompanied by an acoustic signal." ie: a beep.

"Acoustic signal"

"So where's the noise?" my dad asked.
"There," I said, pressing a button, "can't you hear that?"
"No."
"OMG WHAT?"

I continued to press buttons to try evoke some oh-yeah-I-heard-that facial expression from him, but he could not hear the thing! I brought this up with the rest of the family at the next lunch, and my brother was equally shocked. My mum wasn't however, and regaled us with a tale of how he tried to search for his watch while the thing was beeping and driving her crazy, all while he was unable to pinpoint its location with his ears.

In his defence, my dad blamed years of New Year's fireworks celebrations in the Philippines (a valid excuse if you ask me: if you've ever been to the Philippines at New Year's, it sounds like being in a war zone, or at least the war zones that movies and video games have been presenting me).

As for me, I've been reminded just how fragile these ears of ours are, and will be ever-more vigilant with the volume of my mp3 player and computer headphones, so that hopefully, by the time I reach my dad's age, I can still recognize when my appliances are trying to get my attention.

I ran into a lot of people I know over the lunch break today:

• a husband-and-wife couple from work
• the friend of one of my own friend's sisters
• someone from ceroc
• another workmate
• an ex-girlfriend of a friend's friend (lol)
• an old classmate
• and another person from ceroc

Of those 7 meetings, the first 5 were all on my way to lunch. And with the exception of the first ceroc person, all those encounters went smoothly.

We didn't spot each other until we were fairly close, and by then it looked like it was going to be one of the usual wave-at-each-other-as-you-close-the-distance-between-you-then-continue-walking-in-opposite-directions kind of street meetings. We gestured at each other, said hello, and continued walking. Either by accident or on purpose she touched my arm as we went passed each other. I took this as a sign that she wanted to say something, so I stopped and turned around.

She continued walking. So, fixed to the ground and watching her walk away, I was thinking, Huh, maybe she doesn't want to talk. As soon as that thought finished, she looked back and, seeing me standing there, probably started thinking that I wanted to talk. So she stopped, turned around, and walked back towards me.

What was supposed to be a simple street meeting turned into an misreading of signs followed by me awkwardly trying to explain my way out of why I stopped.

If only it ended there

I ended-up explaining myself twice, and even then I wonder if she understood what I was saying because nerves and general silliness were running things by then making me talk a bit faster than usual; maybe too fast to understand.

After that incident, it got me thinking about other meetings that should've been simple, but have been screwed-up because I was being myself.

The example that came to mind was something made possible by my short-sightedness (physical, not figurative). Being short-sighted means I've learned to recognize people from a distance using other visual cues than just one's face: their clothing, hair, the way they walk, etc. Despite the additional clues, this method still has a pretty high failure rate.

A few years ago, I was meeting a friend of mine for lunch at the bookstore outside my work. Inside, I spotted somebody who, from behind, fitted the description of the person I was looking for: short girl, long straight blonde hair, skinny, and wears the sleeves of her jersey up to her fingertips so she can curl the ends around her knuckles. The colour of her clothing also matched stuff I've seen her wear before, so I was pretty sure this was the person I was looking for.

To grab her attention, I threw my jacket at her head.
The girl turned-around, my jacket still on her head, and she wasn't the person I was looking for.

I was quick to apologize, explaining she looked like somebody I knew, and it was then I saw my friend... just to my right, watching the whole sad exchange go down.

Because it isn't enough for me to make a fool of myself in-front of my friends, I have to involve strangers too.

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.

Still an exciting time of year, although I'm the one playing Santa nowadays

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.

My life is average.

Looking back through my previous posts, I'm quite surprised to see that the books I read haven't really been mentioned. There is no Books/Reading/Library category (well, there will be one after I write this up) despite books, reading, and the library being the things I carry most often, the thing I do in my spare time, and one of my favourite places to just kill time in Wellington, respectively.

(Hell, it's books that propelled me to write all the sorts of stuff I keep in the Writing section of my site, which in turn transformed the main page of this site into more of a blog than just updates of my projects like it used to be. And it's authors like Maureen Johnson who got me into Blog Every Day April. Suffice it to say, books, writers, and writing have definitely made things more interesting around here.)

Authors and their blogs do get mentioned here or there on occasion. Today's mention will be Scott Westerfeld, a science fiction author whose more popular works actually live in the young adult (YA) section of the library: the Uglies "trilogy" (4 books, with a 5th as a sort of companion of the Uglies universe to be added), and the Midnighters trilogy.

The author is also in talks for a possible movie adaptation of the series

I actually came across Scott's work when it was just stuff in the vanilla-sci-fi section of the library (The Risen Empire, and sequel The Killing of Worlds). I've been meaning to read his Uglies trilogy for a while - I even had it down as something I might buy for myself last Christmas - but only got around to it now because the popularity of the series means the books are always on loan.

I managed to get a hold of the first book in the series, Uglies, last week, and was so hooked that I used every spare moment I had to read it and finished just yesterday. When I went to return the book today, I looked-up the sequel, Pretties, in the library database to see if it was available. Just my luck - the 3rd copy of the book was available! So I made a bee line for the W authors in the YA section of the library... and couldn't find it there :|

Hmm, must be in one of those special displays or other sections that highlight good books, I thought, so I started going through the entire YA section of the library, searching for this one book.

So that's how I spent my lunch break - looking like a lost soul, travelling many times over the same ground, drawing stares from the seated readers as they watched and wondered why this grown office-working adult male is wandering around the section of the library filled with books mostly aimed at teen and pre-teen girls...

I eventually found it after referring to the library database once again; seeing that the book was just returned today, and finding it in the Recently Returned section of YA. But my discovery-of-the-day award would actually have to go to this new category of YA books that I came across.

On the same shelf as long-running YA series' with categories such as 'detective stories', 'chick lit', 'horror', and the like - each separated by a vivid appropriately-labelled yellow bookend - was a category so specific that I was surprised to find it filled with just as many books as every other category:

Exclusive academies for rich kids who form cliques

The kind of stuff you'd find in there? Gossip Girl.

As a sort of follow-up to an earlier gripe about the difference between my perceived and actual age, just last week I got ID'd when buying a beer... *sigh*

Upon complaining about it, one person suggested I grow a beard, one person showed some sympathy by saying she gets ID'd at the supermarket (can't link to it as it's on my Facebook profile), and another person suggested growing a beard. See a pattern there?

And over a dinner with friends just this weekend, growing facial hair was brought-up again - although in the context of the recent ski week and the things we did to keep warm.

"So why don't I try growing a beard?" they asked. My response is that, even if it will solve my age issues, it brings with it a whole new raft of problems; if I let my facial hair grow a bit, I start to look like a Mexican car thief.

I don't have any photo evidence of this, but there are plenty of photos of my dad in the family photo album from his facial hair days, and boy does he look dodgy. One photo in particular sticks with me, an action shot taken of our whole family at the Auckland Zoo soon after we moved to New Zealand. In it, my mum and dad are walking together with my mum pushing a stroller, and both my brother and I are running ahead of the 2 of them. Every time I see that photo, I look at my dad and think, Man, I wouldn't trust that guy around my kids or car, and then let the irony of my thoughts slowly sink-in as I realize that I am one of his kids, and that I don't own a car.

I don't really look like my dad, but I tend to see a lot of my parents in myself. eg: musical ability from my mum, my aptitude for chess and choosing cooking meals over baking from my dad, etc. So when I forget to shave for a while and see a 5-o'clock-the-following-day shadow on my face, I keep seeing my dad from that photo...

