Month: April 2006

It’s weird. The more of a life I seem to get, the less inclination I have to write about it. This is fairly normal I guess – after all the blogosphere is renowned (regardless of the actual reality) for being populated by pathetic nobodies whinging about their awful existences. When one’s existence becomes slightly less awful, what’s the point in sitting in front of a computer screen typing on about it when one could be out actually enjoying it? It could be an interesting subject of study – correlating the frequency and length of blog entries with the various bloggers’ standards of living, and seeing how altering those standards upwards affects their blogs. I smell grant money – anyone want to co-author a paper? 🙂

Anyway I’ll start with politics because that always gets me riled up.

The federal environment minister (who suffers from such a total lack of personality that his name escapes me) is trying to get laws passed banning wind farms unless the local population all agree that they want them. This is apparently because wind turbines occasionaly kill a few birds, and there are people who think that they look ugly. Indeed.

Well, speaking personally I totally support these laws, as long as they apply equally to other power sources – coal fired power stations for instance. No one should be allowed to construct a coal fired power station unless the local population all agree that they want it. After all they look pretty damn ugly with those big smoke stacks, and the clouds of soot and sulfur dioxide mess up the washing. If even one person nearby a proposed coal burner objects, the minister should veto the proposal – the same as he’s gearing up to do for wind farms. It’s only fair isn’t it?

(On the bird strike issue, wind farms don’t actually kill that many birds – most are smart enough to steer clear – and quite serious work is being done worldwide to reduce the small numbers that are being killed. Claims that wind turbines are “parrot mincers” are about as accurate as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion)

The Government is also looking at tightening up immigration laws – administering tests to potential immigrants to make sure they have a decent grasp of English and support “Australian values and culture”. Hmmmmm. Kind of reminds one of the old White Australia Policy doesn’t it? Up until the 1970’s anyone wanting to immigrate into Australia had to pass a test in a European language. Not just any European language – the specific European language the examiners happened to choose on the day. So, if you were Italian for instance, and the examiners decided they didn’t want to let any more damn wogs into the country that particular week, they would be perfectly within their rights to test you on your fluency in Polish and kick you out when you failed. It was a very useful way of ensuring that Australia remained full of decent, white, anglo-saxon protestants and preventing our proud English blood from being polluted by the awful huns, gooks and dagoes.

The point is language doesn’t matter. English is the dominant language in Australia and will be for decades – if not actual centuries – to come. Immigrants will arrive in the country speaking all manner of foreign tongues and learn just enough English to get by. Their kids on the other hand will grow up speaking English. They’ll have to in order to talk to their friends, go to school, deal with the Government, watch TV and movies and just generally live in an English speaking society. They’ll learn enough of their parents’ and grandparents’ language to be able to talk to them and speak English everywhere else. THAT’S HOW LANGUAGE WORKS.

As for the whole “support Australian values and culture” thing, as soon as someone can explain exactly what those things are I might be prepared to listen. Answers in one thousand letters or less without using the word ‘mateship’ please.

So yes, basically it’s just another example of the Government’s absolute terror of those foreigners with their funny clothes and funny coloured skin who stand on street corners in groups sneakily talking in their funny languages just so you can’t understand what they’re saying. You know, the kind of people you don’t want in the neighbourhood because they lower the property values.

Idiots.

Right, I’m obviously all riled up now 🙂

So, things I should write about. I’ll start with the sleep study, which I did the Thursday before last.

In the olden days a sleep study meant going in to a lab and trying to sleep in an unfamiliar environment while hooked up to all sorts of strange and bulky machines. In this – our age of modern enlightenment – a sleep study means going in to a lab, being set up, having to make your way home, and then trying to sleep in your own bed while hooked up to all sorts of strange and bulky machines. This is what is known as progress.

