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.

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

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.

I was going to start this post by saying something like 'I often complain about the number of hobbies I've accumulated', but to try back that up I did a Google site search for the words 'complain' or 'hobbies', and it turns out I really haven't complained about that at all. I guess I just thought about it a lot, or complained about it in my own head, which surprises me that I haven't made a blog post about it because the things I think about or complain about are quite often what I blog about - sometimes it feels like this blog is just one big online whine-fest punctuated by brain farts.

So I've got a bunch of hobbies. There. And as well as complaining about the number of them (in my head), I often feel bad that I can't dedicate the amount of time I would like to each of them, mainly because I have other hobbies that take up my time. (Seriously, I should just cut the number of interests I have in half and then I won't have anything to complain or feel bad about!)

One of those hobbies I've managed to find some time for recently is an old programming project, that 2D game engine for the classic Command & Conquer game, Red Alert, that I started back in 2006 which I entitled 'Red Horizon' (it even has a tab in the navigation bar of my site). That project hasn't seen any real activity since mid-2008.

For the coders out there: have you ever taken some time to look at the old work you did - the code you wrote from a couple of years back - and then eyed it with mild curiosity as you read it back and wondered, What the hell was I thinking? Yeah, I had that sort of moment when I went back to my Red Horizon code last month and tried to figure-out how to continue it.

It's only been 3 years since I last worked on it, yet in that time I've learned so much more about programming that re-reading my Red Horizon code causes me to scratch my head and occasionally brings some bile to my mouth. I mean, it's not terrible code, but over the course of the work project I've been assigned for almost 2 years now (went live this weekend, so yay that's over) I've been trying to hold a high standard to my own work. That standard clearly isn't present in Red Horizon.

I remember having this sort of talk with my university classmates in our final year. When we weren't studying or playing networked games of Tetris on the Unix machines, we once talked about taking a look at all the code we wrote in first-year and disbelieving that stuff was actually our own. What the hell was I thinking? would often come up, because what we put together as first-years just looked so crude, so 'beginner-ish', so the work of a newbie.

Of course, being work from our first year of university, that code was the work of newbies, but now, more than 5 years out of university, which itself was 4 years worth of programming, I can still look back at code I wrote 3 years ago and have a good old WTF moment.

I'm not really sure if that's a testament to how much I've learned or improved over the years, or how little I actually knew back then. If anything it's reminded me of another conversation I had with my friends at university - not the coders - where we discovered a pattern amongst ourselves in the attitudes we had towards our own fields of study: that as first-years we didn't know anything, as second-years we thought we knew everything, but in our final year (fourth for most of us) we realized that we knew very little.

For a long time now - ever since this site went up in its original form over 11 years ago - I've gotten by without comments to my news updates / blog posts.

Well, for the first few years in this decade the most popular form of 'commenting' was writing into a site's guestbook (man that's old school, remember those things?). But then once blogging became more popular and the ability for a visitor to leave their mark on a person's rantings became the norm, I continued to stay away from having comments on this site because I've managed to convince myself that not enough people come here to read the rantings of someone who has way too many hobbies and simultaneously way too much spare time to write about those hobbies.

The 'Email Me' link at the top of this site has been good enough for some people: my mail archives include plenty of e-mails from people over the years who have asked me for help regarding that Red Alert campaign I put together a long time ago, and even one time last year I got an e-mail from the author of one of the books mentioned in my tirade against the blossoming literary genre that is Zombie Fiction (rant against zombies here, author response here).

(My inbox has also had the occasional e-mail from online casinos wanting to put their ads on my site, or from people wanting to game the Google search results system by including me and my site in part of some link exchange program. I don't really know why anybody would want my site involved in that, but after the discoveries in my previous post, maybe it's because my site does so well in searches for chocolate chip cookies?)

There have been some pushes and shoves from people over the years to put comments on my site: sometimes a faraway relative just wants to say hello, other times my brother just wants to troll the crap out of this place and post links to irrelevant pictures or videos in an attempt to make you laugh or get you Rick Roll'd. But recently, after all these years of getting by without comments, I've finally decided to do something about it.