Since I'm from a country filled with stories about how people dig up and steal phone cables from the ground only to sell them back to the phone companies they stole them off, or about how you can get scammed and stabbed on the buses/jeepneys, or how everyone drives with their doors locked lest somebody open it and steal from you while you're idling at an intersection, I tend to put a high price on my perceived trustworthiness in an attempt to differentiate myself from my crazy little country of birth.

So I'll just have to put up with the young 'un treatment, because given the choice between that or looking like I'm going to jack your car and entice young children with candy, I'd rather deal with the former than hinder my friend/career/life prospects.

For whatever reasons (probably dance classes... yeah, I blame dance classes) this last year has had me meet a whole lot of new people who span a whole range of ages. And for whatever other reasons, one of the things new people like to find out about another person is how old they are.

I often use age as an indicator to figure-out how much silliness I can get away with (older people) or how much restraint and maturity I should show (younger people). (Dunno why it's that way around; if anything I should be sillier amongst the younger like my nieces, and show maturity with those older like my grandparents.) I'm sure others use age to gauge other things, but one thing that happens to me over and over again, and with increased frequency as of late, is that people underestimate my age.

'Everyday' examples include getting ID'd at bars, purchasing alcohol from stores or the grocery, or even the occasional R18 movie. During my recent ski trip, when I hired ski pants from a ski hire shop, the day I hired them I got asked if I was 18 or under. When time came to return the ski pants, I got asked again. I really should've said yes because that second time the salesperson had an item vs days hired price chart in-front of him and I could see the difference in price between 18-and-under and adult hire. If only I had lied, I could've gotten almost 50% off the hire price! Dammit!

Stuff for cheap and all I have to do is reinforce others' assumptions? Sweet!

But for 'non-everyday' cases, when it's encountering new people who I see often and who get enough time to form all sorts of opinions and impressions about me before I even work-up enough courage to find them on Facebook, things get a bit more annoying.

At a big dance party last year, a friend from ceroc (not amazing baking girl, so that really only leaves 1 other person at that time) and I were discussing our high school years, when she said "That should be easier for you to remember, since it can't have been that long ago for you." I looked at her weird before asking her how old she thinks I am, and then giving her the answer. Signs that my response threw her off could be easily observed: an almost-awkward silence followed, during which time I could see the cogs slowing inside her head and her thought processes coming to a bit of a halt as this new fact didn't seem to coincide with everything else that she thought she knew, and so the operators inside her brain had to take the system down for a while to remove the spanner I had thrown in the works.

The same thing happened again more recently with another new ceroc friend (different topic of conversation, same blank response), and again just last week with a complete stranger who, to her credit, was just asking everyone their age to get a range and find-out if anybody else there is her son's age so she can go back to her son and tell him that yes, people your age do indeed take dance classes.

Then of course there was the door lady at dance class who asked if I had a student card...

As great as it is to learn that everybody thinks I look young, it does come with some caveats: not only does my age get underestimated, but my abilities get underestimated too. In the case of getting ID'd, the bouncer or salesperson doesn't pass any long-term judgement; they only require I pass the age test, and all I have to do for that is throw some government-issued photo identification at their face. Undoing the damage caused by the impression that you've just left high school however, is a little harder - I spend half my time copping young 'un jokes, and the other half trying to prove that I do indeed have a full-time job and a university degree.

The long-term challenge however, is that if the stereotypes are to believed, my Asian genes are going to ensure I look like this until I turn 60 (provided I even live that long), at which point all my hair will immediately turn grey, I'll grow a long beard, and whenever somebody asks me a question, I will stroke said beard sideways, speak in riddles, and in the process give out sage advice.

Why do they call it 'taking a dump', when you're actually leaving one?

When you're young, your age is an indicator of the number of years you've been around, the amount of stuff you've seen and done, the percentage of the multiplication tables you're expected to know, and the bigger that number, the cooler you are. When you're older (and heck, you don't even have to be that old before you reach this tipping point) it's an approximation of the years you've got left, the amount of stuff you haven't seen or done, the percentage of mathematics you've been taught and since forgotten, and the bigger that number, the less-cool you seem to feel.

Age sure is a strange thing.

Recently, I haven't been given much of an opportunity to watch the Aussie soap opera that had captivated me during my short stint of living on my own: Home and Away. In that linked blog post I said that the TV station here did a Home and Away omnibus on the Sunday morning so people who come home too late from work on the weekdays (ie: myself) can catch-up on the whole week in one sitting, but given the events of the last couple of weekends (an out-of-town ceroc dance party and a ski week covering 2 weekends), I haven't had a chance to watch the omnibus either.

I've missed so many omnibus Sundays that I find I'm no longer looking forward to waking-up Sunday morning to watch the show, and so I think I've been weaned off Home and Away.

Missing a month's worth of Home and Away will make it hard for me to get back into it; I remember missing a few days once, and when I returned I found myself asking lots of "How did that / When did that happen?" questions. Sure it won't be hard to fill-in the gaps by making assumptions here and there and just hoping that those puzzle pieces fall into place when the characters bring-up things from the past as they often do (that's pretty much how I started-out when I began watching at the end of the 2008 season), but it's my interest in the show that has waned so far into the 'meh' section of my own personal Care Metre that what's left isn't enough to motivate me to do that.

Meh

Now this piece of news will delight some of my friends, particularly those who saw my watching of the show as an epic character flaw (one person even decided to wait until we next met to call me a douche upon learning this fact). Oh you guys may be dancing around happily, but don't count this as a major victory just yet; remember I still watch American Idol with an almost religious fervour! I even bought David Cook's album! (winner from the 2008 season) Hah!

But to the others who I found-out also watch Home and Away and with whom I shared moments of conversing about the plot and the people, it looks like we'll have 1 less thing to talk about, and that makes me particularly sad :(

Circumstances do change however; I expect to be in the city again some time this year. And maybe then, just maybe, I'll be back to a place within walking distance of my work, finishing-up at my usual time, strolling home at a steady pace, and just happen to find myself in-front of the TV before 5:30pm on a weekday.

Tomorrow, I catch a bus to a city some 4-and-a-half hours away to stay with friends for the night, before all of us head for the ski fields to enjoy a week-long snowy vacation :)

It's been a long time since I last went skiing, or played-about in the snow. Last time I ever did both was... *thinks about it* ...1999. Damn, 10 years! I've been looking forward to this for a while, and have used it as an excuse to make several sweet purchases in the past couple of weeks: new jacket, beanie, socks, and sunglasses.

However, I'm wondering if my workmates will actually notice my absence.

No, I'm not being emo about things. Rather, I was noticing how embedded and automatic some responses or phrases are in some of my workmates that they either forgot that I'll be away next week, or forgot that we don't work weekends in this country:

Workmate farewell #1: "Enjoy your weekend."
Workmate farewell #2: "See you next week."
Workmate farewell #3: "See you tomorrow." (it's Friday today...)

I guess I'm just reminded of those images of Socially Awkward Penguin when it says something along the lines of: Taxi driver drops you off at the airport. He says, "Enjoy your trip!" You say, "You too!"

I love you internets...

If, come Monday morning, my empty chair doesn't remind them, then I hope my out-of-office reply will remind them where I am. Here's what mine's set up to say:

If you're reading this, then I'm out enjoying the snowy slopes of my ski trip... or faceplanting into the snow. Given the winter we've been having, you think it'd be smarter for me to go somewhere sunny eh?

I'll be back in the office Monday 27th July, hopefully in 1 piece, without too many bruises or leg/arm/neck braces.

Very professional, I know.

What I don't know though, is if I'll get internets up there, but I'll try remember to Tweet / update Facebook status daily from my phone with my injury statistics.

