I'm not really sure what it is that makes me think that the look of a website is 'old' or 'dated', but every now and then I come across a website design that makes me really pay attention; makes me bother to take a look at the page source, scripts, styling information, and how everything just works together to create this visual marvel before me. Then after having dipped my mind into that wonder of a website, I look back at this website with a bit of an inward sigh.

I've been doing that quite a bit lately - looking at other websites showcased on web design galleries, all bright, shiny, and new. It wasn't really triggered by the coming of the New Year (the usual checkpoint in life that makes people take stock of what they've got what they've done, and what they hope to do for the next 12 months), but rather with seeing this website through my iPad.

I viewed it first in landscape mode and, since the screen has a width of 1024 pixels in that orientation, this site showed-up just fine. Maybe the font is a little small, I thought, but otherwise it looked as it should.

Then I rotated the iPad to view the thing in landscape mode, and it scaled this site down to fit the new width of 768 pixels across. If I thought the font looked small before, everything looked really small now. Then I borrowed my brother's iPhone for another peek at an even smaller resolution and found that my website was pretty unusable (well, usable if you don't mind putting up with some serious eye strain).

Huh, this isn't ideal, I thought, eyes still squinting at the tiny font on the tiny screen on this tiny device, and thus began my trek through the web design world once again.

If I look back at the history of this site, it's had this general layout since 2009. That's 3 years of this light grey gradient, headed by a picture of a planet from one of my space pics from 2007, covered by GDI and Nod logos from the original Command & Conquer games of the 90s.

The internet has changed a lot since 2009, and so the web design landscape has also moved to try and keep up: HTML5 and CSS3 support have taken off thanks in part to innovative browsers like Firefox and Chrome (allowing web designers to do a whole lot more with their websites with less effort), and browsing on mobile devices is very prevalent with the proliferation of larger-screen smartphones and tablet devices.

All of this has created new challenges for web designers, many of which they've already taken to address with things like responsive and adaptive design philosophies. Things I didn't really know about until a month ago.

Combining all of the above, suddenly that 3 years seems like 30 and I feel like I'm at least 2 steps behind the internet curve.

So: site redesign time! The goals: a new look that scales/adjusts to different device resolutions, making use of the advances the HTML and CSS languages.

If it's anything like before, this should take about a month of my spare time to accomplish. I've already tried using this last long weekend to do something with it, but I ended-up spending that time scribbling layouts in a notebook then staring at the computer screen in an attempt to translate my scribbles into code, turning it into something that I actually like.

I also took at Google Analytics just to find out what browsers visitors used to come here so I can figure out where to put my effort, and found that 12% are still on Internet Explorer 7, which supports almost none of the goals I mentioned above :'(

Oh well, since when was life supposed to be easy anyway?

I discovered To the Moon when I was going through RPG Fan's list of top RPGs of 2011. It won the indie category with a lot of praise going towards its story. I never heard of the game before, but to have what RPG Fan were calling the best story of any video game this year, it intrigued me enough to read their full reviews on it, as well as find out what other people were saying about it.

For those who don't know (and to stop my dad from making some terrible joke about how RPG is a programming language), RPGs in the video game world are short for 'role-playing game' - a genre of video game where you assume the role of someone whose progression through the game is typically determined by classes/specializations (what kind of traits you want your character to have), statistics (assigned numbers to each of those traits), and story.

Now that I've told you that bit about RPGs, you can forget it all because To the Moon has neither classes nor statistics - it's basically an interactive story that just happens to be made with a tool called RPG Maker, so I don't know whether the RPG classification is really all that justified.

With that out of the way, To the Moon's premise goes something like this: in the future, people can be granted their dying wish thanks to a technology that allows doctors to create artificial memories in the patient, thus granting them the memories of having done something that they never actually happened.

In this game you take the role of 2 doctors, Dr Eva Rosaline and Dr Neil Watts, as they grant their latest patient, a dying man named Johnny, his wish to go to the moon. Johnny isn't entirely sure why he wants to go to the moon, so with only a day or 2 to live the doctors dive into Johnny's mind and retrace his memories back to his childhood to plant in his childhood self the ambition and drive to become an astronaut, and ultimately to go to the moon.