And in doing so, I've rediscovered one of the other reasons why I didn't add comments to this site in the first place: it's a lot of extra work.

As a stubborn programmer, I wrote the little 'engine' that runs this site several years ago. I never programmed comments into it; all it really is is a content-serving machine: you give it a URL, it puts together the page you asked for.

Then 2 years ago, part-way through Blog Every Day April, I added a chunk to it so I could write blog posts to it from anywhere I could get an internet connection to make my task of participating in BEDA a helluva lot easier. That was quite a time-consuming undertaking for me then, mainly because I kept designing and redesigning how it all worked because I never had a proper model or idea for how writing posts should be done.

Now I'm doing that again, this time for allowing people to add comments, and I discover that what works for me and writing new posts doesn't necessarily work well for general users and writing comments. That, and now that I'm going to open up an avenue for the internet in general to add content to this site, I have to think about security and things like preventing scripting attacks, spambots, and other malicious users...

I'm not a whizz programmer. Hopefully I at least fall above whatever mark constitutes an average level of programming skill. Sometimes I wonder why I don't just install something like WordPress so I can leave all the coding trouble to someone else. But as I was trudging my way through all the work needed to get comments going, I was reminded why I put myself through all this trouble: I'm learning, and it's this constant learning that keeps me above the 'average programmer' line.

So I'm persevering, and hope to have something working shortly after Easter. I was talking to a friend over Skype about this, telling her about all the troubles I was going through:

Me: But right now, trying to see if I can get comments working on my site.
Her: he he he
Me: What a mission. Just so my brother can make his words public, and so Laura can tell me she rulez teh intarwebs
Her: oh the things we do for the people we love eh ;P
Me: *sigh*

The things I do.

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.

Ugh, got another e-mail about my site suddenly dying again, and at the beginning of my work day too! That meant I couldn't do anything about it for hours until I got home since access to non-HTTP ports (like those used to control my server) is restricted by a proxy with an iron grip choke-hold over the pieces of cable between my work and the general internet. I've been trying a bunch of things to fix these intermittent crashes, but none of them so far seem to stick.

I know what the general problem is now thanks to finally having access to all the logs and other process information I couldn’t get with my old hosting plan. (For the technical minded amongst you, the issue is the timeout between this site and the database: old connections need to die, but the connection pool isn’t killing-off those connection, it’s just trying again and again when it should be discarding the old connection from the pool and making a new one instead) I've done the research (read: Googled it) and I've come up with at least a dozen ways to solve it, but knowing my luck I've listed the potential fixes in the wrong order such that the solution I need is right at the end. Knowing that, I should jump right to the end of the list and work my way up from there, but if my luck stays constant, then the solution would've been the next one to try had I not gone and jumped to the end.

So yeah, just a rant that I am aware this place is still as flimsy as a straw house, and that I am trying to reinforce it.

Sad panda wants this place fixed

Other things going on with me include joining the 'write a novel' bandwagon. Based on the ideas that came out of a brainstorming session my guitar buddy and I had last year when trying to come up with a song, I found myself wanting to develop the ideas we had for that song a lot further since the 5-minute finished product I ended-up with then left me with more questions than answers. The character central to the song also started developing a mind of their own and wanted out of my head.

So, I started writing; letting said character leave the small empty spaces of my mind through the fingertips on my keyboard, and into the largely free disk drive of my computer. Now they have gigabytes of space to roam free and grow in.

(What bothers me is that what I've written so far condenses to roughly 68KB of Microsoft Word document, which leaves me wondering: if they were bursting to get out of my head, and now they’re happy at just 68KB, does that mean, if brain space could be measured, that I only had 68KB worth of brain cells left? (That actually might explain a few other things...))