So... see y'all in a week-and-a-bit :)

I've just come back from watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with some friends. I organized the get-together and screening as a birthday present for one of those friends, Claire (the same Claire as previously mentioned in this old story e-mail), and wow, much better than all the previous Harry Potter movie adaptations that came before it.

I give it a thumbs-up for the story-telling: where all the previous movies had a rather disjointed method of telling the story (eg: the 5th movie using those newspaper-esque montages to advance the plot, yet still relying on your prior knowledge of the book to fill-in any gaps), this one cut-out the right bits from the book such that what was left was a good enough story it's own right.

So Happy Birthday Claire! I hope you enjoyed it - I certainly did :)

Anyway, today turned-out to be an interesting and fun day. Not just because of said movie screening to end my day, but also because of the way the day started...

---
I visited my doctor this morning! Yes, exclamation mark! It's been years since I last saw the family doctor - whenever I get one of those run-of-the-mill illnesses (winter cold, the flu, SARS) I tend to just let the illness run its course and cheer my body's defences on. I'm still familiar with the whole process of visiting the doctor, but with the swine flu scare gripping the country and wringing every last modicum of usefulness from the national health system, today's visit was a bit more... interesting.

It started like any other early morning visit to the doctor. I entered the building to the reception and waiting area, a little surprised to see that there were many others here already. It may only be 8:35am, but it looks like things are already in full-swing. I made my way towards reception to let them know I've arrived.

Me: "Hi, I'm here for my 8:30 appointment [yeah, I'm a bit late] with Dr Watson."
Receptionist: "OK, I'll just add that in here..."

*receptionist types/clicks a few keys/buttons*

Receptionist: "Now, have you been experiencing any flu-like symptoms?"

Well that's new. I don't remember having to answer questions like that, or any questions at all actually, when signing-in before. When I rang-up to make this appointment last week, it was about some itchiness in my joints. But in the weekend between then and now I developed a headache and sore throat. Headache's gone, but sore throat is still there.

*cough cough* Flu-like symptoms? Me?

It makes sense they'd ask that, being worried about swine flu and all. I better answer the lady's question.

Me: "Well, I have had a sore throat recently..."
Receptionist: "OK, I'm gonna have to ask you to wear a mask then."

*receptionist brings up a box of disposable mouth/nose masks*

For a sick person being condemned to wear something that would advertise my sickness - I might as well have worn a sandwich board with "Swine flu party right here!" written on it - I didn't actually mind complying. In-fact, I pulled the mask out of the box with too much enthusiasm, and then proceeded to ask the receptionist for instructions on how to properly wear the thing. Sure, I knew how it works, seeing all those pictures on the news with people wearing the masks, but I was so stoked at the idea of actually putting one of these things on and joining the millions around the world who also have them.

So I took a seat in the waiting area and put the mask on, wearing it a bit too proudly - probably just as well that it covered my mouth so that nobody could see the stupid grin on my face. I looked around at the other patients in the waiting room, and found myself somewhat alone; the only other person in the room with a mask was a small boy who didn't really wear it, but had his mother put it up to his mouth when he was coughing.

I turned to look at the the children's playpen which was situated next to me, only to find it devoid of all books and toys. A sign above the pen stated that: "Books and toys have been removed for the duration of the flu season." They're really taking the whole flu thing seriously.

I wasn't all by my lonesome for very long. No, the next few incoming patients didn't declare any flu symptoms, but one of them turned out to be my friend and sort-of neighbour (she lives up the street from me) Clare (not the same person whose birthday it was and who I'd be watching Harry Potter with later tonight). After she told reception that she was here for her appointment, she looked around the waiting room for a place to sit, and overlooked me... twice! The damn mask has made me all but anonymous, reducing me to a member of the generic group of Sick People Who Need To Wear Masks.

Where's Waldo?

I pulled down the mask, said her name, and waved at her. Then she noticed me and sat down in the chair across from me.

Neighbour Clare: "Hey Em. I didn't notice you with your mask on."
Me: "Heh, I'm actually finding it a bit too fun! I'm expecting news cameras to show up any minute."
Neighbour Clare: "Haha, yeah. I wish I had my camera here so I could take pictures of this."
Me: "I already tried to do that with my cellphone, but the battery's low. And to think, I got this mask when I was just coming in for an itch!"

We talked for a bit until the doctor came out to find me. I followed him into his office where I immediately noticed that he was wearing a mask too, albeit much cooler looking than mine: his looked to be made of much tougher material and had what I'm guessing is a filter (a small cylinder that jutted-out the front of the mask just a little).

After seeing the doctor, I made my way to the pharmacy about a block away to get my prescription medicine. Not only did the doctor get me something for the itches (turns out it was some pretty weak eczema) but also the sore throat (tonsillitis, whoop whoop). I handed over my prescription to the pharmacist, and as I was killing time by browsing the products at the pharmacy, I came across something called "mp3 gel douche".

Play your music, and become a douche, in gel form?

When time came to pay for my medicine, I was expecting to have to fork over epic amounts of money for each of the meds. I was just taking out the credit card when the pharmacist said, "That'll be $9".

NINE DOLLARS! NINE NEW ZEALAND DOLLARS!! I quickly stuffed the credit card back into my wallet and paid in cash instead! Looking at the invoice, the government subsidy on prescription medicines reduced each item to $3. Yay for state-funded drugs! :D

For just 9 bucks I was able to transform my backpack into my own personal medicine cabinet, with supplies to fight bacterial infections and skin irritation for a month! Just like when I bought a McDonalds Apple Pie to discover they had cut the price of it in half, the $9 price tag for all this medicine made me feel like I had just won something. And to top it all off, I managed to get away with a souvenir: when I was paying for the visit to the doctor, I asked the receptionist if I could keep the mask.

She said yes.

My new Facebook profile pic

These 2 weeks have been a bit of an emotional roller coaster for me: lots of highs, lots of lows, and not enough time for things to sit still so I can take stock of everything that's happening.

Example of high: ceroc weekend / dance party at Palmerston North and probably everything associated with it: I got to put on a waistcoat and bow tie, visited the Tui Brewery as an aside, and the road trip to/from the event put me in a car with 3 beautiful girls - and no, I'm not just saying that because there's a good chance that at least one of them will stumble across this post (damn Facebook).

Example of low: having a talk with my folks about my apartment-hunting situation and then it dawning on me that I may not be being honest with myself about what it is I really need.

So the low as described above doesn't have a paragraph as large as the good thing I listed, but it really sewed some doubt into me; not just over the apartment-hunting, but over every other shitty little thing which has gotten to me since the dawn of time. Some of those things were really stupid complaints (like this damn itch behind my knee that refuses to go away) but once the doubt crept in, it opened the flood gates behind it and I took a downward spiral into emo-dom.

Throughout this whole ordeal, it feels as if my mp3 player - a Creative ZEN (I got the black 16GB model, not the pink 2GB that seems to show-up by default) - has been able to gauge my mood and put on the appropriate songs to match.

At the beginning: Michael Jackson's Leave Me Alone (yes, I, like everybody else, broke out their old MJ collection), Lifehouse's Simon, Four Letter Lie's A Place Called "Further".

Yesterday, from when I posted "Doesn't know what to do anymore." on Twitter: Lesley Roy's Thinking Out Loud, Maroon 5's Makes Me Wonder, Gary Jules's cover of Tears for Fears' Mad World.

And just this morning: Queen's Under Pressure.

You can of course argue that depending on your mood, you can attach any meaning you want to any song - I'm certainly having that little debate in my mind right now - but I was more surprised at that my mp3 player didn't need any prodding or song-selecting-button-pushing from me to find something that worked at the time. Usually the shuffle function on this thing is really annoying in that it picks the same songs in the afternoon that it played in the morning, making me question just how 'random' the shuffle really is.