Telling a story in reverse isn't easy, and the last time I came across a reverse-story in the movie Memento, it messed with my head for the first couple of minutes. But like Memento, To the Moon, manages to pull-off this reverse narrative, teasing your own assumptions and experiences to fill-in the blanks and treating you to a different form of suspense - instead of the usual "what happens next?", you're instead left wondering "why/how did this all happen?"

It's in unravelling Johnny's life that a heart-felt human story takes place, and just to re-iterate so many other reviews of the game out there, it truly is one of the better written stories I have had the pleasure to play through. There's nothing 'grand scale' or 'sweeping epic' about it; it's just a story of a man and a life filled with friends, places, struggles, love, and loss, and it's in uncovering each of these memories through the doctors' (and your) eyes, reliving each emotion as it takes place, and piecing together the life of the man that is Johnny that the game really shines.

I'm trying to think of an example in the story, but mentioning anything beyond the initial few minutes feels almost like a spoiler since so much of what the game makes you feel is in discovering who Johnny is for yourself. Every little discovery isn't spelled-out for you, leaving you to come to your own conclusions and encouraging you to read between the lines, making each and every discovery your own.

Because it's a story about a life, many of Johnny's memories can hit quite close to home, so I found myself pretty emotionally involved. I would sympathize with Johnny quite a lot - laughing with him over a dinner with friends, mentally putting a hand on his shoulder when the situation got bad, and urging him forward when he struggled with nerves in the moments before talking to a girl. I've been there, I'd find myself thinking, I know how you feel...

As for other aspects of the game, the music is probably the next strongest part about To the Moon, helping only to add to the emotion that you're probably already experiencing. None of the pieces are too busy, and most are written around a simple piano motif that was stuck in my head (in a good way) for days afterwards.

There is no voice acting, but in this game that's hardly a negative. The characters of Dr Rosaline and Dr Watts are so well-written it's like listening to the witty banter between long-time friends. The things they say tend more towards the light-hearted side of things which, in a sombre tale such as this, is a welcome relief.

As I've mentioned, the game was put together using RPG Maker, so the game looks a lot like a top-down 2D adventure from the Super Nintendo era of the early 90s. Heck, even my widescreen monitor would complain whenever I'd load the game, telling me I shouldn't be running it at such low resolutions. Regardless, the 2D graphics still manage to set the scene, and To the Moon makes use of the 2D to paint some pretty good-looking scenes, even those that you visit over and over again in Johnny's memories, without feeling repetitive or copy-and-paste.

As a game though, it's very lacking in the ever-important gameplay department. Controlling the doctors is done primarily through the mouse (click on a spot on the ground to walk there, click on some object to investigate/interact with it), and some basic puzzle solving that feels incongruous at first is the only thing that stands between you and the next of Johnny's memories. The mouse controls didn't seem all that responsive, so I found myself reaching for the keyboard whenever I could (left hand on the arrow keys, right hand on the mouse to scan the environment). This left me in a bit of an awkward position though with both of my hands nearer the right side of my desk.

The strength of To the Moon lies entirely in its story, and wow is it a story to be experienced. Supported by the beautiful music tracks (some of which I learned is composed by Laura Shigihara of Plants vs Zombies fame) this game will tug at the heart strings and, not so much refuse to let go, but rather you'll find yourself giving them up to the game to see where it will take you. More of an 'interactive novel' than RPG, this game took me just over 4 hours to complete, but the impression it's left on me has stuck and, in the several days since, still refuses to leave.

And yes, at one point it did almost make me cry. I remember when it happened, my cheeks and eyes started to feel funny and I brought a hand up to them thinking, What the hell, what is this feeling? before rubbing at my face and shaking the feeling away. Was I about to cry?

I've never had a video game do that to me before.

9 out of 10.