I've been at the writing thing the past few weeks, helped by the fact that some recent real-life happenings have put me into a really melancholy mood. I remember reading an article about how angst and melancholy works as a motivator for creativity, so I tried to find it to link to it here. I didn't find the exact article, but I found a better one which pretty much every other article on the subject seemed to link to:

• Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative, by Jonah Lehrer

I'm on the side that believes this idea because my own past is littered with examples, the most prominent being that I picked-up guitar to get over a girl, and I created this space wallpaper (the first of many) because I was losing a friend. Pretty much any time someone has observed some sort of change in my direction, it's very likely I did that because I was trying to get passed something that put me in a rut.

Unfortunately for me and my mental health, I take to dwelling in these situations all too eagerly since I know I can use them to my advantage when I'm trying to get through the next song I'm learning, or the next paragraph I'm writing. I then feed the melancholy with a sad song or some extra misery, which in turn feeds the creative process, and then I'm stuck in this morbid loop until I play that last chord or type that last word.

But just like my stomach knows I can't keep eating McDonalds every day of the week, my mind seems to know that I can't stay in these grey rooms forever. All of a sudden I'll find myself at the end of these tethers of gloom, and I'll wake-up the following morning in one of the best moods I have ever been in, and with another product of the creative process up my sleeve.

It's like I can't manage to stay that way forever, because like anything in excess, it can't be good for you.

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.

While not my exact words, I pretty much said the title of this blog post to somebody yesterday.

The day before, that somebody and I were talking over Facebook chat about food, lots of it, and so the dream I had that night was basically a rerun of our conversation. However, instead of the 2 of us sitting behind our respective computers using the internet to talk to one another, we were sitting at a table together eating all of the food that we were talking about. I relayed these details to her the next time I caught her on Facebook chat, and her response was: "That's scary Em".

Reflecting on that line, I have a bit of trouble trying to understand what was so scary about my dream; it's not as if we were eating in the dark while a serial killer was lurking in the shadows. The thing is, this isn't the first time I've got that reaction out of people when telling them about the dreams I have.

I can trawl through some of my old e-mails from work and find one where I told a friend she was in dream of mine where she found herself lost in some weird dimension and had to be rescued by a crew that consisted of her husband, myself, and the rappers from what I believe were 50 Cent's G-Unit. Her reaction: she thought it was scary. (Re-reading that paragraph, I think that one qualifies as scary in the 'horror' sense of the word.)

I can also remember telling one of my mates about a dream of mine he was in (can't remember the dream unfortunately) to which he responded by telling me that that's pretty scary, before telling my my head's all fucked-up.

Dreamscape... whoa what the hell?

Thinking about those and other incidents, I'm not really sure what constitutes the 'scary' part of my dreams. Is it scary in the uncanny sense that I can recall my dreams or put people I know into such strange scenarios, or is it scary in the sense that I should be admitted into a mental hospital for what my mind is capable of coming-up with when I'm asleep?

Seeing as my dreams are often influenced by the things in my day I'm not too surprised to find my friends or others who make up my day in them. I've also always had a pretty good imagination, and after hanging-out with anybody long enough I can imagine them in any situation with almost any expression or emotion (I once had a school friend cry in my dream even though I had never seen them cry before). I mean, we all have that ability where, when we read some words from someone (either in a text or an e-mail), we put their voice to the words and imagine it as if they were reading to us. I'd like to think my dreams are just an extension of this ability.

This ability of mine does seem to fall short in one department however: Scottish accents.

I've always had trouble replicating the voices of Scottish actors/actresses in my head. This is particularly annoying when there's all those great Sean Connery movies and there's Scotty from Star Trek with all those great lines. I fail in this department because, when trying to recall their voices, they always end-up sounding more like pirates.

That's right. Pirates.

What's even worse is that now I've made a Scottish friend (previously dubbed 'laundry lass') whom I e-mail more often than I actually see in-person, and my imagination always makes their reading-to-me voice devolve into pirate 'arrs' and 'yarrs'. They even featured in a dream of mine several weeks ago; their voice, after a while, became too hilarious in my own dream that it caused me to wake-up in a fit of laughter.

Avast!