You could also argue that maybe my music collection is just so full of songs that cater to a crappy mood that my mp3 player had no choice but to play seemingly appropriate music... which is a worrying symptom of a potential closet emo.

Regardless, I'm working my way through things, mainly thanks to good people who have noticed my mood, shown concern, and have pointed me in the right direction. It's also just as well that I've got a ski trip coming-up in a week: just me, some friends, the snow to break my fall, and a mountain that won't talk back.

The mp3 player will be coming along too :)

---
On a side-note, I should really start listening to the lyrics of songs - only this week did I discover that Queen's Save Me is about a breakup!

(The first real test for my can-update-this-blog-from-anywhere update. Fingers crossed...)

I've just come back from a ceroc weekend in a city not too far from my own. I was going to write a bit about it, but I noticed I had the stuff below on backlog. I thought I posted it before I left, but it seems I didn't. Silly me.

Well, I'll get that one out of the way first, then maybe write something about "making it big" in Palmerston North ;)

---
On my way to work on Friday morning, I was walking alongside a little girl and her mother. As we approached a crossing at an intersection, the little girl pressed the button to light-up the Walk / Don't Walk lights on the opposite side of the road. The girl was then reminded by her mother to wait by her side until the "green man" (Walk light) lit up.

The traffic in either direction was non-existent at that time. I could've walked lazily across the road without encountering so much as a gust of wind, but I stood my ground. When several others who were walking behind us reached the intersection, they continued forward, jaywalking onto the path of incoming nothings. Tempted to follow them, I continued to hold my ground.

I was rooted to the footpath by a resolution I made with myself several years ago...

The streets can be rough

During my high school years I often walked with some of my friends after school - they had to board a train at a station which was on the way home for me. After one such walk, I said goodbye as their train was approaching and continued on to a crossing some hundred metres away where the railway barriers were down and the bells were warning of an incoming train. Across the tracks from me were a bunch of kindergarten children being held-back from the tracks both by the loud bell noises and by the instructions given to them from their kindergarten teacher.

Now the train was visibly stopped at the train station, so I thought it safe to cross the tracks. So I did, in-front of all those little kids, in obvious defiance of what their teacher just told them.

After crossing, I looked back at the train and was surprised to see my friends walking my way. Curious as to why they weren't on the train, I half-ran back across the tracks to meet them, then we all ran across the tracks again before the train had a chance to accelerate.

"Geez Em," one of my friends said, "you just crossed the tracks 3 times, and in-front of all those children! What kind of example are you setting?" he joked.

Not a good one I reckon. There I was, blatantly defying what the kindergarten teacher had just told her charges. Their little minds must've been brimming with the unfairness of the situation. I could imagine their questions to their teacher:

Little kid: "You said we shouldn't cross the tracks. Why did that guy just cross the tracks over and over?"
Teacher: "Because he's a bad person and he's going to hell."

OK, so immediately jumping to calling some stranger hell-bound might be a bit of a stretch, but it's the simpler choice when the alternative is having to explain to sub-5-year-old minds the concepts of depth perception, velocity, and perceived risk.

Still, I felt guilty. One of the last thing I want on my mind is the knowledge that some of the numbers in the next generation's pedestrian injuries/fatalities statistics may have been caused by my terrible example.

As an episode of Joan of Arcadia once taught me, "it's not enough to feel guilty. The guilt has to be accompanied by change." And so my change was this:

At designated red/green man crossings, and when children are present, to not cross the road until the green man is lit.

It's not exactly New Year's Resolution material, but it's stuck with me for years; so long now that some friends and family think I'm coy when it comes to crossing the road and are actually getting quite impatient with me.

So there I was that Friday morning on my way to work, waiting for the light to turn green and being responsible for young lives, simply by being more responsible with my own. It made me feel very grown-up.

The other day I was talking with somebody who had very recently joined Facebook (yes, seems some people don't have Facebook, I'm shocked too). Not having been a big user of social networking websites until that moment, she talked about feeling very exposed: having photos of yourself up there for the world to see, and how the social aspect of your life is now visible to work colleagues or potential employers (as many people do like to keep those sides of their lives separate).

This isn't the first time I've heard these topics brought up when it comes to the social web - one friend in particular mentions these points as arguments for not joining Facebook, which kinda sucks because that person lives in Australia, so the keeping-in-touch stuff is all done through e-mail. Maybe it's time I gave these subjects a bit of thought, I said to myself.

Time to put one on. Actually, time to find a brain to make this thing of any use.

Personally, I haven't had too much fear of putting myself out there on the big bad internet. I run a personal website with my name plastered all over it so that Google can index me, and my e-mail address is just 1 click away from potential spambot loving.

My Facebook profile isn't any better either; everyone on my friends list sees the same thing: photos of me being stupid at parties of weekends past, my sometimes-personal Twitter-sized status updates, and work mates can just as easily read my posts about my latest work-related gripes.

Maybe it is time I started taking the face I show to the internet - which is the face I wear in real-life - a bit more seriously by putting some leash or restraint on it, because throughout my online life (some 14 or 15 years now) it's probably only dumb luck that has protected me from the consequences of being this open. Or maybe, I'm just not a good target: I'm not a big company, I'm not a famous person, I don't have lots of money, I don't wield any power, nor am I any combination of the above.

And I'm definitely not an Attractive Young Female.

OK, let's be realistic: I'm not even 1 of those 3 key words in the paragraph above, but because of what I'm not, I reduce the size of the pool of potential people I could be afraid of on the internet. Creepy old men don't want me, I'm too old for paedophiles and cradle-snatchers, and straight-guy stalkers ain't coming here for their fix.

As for my current employers or anybody in my future to whom I look to for work? Well, lets just hope that they not only want to add some programmer / web designer to their teams, but also want to inject some personality and honesty into their company (because with my ugly mug, those 2 traits are all I've got going for me now).

I was at work just a moment ago - grabbing my headphones (which I left there Friday evening because I had other things/people on my mind) and sending status reports to team leaders (also forgotten for the same reasons as the headphones) - and the city is noticeably full of Frenchies, or at the very least supporters of the French rugby team.

There's an international rugby match going down in the city in just a few hours - New Zealand vs France - and supporters of the away team are doing a good job of letting everybody know they're there. Bright red/white/blue wigs, face paint, clothing, flags and capes are standard fare. So are loud French songs which I can't understand, although I think that's mostly the point.

One group in particular was heckling anybody, in a friendly (ie: non-soccer fan) way of course, that obviously looked like a New Zealand supporter. And, for those who didn't at least look like a supporter of France, sung to loudly and in their general direction. As I headed to work, this group's and mine paths were going to cross.

Ah crap, I thought, I may not look NZ enough to be a New Zealander, but I'm definitely not a Frenchie. So as I neared them, I prepared myself for some form of undecipherable sports chant.

The chant however, never came. Instead, they looked at me approvingly, like a fellow Frenchie, hands raised in greeting to what they must've thought was a fellow France supporter. Hmm, maybe they reached a gap between the verse/chorus of their song I thought, except that the group proceeded to sing to the guy immediately behind me.

As I reached work and sat down at my desk, I was still thinking about why I had been skipped over by that group of France supporters. So I set my red/white bag on my chair, took its contents out, then took off my blue/off-white jacket and draped it over my chair. And when as I had these 2 items in-front of me, it finally clicked.

I am a big fat walking French flag.