My appointment at the sleep clinic was at 3:00pm. Thankfully the strata company managed to get the hot water running around midday, so I was able to have a proper shower (the first in just over a week) before heading off. I had convinced my dad to give me a lift over and back because I didn’t relish the idea of negotiating public transport attached to God knows how many bits of beeping and humming equipment (not to mention the possibility of being identified as a suicide bomber by over-zealous rail guards). We arrived, and after a suitable wait of about twenty minutes I was ushered into the consulting room where the doctor measured my height and weight, filled in a few forms and proceeded to hook me up to enough boxes and wires to make Locutus of Borg jealous.

To start with there were two elastic belts – one around the chest and one around the abdomen – to measure breathing. Attached to the left hand side of the lower of these two belts was a data recorder, about the size of a pack of playing cards. From this a thick, grey cable ran up to the front of the top belt where it met a similarly sized junction box, and here the fun really began because this had round about a dozen sockets of various sorts, each with a tube, pipe or wire emerging from it.

These tubes pipes and wires consisted of – a wire to each of the elastic belts – three wires going to heart monitor thingies on the lower abdomen and either side of the chest – two wires going to EEG brain monitor thingies on the right forehead and behind the left ear – a breathing tube running up behind the ears and down to the nose where it went into the nostrils to monitor snoring – a long wire extending to the index finger of the left hand to monitor blood oxgen levels – a short wire to a ‘position monitor’ on the front of the top belt to show if you were standing up or lying down – a pair of very long wires going down to sensors attached to the calf muscles of each leg to check for spontaneous leg kicking – probably some I’m forgetting.

So, wired up like some kind of techno-marianette I had to go home and find something to do for six hours or so that didn’t involve anything as complex as moving or breathing (why in the name of all sanity was the appointment for 3:00!? Why don’t sleep clinics do this stuff at 6:00!?).

I did make a stop off on the way though. I’d looked up the minimum system requirements for Civ IV and discovered that my computer didn’t have enough RAM to run it. This was obviously a situation requiring immediate remedy so despite my Borg-like state I got Dad to pull into Ross’s Digital Computation Emporium (not its actual name sad to say, I think its actually something simple and boring like “Ross’s Computers”). They had what I needed, but didn’t comment on my EEG probes and finger monitor*The breathing tubes were tucked away for later. which was a shame because I’d spent the entire car trip figuring out things to say if they did (the best one was ‘It’s part of my bail conditions’ :).

So I got home, installed the RAM, watched some Firefly and got so appalingly fed up with the whole ‘waiting around in extreme discomfort’ enterprise that I went to bed at 7:00pm.

Needless to say I didn’t have a particularly restful night. The belts and boxes were restrictive and pokey respectively and the entire system seemed to be making some strange buzzing and beeping noises in my head (it sounds crazy I know but I got up to see if I could find the source of them and they went everywhere with me – some kind of EEG feedback maybe?). I got some fitful sleep, but finally got jack of it all at 6:00am – which is when I’d be getting up on a normal workday anyway – so got up, took it all off, and went back to bed for another two glorious hours of actual slumber.

I got the train back to the sleep clinic later that morning to return the equipment and am currently awaiting the results.

So, that was the sleep study.

Hmmm, now the problem is that after that effort I’m all written out and don’t have the creative energy to write a decent account of all of the other stuff I need to catch up on – on top of which I need to clean up, cook dinner and ventillate the lingering paint fumes from some work I was doing earlier. I shall provide a brief summary as follows and elaborate over the next few days.

1. A Most Enjoyable Date with the Lady Purdey at the Red Orchid during which Books were Examined, Crocodile was Consumed and Gelare was Procured
    
2. A Most Horrible and Demanding Return to Work under the Watchful Eye of that Most Dastardly of Employers Lord Carter
    
3. A Bohemian Evening of Entertainments Most Novel at the Church Gallery and Moon Eating House in the Company of the Lady Purdey and Various Friends and Relatives where Art was Appreciated and Many Good Impressions Made by All

That’s it – I’m done 🙂

Well, I just spent a quite enjoyable ANZAC Day trussing up wires, sorting recycling and doing long delayed washing up. If you have to go back to work after a holiday, then working a single day then having a public holiday is definitely the way to do it.

Now, there’s at least three things I should write about today – the sleep study, the date on Friday night (which went pretty well I think), and high tea on Saturday (please don’t ask) – but it’s been a long day and I only have so much energy. So I’ll cover what I got up to today and write about them tomorrow. Or maybe Thursday. Or Friday 😀

So, today.

Today was of course ANZAC Day. For years I’ve been saying I’ll go to a Dawn Service. I intended to go to the local one (just down the road) last year, but this didn’t actually happen as I woke up that morning with the worst migraine I’ve had in over a decade. This year the same plan was almost foiled by the fact that I lost the bit of paper saying when the service actually was. Now, if I was thinking straight I would have just looked up when dawn was – you know, Dawn Service? But instead I went with a vague memory of 5:20am and hence set my alarm for 4:00.

I got down to Halliday Park at 4:45. As it turned out the service was at 6:00.

This wasn’t as bad as it sounds. There’s something pretty cool about having a park all to yourself early in the morning (hmmm, that sounds a bit suss doesn’t it? :D) and I got to watch everyone arrive and set up – all of the back stage stuff you normally miss. Lots of muffled up figures walking around, flashing torches and talking in low voices, and the local cadet unit marching round the oval and practicing their manouvers in the pitchy dark. And above it all the crescent moon was riding high – the dark portion spectacularly lit up with Earthshine – with Venus burning like a flake of magnesium just on top. It had been a wet night and there were a few brief showers, but as the dawn got closer it all cleared up. So all together it was a pretty nice way to spend an hour.

By the time things got underway – just as the sky was lightening – about 300 people had turned up. The service went off without a hitch – unless you count a few bum notes during the Last Post which is virtually traditional at these smaller services. The surprising thing is how short the service really is – you tend to forget the simplicity of it when you don’t go for a few years. The cadets and/or soldiers march in and take up their positions, the wreaths are layed around the memorial, the Ode (the fourth stanza of For the Fallen) is read, and the Last Post is played while the flag is lowered to half mast. Then it’s over. We got a short speech about the Gallipoli landings from the head of the local RSL and that was it, unless you wanted to hang around for the sausage sizzle. I decided against it – queuing for sausages with 299 other people isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. So I walked back home – all done by 6:50.

I spent the rest of the day playing Civ III, listening to JJJ, arranging the gorgon’s hair tangle of wires behind the computer so they’re no longer a tripping/strangling hazard, sorting out the recycling and doing the washing up that I couldn’t do all last week due to the water problem. Oh, I also watched an episode of Firefly. There’s only two left now, I’m stretching them out by watching epsiodes I’ve already watched with commentary, but sooner or later I’m going to have to watch the last ones. Boo!

Anyway given that I was up at 4:00 it’s been a long day and I’ll be having an early night, so I’ll cut this short. Expect details of the Sleep Study, date and other important things soon.

Oh, before I go though I thought I’d take the opportunity to do something ANZACy and post the lyrics to the Herd’s cover of Redgum’s I was only 19. They did it for JJJ’s “Like a Version” last year and it’s been going absolutely nuts for them ever since – they’ve recently done a studio version. I’ve had the lyrics kicking around for quite a while because I was particularly impressed with their rewrite – a hip-hop version of a song needs a lot more syllables – and I was always intending to post them as soon as I figured out a few problematic bits. Thanks to the aforementioned studio version I now have them, so today seems appropriate.

(By the way, these are the words of the version they performed live on Like a Version. The studio recording is a bit different, but I prefer the rawness of the original)

Currently entering day seven without hot water…

I really don’t know what the strata company are up to. They managed to get the water flowing again yesterday (after being off since Monday) but far from being hot it’s ice cold. I strongly suspect that the plumbers forgot to turn the heaters on once they were finished – I mean the water’s had all night to warm up so why hasn’t it? Come 9:00am I’ll be making a very disgruntled phone call.

I can’t remember when I last blogged, so probably it’s been a while and this is the first entry I’ve written about the water crisis. Or at least this water crisis – we seem to have one every two weeks at the moment. It began on Thursday night when the supposedly hot water turned distinctly chilly. This state of affairs continued until Monday afternoon when it stopped flowing completely. Hence we arrive at the current juncture.

A week without hot water. Did we lose a war?!

I haven’t had a shower since Sunday (at my parent’s place). As I have my sleep study tonight (for which you need to be clean and showered so the electrodes will stick) and a date with Purdey tomorrow night, this is a problem. I’ll have to boil the kettle and do the sponge-bath-out-of-the-sink-thing I guess. Bah!

Anyway, I supposed I’d better record what I’ve been up to. Wednesday evening last week I headed around to Purdey’s new place in Rivervale for dinner and Smallville (on tape). It’s a really nice complex right on the river – we hung out for a bit down at the riverside listening to the wail of bagpipes floating across from the police complex on the far bank while the non-spaghetti spaghetti was cooking. We watched the video, listened to some music and spent some time cuddling on the couch, so a most enjoyable evening all up 🙂

(We’re going to the Red Orchid tomorrow night, which would be our… fifth date? I should probably stop counting now 🙂

Friday. Friday was the Good Friday public holiday. Normally a combination of Catholic Guilt and maternal dissaproval would have me spending the entire day kneeling in the dark starving myself – but I decided to go to work instead. Got a fair bit of work on the new page editing system done, which is good because it’s been a monkey on my back for months now. A few more days should see it finally done.

Saturday was a day for recovering from the awesome effort of working on a public holiday, and watching Firefly and Wonderfalls on DVD, my Amazon order having finally arrived. I’m trying to pace myself on both of them because there’s only one season of each – damn network execs! Even so I find myself talking like Mal (or possibly a character from Mark Twain), so I reckon I’d best go cold turkey for a spell.

(See!? SEE!?)

Sunday was church in the morning then off to the folk’s (folk’s – I’m not kidding on the talking like I’m in Firefly people!) place for the yearly Easter get together (I almost typed ‘shindig’). It went pretty well, even if my brother did give me a can of SPAM rather than chocolate. His justification was that I’d said I didn’t really want much chocolate because I’m trying to lose weight – apparently SPAM Lite is an acceptable low fat substitute. *sigh* 🙂

On Monday it was into town for lunch with Rebecca and Dom. We met at the Art Gallery then headed over to a Korean place on Barrack street (located in the old Hungry Jacks). I had a sort of seafood fried rice thing which was good – although not spectacular. I’ll certainly go back to the place, but I’ll try something else next time.

The restaurant has two notable features. Firstly the background music which seems to be the Korean equivilant of… well I don’t know what skinny teenage girl is at the top of the pop charts at the moment (an advantage of not listening to commercial radio) but whoever she is, they were playing the Korean equivilant of her. This isn’t as annoying as it sounds because mindless pop songs sound a lot better when you can’t acrtually understand how banal the lyrics are (example – Ricky Martin singing in Spanish is almost listenable).

The other is the rather strange poems written on the wall hangings. I quote – “Such a fine time to dine, With fine food and wine, Melodious chime”. We were just puzzling over the ‘melodious chime’ bit when a loud “DING!” came from behind the bar – I’m not entirely convinced that the staff don’t have a bell back there merely to justify the poem.

After lunch we went for a wander around the city looking at all the closed up stores. We were under the impression that they might have opened up in the afternoon (they often do on public holidays) but no such luck. Which was a pain because we all had things we wanted to buy. Once the entertainment potential of wandering was exhausted we headed back to the train station and went our seperate ways. On the train however I ran into Katie, which was great because I’d been meaning to catch up with her. We scheduled in lunch for Friday.

On Tuesday everyone went back to work after the Easter break. Except for me because I had the week off. Yey! 😀 Justin was meant to be dropping around in the morning to pick up some books for a uni assignment, and to hook up his mobile phone to my computer (long, complicated story that doesn’t need to be gone into here). As is quite often the case he didn’t show up. In the afternoon Ryan was meant to be coming around with his van to help me recover my old filing cabinet from the folk’s place. He didn’t turn up either. All this dissapointment got me in such a foul mood that I thought I might as well make it fouler by exorcising the fridge (when your fridge gets as bad as mine was, you don’t merely clean it). I set to with bell, book and candle and eventually got it cleared out – or at least disposed of all the stuff that was no longer edible, which basically left some cheese.

Ryan eventually turned up in the evening, just as I was cooking dinner. We watched the Firefly episode Bushwacked while I ate, then went and retrieved the filing cabinet – which required quite an effort getting it up the stairs. It’s now safely ensconsed in the spare room though and shouldn’t have to be moved again until doomsday.

Speaking of doomsday however… well, once we got it in to the apartment we naturally had to take a look inside. And in the bottom drawer we discovered a remarkable relic of the last century. My emergency Y2K stash! 🙂

In the run up to the fake-millenium (or willenium even) I thought it prudent to put aside a bit of food just in case there was any disruption to services. I’m not talking about the collapse of society – I just figured that there might be some shortages or price rises – mostly from people panicking and rush buying or maybe some trucks not making it over the Nullabor for some reason. So a few months out I spent about $50 on assorted tinned and preserved goods, just as a precaution. I put these in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and – when the change over all went smoothly – forgot about them. On Tuesday they emerged into the light of day for the first time in six and half years!

Some of the stash seems to have survived quite well. The rice and pasta look good enough to cook up and eat. Most of the tins are a bit faded, but seem intact. The main exception are the two tins of beans, which have swelled up like small cannonballs. It would be an interesting experiment to open some of the cans and examine the contents – I’m not quite that nuts though. After a suitable period of contemplation they’re all going in the bins – possibly labled with biohazard stickers. A waste perhaps, but it’s got to be better than salmonella poisoning 😀

Wednesday morning I spent organising broadband and grocery shopping. I’ve signed up for ADSL with Westnet (don’t tell Eftel!) but because Telstra did something Really Clever(tm) with the phone lines back in the late eighties I can’t actually get broadband at the moment. Telstra needs to go into the exchange and sort out whatever kind of unholy mess they made first. And it’s going to be 6 to 8 weeks before they deign to even say if they can be bothered or not. So, until then I’m stuck on dialup. But at least the wheels are in motion (Telstra are very bad men! Very bad men!)

The grocery shopping was a trip down to Maylands to replenish my now empty fridge. Nothing interesting happened at all, so I don’t know why I’m mentioning it.

So we come to today. I’ve actually called up the strata company now and it turns out that the plumbers have no idea what’s going on, which is reassuring. They’re coming back though, so maybe we’ll have hot water by the end of the day. Maybe. *sigh*

I’d better go get cleaned up. As best I can.

In light of the current diplomatic problems with Indonesia over asylum seekers, the Howard Government is considering changing it’s refugee policy. Apparently from now on when someone claims political asylum, Canberra will supply all their details back to the Government allegedly carrying out the persecution so they can say whether they’ve been persecuting them or not. Wonderful idea guys, let’s consider the implications…

Scenario 1:

Elbonian*Hopefully Scott Adams won’t mind me borrowing his generic foreign country too much – particularly since the proposed policy change is exactly the kind of thing the Elbonian Government would do. Refugee: My government is persecuting and torturing me!

Australian Government: OK, what are your full details please? (gets details, phones Elbonian Ministry of Torture and Depravation). Hello, have you been torturing [refugee]?

Elbonian Ministry of Torture and Deprivation: No, we’ve never heard of [refugee]! (sotto voice) mwahahaha!

Australian Government: Sorry, your government says they’re not torturing you. Here’s you plane ticket home.

Elbonian Refugee: NOOOOO!!!!!!

Elbonian Ministry of Torture and Deprivation: (waiting at airport) We’re going to torture you twice as hard now you horrible little defector!

Scenario 2:

Elbonian Refugee: My government is persecuting and torturing me!

Australian Government: OK, what are your full details please? (gets details, phones Elbonian ministry of Torture and Depravation). