Month: March 2005

Damn this is depressing. Paul Hester (drummer for Split Enz and Crowded House) committed suicide on Friday night. Apparently he’d been strugling with depression and it finally got the best of him. It’s a real shame, not only was he a member of two of the antipodes’ best bands, but he used to appear fairly regularly on the old Martin Molloy radio show, and seemed like a really smart, funny guy. Guess it just goes to show that it can hit anyone. There’s so much general disbelief and grief around the place that you can’t help but wonder if he’d have done it if he’d known how liked and respected he was.

Apart from that Easter wasn’t bad. I was sick (still am in fact) for most of it, but the sort of general malaise and coughing sick as opposed to lie in bed wanting to die sick. I got a nice amount of chocolate, but it’s almost all gone now, which is good because I have absolutely no control and if I had heaps would just eat and eat until I went into a diabetic coma or something. I re-read most of John Allison’s Scary Go Round which almost drove me mad, but means that the Tackleford Map is almost complete (how could I forget the Weasel Reserve?). Oh, and someone gave me a very generous Easter gift in the form of an unlicenced wreck dumped in my parking space.

Now it’s not like I use my space much – not having a car or a driver’s licence – but it’d still be nice to have it there and not filled up with a gigantic piece of garbage. So tomorrow I’m calling the strata company and having it hauled away. Consider this a warning people – you DON’T mess with my parking space!

Oh, and I ended up having to work on Easter monday. This should have been OK because I’d get some kind of penalty rate for working a public holiday. Sadly though (for complicated reasons) I didn’t get any penalty rate. I didn’t work very hard though, so it all evens out in the end 🙂

Hmmm, I’m sure there was something else I was going to write about, but I can’t remember what. Too much chocolate probably. Oh, I will say though that Laisse Tomber Les Filles by Fabienne Del Sol is one of the best songs around at the moment. Like a French version of the Munsters theme. I just wish I spoke French so I could understand what she was on about*Well OK I know what she’s on about in broad terms, but the actual specific words would be nice 🙂

Been a while ain’t it?

I’ve been busy getting settled into the new place, that’s my excuse. But now things are just about right, so I should start making updates with a bit more regularity. You never know.

I spent a few enjoyable (enjoyable to me that is, anyone else would have been bored paralytic) hours this weekend redrafting my map of the entirely fictional English city of Tackleford. Tackleford (for those not in the know) is the setting of John Allison’s most excellent webcomic Scary-Go-Round (and his most- excellent- for- the- time- but- now- looking- somewhat- dated- webcomic-Bobbins). My motivation for undertaking such a task is that someone on the Scary-Go-Round forum asked if anyone had a copy of it so he could add it to the Tackleford page on the new Dumbrella Wiki.

So I redrafted it, neatening it up generally and adding a few extra details like the Keane End golf links and the suburb of Copper Edge (it’s nice there – they rob you, but then shoot you so you won’t feel sad :). The next logical step would be to reply to the forum post, BUT in order to do that I’d have to sign up. And while I have considered it from time to time (it’s a fairly entertaining read – if you’re into the comic that is of course*Which I am. Not just to the extent of forking over good money for tea-towels and printed collections but to the extent of forking over extra money for such fripperies as getting my name published in the back of first editions and having John A. do personalised sketches inside the back covers. I probably badly need a life but I reckon it’s worth it for a hand drawn sketch of Amy and Friend Bat 🙂) but I don’t think I will. I don’t know exactly why, maybe it’s because everyone on there seems to know everyone else so well – that kind of thing tends to intimidate me. I guess I’m just a natural lurker 🙂

So I’ll just post my map here, and sooner or later someone may stumble across it and feel inclined to add it to said Wiki. Hmmmmmm I guess I can increase the odds of that with a few well chosen key words on the actual map page…

Apart from that I’ve mostly been just settling in to the new apartment. I did a major furniture reshuffle yesterday with the result that I can now use my computer without having to have the main curtains drawn (the perpetual gloom was depressing me) and the TV is now in range of the remotes while I sit at said computer (having to stand up and walk a metre forwards whenever I needed to adjust the volume was getting to be a serious pain). The new location has the added advantage that I can no longer hear the drug-addled thugs downstairs going around their business, which is fantastic. Unless they’re being really loud that is.

You know I don’t think I’ve mentioned the drug-addled thugs before. They inhabit the unit underneath mine and seem unable to hold a simple five minute conversation without some kind of shouting/screaming/swearing match breaking out. And that’s just their day to day routine – if something happens to annoy them they ramp the volume up to deathmatch levels.

Like the other day for instance. Apparently one of the other residents had the temerity to complain about one of them damaging her car. The resultant discussion about this went something like this…

This (and variations thereof) went on for about two hours while I was trying to sleep. I did consider leaning out my window and pointing out that if he was innocent of damaging her car, then putting a brick through her window would be highly illogical (making oneself guilty of one criminal act specifically because you weren’t guilty of another), however I decided that they might not appreciate my input 🙂

The only time they seem to calm down is when they sit in their garden (ground floor units have a small fenced garden in lieu of a balcony) and smoke massive quantities of the wacky-tabaccy, the smoke of which blows up into my unit, giving me a headache. Sadly the calming effect doesn’t seem to last very long as soon afterwards they start up again with the yelling, screaming and dog kicking.

(OK, they don’t kick their dog that much).

When I first moved in here their continual fighting terrified me, but now I’m getting used to it. The trick is to view them as an interesting anthropological case study of Very Angry People, or as a cautionary example on the dangers of too much pot and alcohol and too few brain cells. If they carry on the way they are, I figure they have to get kicked out of the complex eventually – or at least I hope so at any rate. With my luck they’re owner-occupiers.

Ah, there they go again! Something about someone paying someone else with $20 and a foil. Everyone in Geraldton’s talking about it apparently. Well I never!

Anyway what else has been happening? Oh yeah, I almost found a diamond on the street. It was at the bus-stop on Hampden Road, just lying there between the brick paving. I carried out some preliminary hardness and spectroscopic tests on it (ie: I tested to see if it would scratch glass – it would, and I held it up to the light to see how sparkly it was – very sparkly) then took it in to a jeweller. The good news is that if it was an actual diamond it would be worth about $15,000. The bad news is that it’s not an actual diamond, it’s a cubic zirconia and worth maybe $6.00. Oh well. It was worth checking out, $14,000 would have been very useful for the mortgage.

(Why only $14,000? If it had been a real diamond I would have gone into town and blown $1000 on books and CDs. I’ve always wanted to just walk into a store and start throwing things into a basket without bothering about how much they’re going to cost :D)

Naturally a lot of other stuff has been going on, but that’ll do for an update for now. After all, I’ve got to figure out where to put my printer and scanner before CSI starts 🙂

Am I the only person in the world to notice that the maps of Middle Earth used in Peter Jackson’s films incorrectly label the Adorn as the Swanfleet?

Am I the only person in the world who actually cares? 🙂