The colour of my stuff

Walking through the city for the rest of the day felt a bit weird. Where previously my new winter jacket told all polar winds and sub-zero temperatures to fuck off, it and my bag were now in cahoots, broadcasting my treason in 2 different languages. I guess I should be glad that I didn't run into any groups of NZ supporters, or that I'd be going to the game tonight - a speck of red/white/blue in a sea of black...

Personally, I didn't feel too bad. I'm not a big rugbyhead, but I know NZ has lost all the major games to France in the last 8 years (ie: 2 World Cups). So no guilt on my part for accidentally supporting the team that beats NZ when it matters.

Go France! :P

(a sort-of sequel to my BEDA post, Mother's Day ahead)

Mother's Day (and my mum's birthday) was over a month ago, and what I ended-up getting my mum was a 2-part present to cover both occasions:

The first part was a book, The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger. The second part of the present will be that, provided she likes the book, I'll take her to see the movie adaptation of the film coming out later this year.

I've never read the book myself, but have been meaning to for a long time; it's just that it's always on loan whenever I visit the library. Now that there's a copy on hand, I'll be sure to borrow it from my mum when she's done reading it.

So what should I happen to see when I made my way to work last week? As I walked through the book store from which I bought the book to reach the lift I needed to take to my work, I saw an entire shelf of The Time Traveller's Wife for sale at 50% off...

F*!@$!

For 50% off at Whitcoulls at the moment

When I got the book so many weeks ago, it was the last one on the shelf! It wasn't overly expensive or anything like that, but this has happened to me so often: I buy something, only to find it at a reduced price a week or so later! Most often this happens with clothes, which sucks because I just bought this sweet new jacket for an upcoming skiing trip at full price.

If history chooses to repeat itself - which it often does just to mock me, probably because I never took it seriously as a subject during my high school years (lesson learned: don't shun your studies lest they come back and taunt you later in life, especially physics which will find very mathematical and cold-hearted ways to screw with you) - then I should see this exact jacket on sale a week or 2 before my skiing trip.

The other types of products this happens to me a lot with is computer stuff. Although with the speed at which technology evolves and the prices drop, a certain amount of "it'll be cheaper next week" is to be expected.

I guess it's the world's way of getting its money back off me; because I don't spend a lot or buy things very often, the economy finds some way to take it all back, thus evening-out my semi-frugal nature.

So around the time I was coping with my own battle against swine flu, I spent a lot of time just sitting at home and doing nothing. I tried to do some programming, but thinking on that level became tiring. I thought I could give my art a go, but I wasn't feeling particularly creative. All that was really left for me was to vege out on video games, so at my brother's recommendation, I played Dead Space on his Playstation 3.

To summarize, Dead Space is a sci-fi survival-horror action game set on a large spaceship that seems to have been overtaken by grotesque alien monsters. If you need comparison materials, think Doom 3 meets Event Horizon.

Anyway, as is expected of games in the survival-horror genré, you see a lot of blood, strange writing on walls, undecipherable symbols on walls, said writing/symbols drawn in blood, and any other combination of the above. When the blood on the walls started showing-up in Dead Space, I didn't really think much of it. But when the blood-soacked writing and strange alien symbols started showing-up, I began wondering: "Where are the pictures of dicks?"

As gay as that sounded, let me take a step back to write about an observation I made several weeks before.

The internet is notorious for its childishness. Given the chance, people will create usernames which allude to sex or dicks (case in point: my brother has registered the username 'PhallicThunder' on some forums), create banners depicting dicks (eg: first time my friends took Mario Kart DS online, they competed against others with dicks on their banners), or creatures shaped like dicks or boobs (eg: Spore Creature Creator).

While this isn't a dick creature, it turns out boob creatures aren't allowed

This obviously isn't an internet-only thing. Just the other day I walked past a construction site with grafitti of dicks on the walls. And when taking the lift up to my floor at work where the covers used to protect the walls against scratches are installed, those covers have their fair share of phallic pictography (same thing at my mum's work I've learned).

When I saw our elevator covers with their dick pics, I started to wonder, who in this building would do this? I mean, this is a workplace where the average age of employees is somewhere in the late 40s. If I had to accuse anybody of drawing those, I'd quickly point the finger at myself because a) I'm one of the youngest there, b) I'm pretty childish myself, and c) I really have a hard time imagining my middle-aged managers taking out a pen and scribbling pictures of dicks on the elevator wall covers while they giggle childishly.

So there I was, playing Dead Space, staring at a wall of blood-soaked words, wondering where the hell the dick graffiti was...

I imagine that, with your dying breath, writing warnings or hints to potential survivors about 'cutting off their limbs' or how to survive certain alien attacks takes precedence over posting phallic imagery on the walls of a spacecraft. But then again, when you're on your last legs, why the hell not?

(slightly unrelated, but my favourite example of vandalism has to be the one where they removed some letters from the sign PUBLIC PARKING, such that it read PUBIC KING)

A cold southerly chill straight from the antarctic - and maybe even the cold vacuum of space - is currently blasting my poor little country into submission. As an avid fan of cold days, I've prepared myself to handle the temperatures. Right now I'm wearing with my usual attire, socks, another long-sleeved tops, fingerless gloves and a just-purchased-today beanie, with my legs resting on my 9-fin oil heater while I chow-down on chips and chocolate biscuits. On any other day, this moment would exist in some permutation of my own personal heaven, but there's one more details which puts a big fat dampener on whole situation: I'm sick.

It is approaching winter, it is getting cold, and it just happens to be the month when my sick leave gets reset, so of course I would get sick. This particular sickness has been lingering at the back of my throat for several days now, waiting for the perfect opportunity to rear its ugly head. It started-off as a pretty weak thing, but I think it's been fueled into the major annoyance it is now because of my state of mind this past week.

"It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black."

You see, on Wednesday morning as I was reading the paper while eating breakfast, I came across an article which said the Dymocks on Lambton Quay is closing down (for those who don't know, Dymocks is a chain of bookstores throughout New Zealand, and Lambton Quay is a street name). There have been a lot of retail closures throughout the country because of the recession, but Dymocks, "The booklovers bookstore" (as their motto goes), came as a major surprise to me. Dymocks has been as much a part of Lambton Quay as blue is to the sky and as far as I'm concerned has existed in that spot since the English settled this country.

Not only is it a landmark, but it's also a bookstore. While I'm no bibliophile, my love of writing is fueled by my enjoyment of reading and the feeling a good book gives me that is the urge to go out and start telling my own stories. I don't even buy books that often (I'm more of a library slut, and my last book purchase was from a competitor), yet to hear that this particular bookstore was closing down was like a stab to the book-loving part of my heart, and so without the kindle for my writing fire, I began to despair.

So there I am at mid-week, both sick and sad, one possibly the cause of the other, but I have no idea which one it could be. On the one hand, I become more susceptible to illness when my mood is particularly negative; it's like being emo allows my immune system to become more porous and thus permeable to bad bacteria and viruses. On the other, being sick causes me to feel worse and tints my entire world and outlook with a drab palette; unejoyable days at work feel longer, every wind chills to the bone, and even my favourite foods can lose their taste. One paves the way for the other and vice versa, creating some sort of feedback loop that decided mid-day Friday to explode.

Friday night had a dinner with friends to use-up 2-for-1 dinner vouchers we had accumulated before they expire, and a sort of well-wishing for one of us who is headed-off overseas to represent New Zealand in some sport I still don't completely understand. I was looking forward to it the whole week, but around lunchtime on Friday everything started to go downhill from there.

Lunch didn't feel all that great because my throat started to feel like it was swallowing sandpaper, and the shopping afterwards for a new beanie, gloves, and jacket for an upcoming ski trip left me noticing how cold it was getting outside and how useless my jacket was to protect me from the elements.