---
To the Moon
PC video game, $11.95 USD, developed and published by Freebird Games
http://freebirdgames.com/to_the_moon/

How do you know if someone has an iPad?
Because they'll tell you.

Oh yeah, I got an iPad 2 for Christmas :D

Unlike all the spoiled kids tweeting that they got a car from mom/dad instead of an iPhone/iPad, I bought the iPad as a Christmas present for myself which surprised me a little when I got the idea because I don't often buy flashy or expensive things like this. I mean, the last purchase I made (which I still think is very cool) is a mandoline. It slices vegetables very thinly. That's all it does.

I've also mentioned a few times that as a computer programmer, ie: one you'd expect to be enamoured and surrounded with cool electronic stuff, I'm still very much behind the tech curve when it comes to owning said stuff. I'm waaay behind the late majority and laggards, and so late that I'm practically pregnant.

"Food baby? No, that's just some tech from 5 years ago accumulating in my belly."

Also, the last time I spent such a large amount of money in one go I got a call from the bank to confirm that yes it was me that spent that money and no please don't block the transaction because otherwise my friends won't have a holiday house to spend New Year's in.

I'm pretty alien to big purchases and have managed to give my bank absolutely no reasons to increase my credit limit. So when I went to the store and the price of the purchase was repeated back to me by the nice young lady behind the counter, I very slowly forked over my credit card, all the while holding a face that I imagine looked like something you'd get if you crossed pain with a nervous smile.

I bought it on December 5, gave it straight to my mum to wrap and put under the family Christmas tree, and didn't open it until December 25. It was a very long 20 days.

My 'spending money' face

For my first ever Apple device, I'm very impressed. I've never really been an Apple fanboy, although I often find myself defending the company against my mainly Windows/Unix/Android group of developer/tech friends simply because nobody else will. What fun is an argument if everybody is on the same side?

(It usually goes that they pick on Apple for some thing they've done, like the comparison between Apple's walled-garden of an App Store vs the openness of the Android Marketplace: my friends will often attack it for being so developer unfriendly and I'd play devil's advocate, saying something like how Apple is ready to throw its developers under the bus for the benefit and safety of its customers. As a customer, this makes me feel a lot safer when perusing the app store; as a developer, I probably wouldn't want to develop an iOS app any time soon.)

Using the iPad has been a dream with pretty much no hiccups or complaints to speak of. As a customer, this makes me feel supremely satisfied; as a developer, this makes me ask why so many of the technologies I use at work and at home aren't this easy to use? I'm routinely surrounded by examples of difficult to use/understand software/websites/devices that it makes me wonder if we developers did this to ourselves on purpose.

It doesn't have to be this difficult! I'd find myself thinking as I wrestle with another annoying system I have to use as part of my work.

I think it all started with that user interfaces course I took at university where we were taught to focus on the user, test interfaces with actual users, find out what users actually need and other general things to think about so as not to annoy your users. (Pretty much everything that this guy talks about.) Ever since then I've been very user-centric and trying to include that in my own work and to have it show that I do in-fact care about the person who has to use whatever I'm developing.

An offshoot of this is that I really believe that every computer-related frustration a person has ever had is avoidable and a reflection of something missed during development.

It doesn't have to be this difficult! I would often think or say when debating user interface design in my head or with a co-worker.

Now I find myself wondering: Why can't everything be as easy as the stuff my iPad?

I've never been an Apple fanboy, but now I've had a taste of things on this side of the fence and it's pretty sweet over here. In this post-Steve Jobs Apple world, I really hope their user focus continues for years to come, because I am sooo very tired of wrestling with computers to make them do what I want. (I'm looking at you Linux...)

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'

My last post mentioned how, even in a happy mood, I can be brought back down if I get caught in a smoker's puff of smoke, so when I thought about it some more I started to recall a few more examples where my mood might have been nudged in a certain direction, whether I wanted it to go that way or not.