So much for nightmares forcing a person awake to escape a frightening situation; here's me being forced awake to escape a terribly imagined accent.

Maybe I am a scary individual after all.

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

My perceived age seems to be a running theme on my blog as the running-into and meeting several new people thanks to dance classes has my age coming into question time and time again. What about how old I am on the inside then? Well, according to a study that has recently come out about social media amongst young adults (which has been getting referenced a lot this past week from the sites and blogs I follow) I'm likely to be 30 or older.

According to the study, blogging amongst teens and young adults declined since 2007 (went up with the 30+ crowd over the same period) who have exchanged "macro-blogging" for micro-blogging with status updates. It's more likely the status updates are just confined to their online profiles on sites like Facebook, as the study also showed that a majority of young adults have a Facebook profile, but not a Twitter account.

So blogging and Twitter are both uncool and for the old folk. *sigh* Can't catch a break can I? And all of this on the back of a dream I had a few nights ago where I was getting gray hairs O_o

I guess being told you're old on the inside isn't as bad as being mistaken for young on the outside. It carries with it a lot of the better connotations associated with age, like wisdom and responsibility, and it kinda makes me feel good about myself, much like that feeling you get when you did reading tests at primary school and were told by your teacher you had a reading age beyond your years. Pride, I think it is - the sense of achievement kind, not the self-important seven-deadly-sins kind.

Back to the study, it's probably just showing the trends of today: Facebook is an easy way to share certain content with your friends, and status updates are an easy way to do what blogging does but with less characters; say what's on your mind to those who are willing to read/listen.

When I started this website in 2001, I was just following the trends of those days which was to get your own Geocities (or equivalent free-hosting) page and add whatever spastic animated image or annoying follow-your-mouse-cursor JavaScript to the site. The blog was the natural extension of the personal website and so that was added quite soon afterwards, although I didn't start calling it a blog or blogging until late 2005.

Little did we know that maintaining the thing takes actual effort, and so came the decline of the personal website / blog, paving the way for the multitude of social networks, each with their own little way of doing relatively effortless things like uploading photos from that drunken 21st, or telling your friends about what food you're ingesting AT THIS VERY INSTANT.

If the long-term trend though is to replace effort-requiring things with effort-less things, then I wonder what will be superseding the Facebooks and Twitters of today? It's bad enough that today's kids have forgotten what punctuation is for in their goal to say as much as they can with as few characters as possible.

What are we going to forget next? The ability to act appropriately in social situations because everything is done with non-face-to-face communication methods?

Oh wait...

Finally back from my New Year's holiday, which included something of a technology blackout: no cellphone coverage, so no day-to-day Tweets of the day's happenings, so no receiving or sending of New Year's text messages, much to my chagrin because those on rival cellphone networks did get some modicum of reception and were still able to receive New Year's text message love :(

So, on to the blog post backlog I had in my mind. First-up on the list: my mum.

At a Christmas party a week before Christmas day of good ol' 2009, a certain someone - who I haven't yet mentioned in this blog before, and so doesn't have a witty nickname to which I can attach to them, to which I am surprised considering the contribution this person made to my 2009 which in turn made it so great - asked me a pretty tough question:

"What kind of person is your mum?"

How we got on to the topic of my mother, I can't remember - it might have something to do with a certain button badge I was given prior to this party - but when I was faced with that question my mind drew a blank. After what seemed like minutes of silence from me while my interrogator watched patiently at the cogs turning behind my eyes, all I could respond with was:

"I don't know how to answer that. Give me a day or 2 and I'll come-up with something."
"Good answer." she said, and walked away to leave me to contemplate the sorts of things I could say about my own mother.

One of the holiday season presents I received. I have never worn a badge so proudly in my life

So I gave the thought a day, which then became 2, which then stretched out from however many days there are between a week before Christmas and now...

When thinking about how I describe anybody, I usually look for that 1 trait that sets them apart from the rest; the thing that makes them unique to me. In the case of my mum, it would be that she is self-sacrificing for her children: everything she did, she did for my brother and I.