Back at work, the new project I'm currently assigned to just didn't hold the same excitement as it usually does, and so the afternoon dragged. When work ended and it was time for dinner, I didn't head straight to the restaurant. Instead, I took a bit of a wander in an attempt to lift my mood before I had to face everybody. It wasn't a complete success.

Long story short: I managed to muster enough energy, sarcasm, wit and one-liners to last dinner without looking too ill, but after that I had to take a back seat to proceedings lest I collapse or something.

Spent

That, and told myself I had to get home and let whatever sickness I had run its course. I've already been nicknamed 'ebola monkey' at work for my ability to be the most cold/flu-stricken person and the most likely vector for infecting others with said cold/flu. I didn't want to give this group a reason to continue the nickname here.

So I'm looking for a scapegoat, but it's like asking about the chicken and egg situation. Now I've just been told that I should get some more sleep because I look like a zombie. That compliment just made me notice my throat flare-up again.

It's a vicious cycle...

"Before you sue me for defamation, in my defence, teasing or joking is one of the ways I show my affection. It's only with my friends that I joke about their mothers, so the fact that I just joked about yours, and written about you twice in the past 2 weeks, goes to show how much I like you."

And those were my last words before dial-up girl - tired of being misrepresented in my blog - killed me with her cold hard stare. Yup, I'm blogging from the afterlife which, oddly enough, looks a lot like work, so I must be in hell.

SPARTAAAAAA!

So what do you do when you're in a temporarily ethereal state? I dunno about you, but I start thinking about the hard questions: Why are we here? If you were given the opportunity to travel back in time and talk to yourself when you were much younger, could you go through with it? What would you say? OK, so I never really thought about that stuff, but instead I thought about how I've slipped under the radar.

All this reflecting was started by a dream I had a few nights ago about my dance classes.

Come the end of May I'll have attended ceroc lessons for a year. In the dream, everybody whose name I know and is still attending classes (which isn't a lot) is going to some private dance party that I didn't know about.
When I went to ceroc last night, several things hinted that my dream might actually be true; a couple of people asked me if I was going to some dance party that I had never heard of. I intended to ask my ceroc friends about it, but just forgot. So when I got home I did a bit of Facebook stalking and it turned-out that yes, my ceroc friends were going to this previously-unheard-of dance party.

I didn't really feel surprised - not getting blindsided by surprises is a skill that comes with age - but I did kinda feel left out. It also reinforced a slight 'on the outside looking in' feeling I've had when I see some of the groups at ceroc.

My 2 ceroc friends have managed to make a big impression with many of the others there and so are very much a part of those groups. I guess it helps when you have some redeeming or memorable traits: one of those 2 is the ever cheerful hug nazi, the other looks like the spitting image of Edward Cullen from Twilight.
As for me, I don't exactly do anything to draw attention to myself: I dance well enough, I don't look like any actors, and I don't grope my dance partners or stare at their chest all day (I've been told of some creepy guys who do).

That's not to say I haven't been a total social failure: I've made another 2 solid friends through dancing (one of whom is amazing baking girl), and maybe twice that number in acquaintances who'd I'd stop to talk to if we ran into each other on the street. But the rest of the time, I'm just another familiar face.

I'm not really complaining here - just stating facts - as I do bring this upon myself: I don't go to every event on my calendar, I tend to stick with the people I know, and I do enjoy a quiet night at home. I'm more of a 'go where I'm needed' type.

I think I do this because I focus so much on the few friends that I do have. It's this core bunch that I will travel long distances for, re-organize my schedule to meet with, or go to a movie or exhibit again despite having seen it myself so that they have company when they go. Sometimes it requires a lot of effort, which is probably why I keep the number of friends I do have to a low number lest I get gray hairs or other sign of aging from trying to make too many people feel like they're worth their weight in gold.

So yeah, I think about them a lot. I try not to give them too much to worry about when they think of me, but I can't really stop that when it comes to it. The last time I ever think I worried them was several years ago when I had a seizure. My friends were organizing some get-together, and when they were unable to reach me, one of them tried ringing my house:

*phone rings*
My dad: Hello?
Friend: Hi. Is Em there?
Dad: Uh, no. He's in the hospital.
Friend: Oh...

The thing was, my dad never elaborated on why I was in the hospital, letting my friends' imaginations come up with all sorts of possibilities. The truth of it was that in my flu-induced state, my temperature reached an almighty high (40C / 104F) to which my body responded by shutting-down and resetting itself, a by-product of which was the seizure.

I tended to downplay the seizure because, well, it wasn't that bad. Before the seizure: my head hurt, I felt warm, colours and lights were swirling in my vision, and I couldn't even guide a spoonful of food into my mouth properly (the seizure occured over breakfast). Afterwards: my head was clear, my body felt cool, my vision was restored, and I could tie my shoes - the seizure was the best thing that happened to me during my flu!

I'm not suggesting everybody who's sick go out and have a seizure. A few years after that incident, I witnessed what a seizure looked like from the outside when a lady at my favourite bakery (which I have dubbed 'The Pie Shop' for having won a Best Pie In NZ award) collapsed and seized-up while making an order. It didn't look pretty - it was actually quite frightening - so it's not the sort of thing I'd be encouraging people to go out and experience.

I like to show I care by making jokes and sharing a laugh - I basically live by the motto "the day your friends stop making fun of you, is the day they stop caring about you." But to prevent myself from imploding, I only extend this philosophy to a close-knit bunch of people.

So I'm one of those quality over quantity freaks; sue me.

In a previous post I talked a bit about the concept of Three Thirtyitis. After that, you should understand what I then mean when I'm suffering from 10am-itis.

My Twitter update sums it up rather well:

Woke-up early to meet friends for breakfast, is now fighting sleep by blasting American Idol tunes through headphones d(O_O)b

So this morning I woke-up a lot earlier than usual (1 whole hour! *gasp*) so I could meet-up with friends for breakfast before work, and on a Monday morning too! The attraction of such an early-week early-morning get-together was to see people we don't often see. Well, that was the premise from the point-of-view of the organizer. For me, I'd been lucky enough to actually see the others rather recently.

Despite that, I made it through the cold, the rain, and the soul-crushing darkness that is the overcast cloud cover which has blocked sunlight from the city for several days now. I and one of the other train-riding guys caught the same train and made it in early. The next to come along lives a couple of suburbs away. The last person was actually the one who lives in the city and is the closest to the breakfast venue... typical. It was good though: breakfast was alright, company as always was great, lots of lols were had.

But wow, I feel so drowsy right now: my eyelids are being drawn to the ground by more than just gravity and my concentration is so far detached from my mind that it's almost like having an out-of-body-experience. I would normally eat something sugary to keep my consciousness afloat, but this doesn't feel like a blood-sugar thing. If this were after lunch, maybe I'd try sneak-in a power nap, but that's not gonna look so good having just gotten into work. So instead I've settled for playing tracks from this seasons American Idol contestants a bit louder than usual through my headphones.

How non-coffee drinkers wake up

Surprisingly the volume therapy is working wonders. The only downside was when a phone call came through and I picked up and put the receiver to my ear while my headphones were still on.

Unfortunately for me, I'm one of those people that needs about 8 hours of sleep a night to function at 100%. I'm not somebody who can either operate on less sleep or supplement rest with coffee or a wide variety of energy drinks. I came across several of the latter kind at university, or at least discovered that a lot of my friends could also fit into that category. One of the guys always kept a 6-pack of V energy drink at their workstation and ended-up collecting them to create a massive tower. Wandering around my floor at work, I see one of the older guys doing the same thing with his takeaway cofee cups.

Achievement unlocked

All that's left for me is to catch up on lost sleep tonight. I only fear that I'll fall asleep on the train home - gently rocked by the moving carriage, lulled by the sound of the electric engine - and miss my stop. I've done that before...

m(_ _)m ZZZ

First of all, I have a Miley Cyrus song stuck in my head because after watching this parody, I went and watched the original, before watching the parody again. So technically I have a parody of a Miley Cyrus song stuck in my head. Hmm, still doesn't help my case.

Secondly, I was walking to work yesterday morning with a friend - the same friend who has dial-up and mocked me for writing about My Feelings on this blog - who found even more reasons to divorce herself of my friendship. Last week she said my life wasn't scandalous enough to warrant us hanging out. This week, as a consequence of my non-scandalous life, she complained that our walks together are so draining that she needs to grab another coffee afterwards to wake her up for the second time for the day (she feeds on scandal like a plant feeds on sunlight. My presence obviously starves her). "What, is there not enough caffeine in my breath to keep you awake?" I joked.

So along the way, whenever a coffee shop passed us by I offered to buy her a coffee. She refused of course, knowing that I was only doing this to annoy her, but after maybe the 3rd coffee joint she came up with an excuse for her refusals: "I can't! Because if you spend money on me, and I haven't got any money to spend on you, then it creates an imbalance in the bank of friendship." (OK so that's not the exact quote, but it went something like that).

In response I asked if she wanted to apply for an overdraft, or hear of various loan repayment schemes (I would have taken payments from her mum, but I kept that line to myself), but it got me thinking about whether or not there was something more to her choice of metaphor; whether there is some sort of economic model I could apply to this situation.

Where my friendship could be headed

I looked to the internet to see if somebody else has tried to do a similar thing, and several people had. Some were more philosophical than others, some were very technical and I even came across a few scientific papers on the subject. One page seemed to sum it up best with our good friend, the law of supply and demand:

One of the first things they teach you in introductory economics is the law of supply and demand. A price equilibrium is reached at the point where supply and demand intersect. All that means is that both parties are getting what they want for what they think is a fair price.

I guess you could say friendship is established at that equilibrium point where both parties are happy with whatever they're getting from the other person.

The kind of relationship between dial-up girl and I is simple, but there is a mutual equality to it. We don't really organize to see one another but talk when we do, usually at friends' parties or when our paths happen to cross. Dial-up girl however has a tendency to feel a tremendous amount of guilt at the smallest infractions, and so my joke of buying her a coffee to make-up for the boring-ness that is my life was perceived as throwing a little - but just enough by her standards - imbalance into the equation.

[L]ooking at friendship as an economic transaction might seem a little cold and callous, but really, it's what we were all taught when we were younger. Life is about give and take. You can't just give give give or else you'll burn out. It's also the trademark of a sucker. And if you take take take, eventually people are going to realize that they're not getting anything out of your friendship. We should always be aware of what we're offering to other people. If we look at it like that, it'd be easier to understand why people interact with us in a certain way.

http://qnzalvin.xanga.com/624082638/economics-of-friendship/

I can think of a few people who could learn a little from watching what they offer. Hug nazi in particular used to give too much, and then started feeling bad when people stopped accepting her generosity, thinking that people didn't want her help anymore - she failed to understand that those on the receiving end started to accumulate some guilt at having taken so much. Several younger siblings of families I know often take too much, and then become ungrateful when the charity comes into question or stops - they fail to realize the effort being made by the gift-giver.

So what did I learn? 1) I shouldn't have joked so much about the coffee. 2) I totally should've said I'd take repayments from her mum. 3) No more coffee for dial-up girl :P

My last and final gripe with having moved back to the suburbs: the slow slow internets.

I always suspected that the kind of broadband we were getting out in the suburbs was slow, but I never really knew how bad it was until I moved into the city. On a good day in the suburbs, if you wanted to watch a YouTube clip that was 1 minute long, you would have to load the page, then pause the clip at the beginning, and return to it 4 minutes later so that you can get smooth playback from start to finish.

That was the general formula: multiply the video length by 4 to get the average loading time. We didn't even bother with high-quality or high-def clips, for streaming anyway; we always downloaded those with some multiple-connection download manager.

Anyway, when I made it to the city, one of the first things I had organized was the broadband (I actually had it set up before I got a fridge in... priorities, I know) and once the computer was set up, did a YouTube test. The difference? I could stream low-quality YouTube video!

I could load videos left and right, download podcasts, and have a torrent running in the background, all at the same time. I had finally caught up to technology as at 3 years ago, and it was great.

So what self-respecting IT guy would be caught with a slow internet connection? Unfortunately for me, that's kind of out of my hands, and no amount of shouting from the citizens of this country at the national telco has done any good to get it sorted.

And although it's not my problem, the slow internet thing got me thinking about other kinds of IT guy myths which I've been doing wrong. I mean, I don't have a digital camera, I don't have a smart phone (my cellphone doesn't even do + code dialing...), I'm not an early adopter (I only got the Xbox360 a couple of months ago) and I don't have a USB flash drive. I was probably the last of my group to get onto Facebook (a year of peer pressure finally got the better of me), I don't have any shirts which make references to internet fads, and I got a Twitter account only 2 months before Oprah did.

I think I'm just too cautious in my ways. While that doesn't explain the lack of digital camera, I often take the 'wait and see' approach to things such that by the time I've waited and seen, the thing in question has already hit the mainstream. Now that I'm looking for an apartment to buy in the city I just left, I think a cautious approach is a good thing to have. Who knows, maybe a cautious approach could've averted the subprime lending collapse.

So, I've taken my time, I've thought a lot, thought of everything I got and apart from blatantly ripping Cat Steven lyrics I've learned enough about what it is I am looking for in my own apartment. Amongst those things: high speed internet and a high-pressure shower. Everything else, as my favourite quote says, is negotiable ;)

Following on the back of yesterday's blog post, here I thought I'd mention a couple of other things that I'll be missing from my time in the city (and looking forward to when I return).

High-pressure water for showers

This was something I never knew I had until I moved into the city: shower water that can cut through my thick mop of hair and reach my scalp. At first I thought the water pressure at my old apartment was too strong, but, as with everything else, I got used to it. Then, when I spent a weekend with the family soon after moving out and had a shower, I was surprised at how weak the old shower was.

For years I had been showering with this water pressure, but only in that weekend did I notice that the rain does a better job than this! The water just hit the top of my hair and then slid away as my slightly oily hair built a protective shield over my hair which this low low low pressure water couldn't penetrate. No wonder I like rainy days; it's because only then am I properly washing my hair!

Now that's my kind of water

No more trains

No longer having to schedule my life around the train timetable was probably the biggest plus of city living. It meant I could spend more time out when I was with friends, most of whom live in the city too. Dance classes were also something I could extend without the trains; previously I'd cut the classes a bit short so I could catch the train home at a reasonable hour of the night. Although one thing I learned was that soon after the time I would normally leave to catch a train, my dancing would start to deteriorate. So maybe it was a good thing I caught the train when I did.

I could also enjoy other events held in the city a bit more when I didn't have to think about how long it would take for me to get to the station.

Don't let that smile rule your life

Home and Away

If you told me that I'd end-up getting hooked on a soap opera if I left home, I never would've believed you. But that's exactly what happened.

I normally leave work just after 5pm, and with a 20 minute walk to my former apartment, it positioned me perfectly to watch the pre-news show, which happened to be Home and Away - before that it was The Biggest Loser. After work, sometimes I just wanted to vege-out in-front of the TV, and given the timing of my return, Home and Away became the show I wound-down to.