The best examples, or the examples with the most witnesses, were whenever I watched some movies that really stuck with me. The first one I could think of was The Sixth Sense. When I got hit with that bomb of a plot-twist at the end, my mind was blown. I watched that one with my family and I remember being quiet the whole ride back home from the cinema, mouth agape at what I had just seen. Even when we got home, I lay on the floor of my room, staring at the ceiling and still thinking 'whoa' for the remainder of the evening.

More recently, watching movies with then-current-and-former workmates, I remember coming out of the theatre after The Dark Knight and wanting to impart some vigilante justice. When the group of us gathered outside the theatre afterwards, and one of the guys was being a little bit more of a jerk than usual, the urge to punch him was just so much more intense than usual.

And with the same group of people, we saw WALL-E, which made me stupid happy. I was grinning from ear-to-ear after that movie and felt the need to plant a tree and hug everything.

It's not just movies, but also books. A few years ago I was reading what would become my book, The Wreck of the River of Stars, by Michael Flynn. It's a very melancholy, character-driven story that plays out like a Greek tragedy; misfortunes and misunderstandings at every turn, and things falling apart simply because every character is human: biased, selfish, flawed.

From Amazon.com:

When a bizarre failure disables the Farnsworth engines driving The River of Stars, the crew has a problem no Earthly sailor ever faced: their ports don't stay put. If The River of Stars doesn't arrive on schedule, Jupiter will be somewhere else in its enormous orbit. That means the damaged ship will speed out of the solar system and drift forever among the stars. The crew's only hope appears to be the magnetic sail. But recreating a long-gone high-tech sail isn't the worst problem this motley crew faces. To survive, they must achieve something even more herculean: they must overcome their own intricately entangled fears, hatreds, power struggles, and romantic disasters.

Hope in that story keeps fluttering in and out of reach and for the month it took me to read that book, I found myself in a sombre mood at work, at lunch, at social occasions... I couldn't get myself out of the rut that the characters in that story were experiencing - I shared the roller-coaster ride with the crew of that ship as they struggled to save the ship and, more importantly, themselves.

Given the above, maybe that's why it was so easy for me to blend into the crowd at the Rugby World Cup games, even though I'm not really a big rugby fan or supporter. Hell I could hardly name the members of the All Blacks, but throwing me into the stadium crowd as the games were played, I think it was my emotionally susceptible nature that let me fit in so well there.

I probably should have learned by now that I'm like this, because after the high and euphoria the entire country was in following our rugby victory, I made the mistake of cutting-short that feeling for me by reading a book that was so disturbing that all the love I had for the world, accumulated over the weekend of the Rugby World Cup final, the Simply Ceroc ball, and a part of my birthday month, I lost in an instant.

Elizabeth Scott's Living Dead Girl is a story about "Alice", a 15-year-old girl who was abducted 5 years ago and has endured physical and sexual abuse every day since then at the hands of her kidnapper, Ray.

From one of the reviews on Amazon.com:

He starves her because he doesn't want her to physically mature, he terrorizes her and tells her that he'll kill her parents and burn their house down if she tries to escape. I'm putting "Alice" in parentheses because that is not her real name. It's the name Ray gave her, the same name he gave the girl he kidnapped and killed before he kidnapped the second Alice.

Alice calls herself a "living dead girl." She's numb inside, she's hungry, she's been tortured so much that she wishes for death. She's waiting for it, hoping for it, expecting it any day; but Ray has something different in mind that is even more terrifying to the reader, and he needs Alice's help.

I started reading that book on the first working day after the Rugby World Cup final, borrowing it from the Young Adult section of the library on recommendation of my previous reading history. When I finally put it down, I discovered that I had lost almost 2 hours of work reading this book.

I intentionally didn't pick the book up again for a week. The country is happy, I told myself, everybody is smiling, I have a victory parade to go to tomorrow, I CANNOT put myself into this sort of mood! Not now!

I struggled to keep that book at the back of my mind, but that in itself was the problem: it was at the back of my mind. I eventually got around to finishing the book, and when I did I wanted to call my nieces, meet-up with my friends, and just make sure that everyone I held dear was OK.

Damn my mood swings.

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 :)

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...)

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...)

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...)

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.