That trait encompasses many things: unconditional love, support, a level head whenever I asked her about the decisions I was facing (giving me the answer that would benefit me the most, even if the answer was not what I wanted to hear), and an almost embarrassing willingness to go out of her way to make sure my brother and I were as comfortable as we could be (eg: driving out from her work after school hours to take us home, giving us more than our share of food at the table, giving-up the window seat on a plane, etc).

That trait however is a bit of a double-edged sword; as well as being what makes my mum so great, it's also what has annoyed me the most: the unconditional love is often blind to what's going-on with others, the support would often make me think I was right when I was in the wrong, the honest answers might have carried me down the much safer path which could've given me valuable lessons or challenges to face, and the 'out-of-her-way'-ness often became too embarrassing, particularly when around my friends throughout those terrible teenage years.

Despite the good and bad nature of a child-centric focus, it's all the sorts of things I have grown to expect from a mother - and all the sorts of things that compose the yard stick by which I measure every mother I have known or will know.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

"A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie."
- Tenneva Jordan

(http://www.quotegarden.com/mothers.html)

I was doing a Google search at work last week - looking-up "AGM", making sure that it meant Annual General Meaning, which it does, before I used it in a sentence in an e-mail - and in doing so I came across a blog entry from a local blogger where they described attending their apartment's AGM and how it felt like such a grown-up thing to do at the time. I say 'at the time' because it was written in 2004.

Browsing through to the blog's homepage, I saw that it is still actively updated. OMG! I thought, another blogger from NZ who writes about their day-to-day life, who started the site off years ago, AND IS STILL AROUND! OK, so 5 years isn't forever, but my own website only has entries dating all the way back to 2005, despite having had this site up since 2001, and that was before I even called these updates 'blog posts' or that the word 'blog' was common in the English language.

I was excited! Ecstatic! Glad to find someone out there who perseveres with a personal website for years, even with the knowledge that their readership consists mainly of friends and family, with the odd stranger/passer-by. I became even more excited/ecstatic/glad when, after reading through a few of their posts, I could identify them as somebody who might be a workmate of amazing baking girl. (2-degrees of separation FTW! (NZ joke))

OK, so my excitement probably makes no sense to anybody else. Here's some background for where I'm coming from with all this:

The day before I ran into OrangeBlog (yep, that's their blog's name), I was reading another blog entry from one of the authors I read and follow, John Scalzi, who had just written about how his website has been around for 11 years. That's one helluva milestone, I thought.

Not many personal sites on the internet stay around for 11 years. My own friends' attempts at websites or blogs are a testament to that: one guy hasn't added anything substantial to his site in several years, of 2 overseas/travelling blogs, 1 stopped theirs just a few months in while the other hasn't been updated in over a year, and the 1 guy who went so far as to buy a domain name and host his own Content Management System (think website management program), when he stopped updating it it got bombarded by comment spam bots, before getting domain jacked.

And when the New York Times has a slow news day and decides to take a pot shot at bloggers for lacking discipline and staying power, I find myself alone in the fight back, using whatever skills I have on hand (writing, 'your mom' jokes) and whatever weapons I can find on my desk (unsharpened pencils and dead batteries... wait, that can't be turned into some sort of analogy for my life can it?).

I guess it takes certain kinds to continue something that has no real rewards, no tangible benefits; to throw thoughts, words, ideas, out into the digital ether and not worry about them coming back any better than they were when they left the gap between your brain and the keyboard. I haven't received so much as a cookie for what I'm doing with this website, but it's not an entirely selfless thing; every time I hear somebody I know say "Hey, I read your blog" or allude to something I've written, it becomes a real boost to the ego.

So yeah, I knew I wasn't alone in the whole 'maintain and keep updating a personal website' endeavour - the world's way too big for that - but I feel a lot less alone than I did before.

It's not called OrangeBlog for nothing

And hopeful too that there are more like me out there when it comes to keeping to things for the long term. Hope, for now it seems, is the colour orange.