With the train schedule, I can't watch this show without leaving work early, but I don't exactly feel like going to work earlier to make up my hours. Luckily for me the national TV station has a Home and Away omnibus on Sunday morning which plays all the previous week's episodes back-to-back, so I don't have to miss a thing!

So I'm out of the city - back with the family in the suburbs as I make my next move for buying a place - and having now spent 2 nights back in my old bed and room, I've noticed something here that I've been missing during my time in the city: hay fever.

The family house isn't like some sort of rural setting surrounded by rolling hills without a neighbour for miles; it's a pretty average suburban setting, but the house has it's own Lawn in both a Front and Back Yard, as well as Bushes and Trees around the back. When you wake up you hear Birds and can see Trees out my window. Whereas my now-former-apartment was a massive concrete block with just 1 big tree outside (probably only there because it was there before the building was built and so resource consent couldn't be obtained to cut it down) and the sounds of chirping have been replaced by the sirens of emergency vehicles. But in the city I never really get hay fever.

It's kind of sad to think that my body is better suited to an environment where the air is full of cigarette smoke and car exhaust than it is with whatever stuff nature throws into it. It wasn't always like this though: I remember when cigarette smoke used to make me physically ill. As a child when I spent too much time around smoking adults (like when my parents went to a friend's house and brought me along) I'd spend the next day vomiting into a bucket. Now, the only consequence of spending time with smokers is that I have to send my clothes to the laundry because the smoke has infused itself into the fabric.

Chain smoking++

It's too bad my body can't do the same thing with pollen or whatever it is in the air that throws my immune system off-kilter.

Short blog post tonight as I should get some sleep; I have to get used to catching the trains into the city again O_o

Oh, and I have, in just this month so far, surpassed the the most number of posts I have made to this blog in a single year (26 posts this month now, 25 posts in 2006).

And so we enter the first day of Blog Every Day April. Like Maureen Johnson, this'll pretty much be a day-by-day account of my life this month.

So what exciting things happened to me today? Well, today I walked to work with my neighbours.

I was late to work as usual, waiting for the lift to get to my level, when I heard the door opening to the only other apartment on this floor. Out came my neighbours, also ready to go to work.

There are 2 of them: a girl who I've encountered several times and keep calling "neighbour" since moving in to this apartment, and her boyfriend who I have seen before but never really met until today. I gave them my usual greeting - "Hey neighbours" - and we all walked together to our respective jobs.

We spent the walk talking about things that people who don't know a lot about each other talk about: work, work hours, being collectively called girls by one of the girls' friends as we passed-by, having my brother mistaken as a girl on his plane ticket, etc. The guy and I properly introduced ourselves to one another, and once they went their separate ways, I walked the rest of the way to work thinking, WTF, I actually don't know her name!

I tweeted that thought during the day (you can probably see that item in the Twitter feed to the right unless you're reading this via RSS) and found I wasn't completely alone when it came to nameless neighbours that you frequently encounter. One respondent referred to their nameless neighbour as "#12".

So I resolved to find out her name the next time we met, and as fate or co-incidence would have it, while I was waiting for the lift to take me back to my apartment this evening, I heard the lobby door open and in came my neighbours, also ready to get back home. After greeting the unnamed one - "Evening neighbour" - I found out her name.

I haven't written anything up here since before Christmas '08, so I felt compelled to put something up here just to fill the silence and pre-emptively dispell any rumours about my death. Now it's pretty much Valentines Day... cripes.

So what have I been up to in the month-and-a-half since my holidays? Working on a website redesign.

It's a new year, it's time for a new look I thought. And so, what was supposed to be a new look for 2009 which was supposed to come out in mid-Jan, is now looking at being more of an early-March thing. Or, if I wanted to be more sarcastic (or more realistic), an Easter thing.

I've been trying to add a bunch of new tricks I've learned since the last makeover (circa 2007). One of these things is something fairly new to me: Twitter. OK, so that thing has been around for a long time, but only recently, through listening/watching other podcasts of other members of the IT industry plugging their own Twitter URLs, have I felt compelled to join up. I'll be working on adding my tweets to my website (another sidebar?!?!), likely integrate it with my Facebook as well, and start getting into the micro-blogging habit.

So you can find me at http://twitter.com/u1traq (note the 1 instead of an L. 'Ultraq' was already taken, under the guise of ultraQ... bastards), and apart from updating the world with whatever inane activity I'm doing at certain points in time, I think it might actually be useful for site-related mini updates, particularly when I get back to working on Red Horizon.

Tweet tweet.

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.

I was a bit over-excited the other day when I received the first piece of mail addressed specifically to me. For the past couple of weeks it's been letters for at least 4 different people, and whether they be the owner or previous tennants, I haven't been able to tell. So when I got it, I was all "Hey, it's addressed to me! Oh wait, it's from [my electricity company]. Dammit, it's probably a bill." And it was.

Even when all the correspondence I make with friends abroad is done via e-mail, a good old letter still grabs my attention. An e-mail nowadays is a couple of sentences and a lol here or there. A letter is a page-turning short story. An e-greeting card is like a 5-mouse-click Christmas fruit cake; it doesn't take a lot of effort, and you don't feel that great about receiving one. An actual card requires a visit to the store, forking over some money, writing something in it, then dropping it into a post box.

With the saying "it's the thought that counts", I think they need to add that effort is a pretty big player too, and then maybe from that you can extrapolate a 'value of the gift is proportional to the amount of thought and effort put into it' equation.

Although there are some things that should stay as e-mails. I don't imagine that a letter version of a Facebook notification that someone has responded with "gaaaay!" to my status, could be made any better.

So yay for the letter, but meh for the anti-climactic discovery that it's just a bill. I'll probably end-up choosing to receive my bills online from now on so I don't face such disappointments in future. Thus, freeing-up the mailbox for general junk mail and niche items to people who don't live here anymore, like a Christian version of Guitar Hero.

I wasn't really going to write anything about this, but then I got an e-mail from someone wondering if my RSS feed was broken because I hadn't reported on it. So what happened to me? I moved into my own place in the city, and celebrated my birthday with friends (in that order too).

Over the past couple of months I'd been looking at places to live in the city as pretty much everything going-on with me right now is there: work, friends, your mum, etc. I used to live out in the suburbs and rely on the trains to take me between these places. I remember when my train buddy (a friend of mine who by sheer coincidence ended-up taking most of the same trains I did for all of our years at university) started talking about how much she hated the trains. After having taken the train for more years than I have fingers, she just got fed-up with them. I didn't understand her then, and soon afterwards she and her husband-to-be moved to Australia.

Earlier this year, I think I finally understood where she was coming from.

Somewhere between the beginning of this year and the date of this post, I got tired of having my life revolve around the public transport system's schedule. Running after trains, waiting at the station, leaving parties early just so I could catch the last train home... small frustrations that just started adding-up. I thought it was about time to do something about it, and so here I am, recently-relocated into an apartment in the city, when I had my birthday.

So my birthday isn't usually something I post about, but it has been a long time since I actually celebrated one of mine with friends. This year's one was a simple affair; dinner at my favourite Italian tratorria (a place I had been going to for every one of my birthdays since turning 21), talking about matters close to our hearts: AIDS monkeys, ginger kids, your mum, etc. I got presents too!

The most notable would have to be the flying alarm clock. And yes, it works as well as the web page suggests: the clock does have a loud shrieking alarm, it does have a propeller that flies off to some dark corner of your room, and it does require you to retrieve the propeller and return it to the clock otherwise THE DAMN THING DOESN'T SHUT UP!

I haven't been late to work ever since.
I've also been a lot grumpier than normal.
Go figure.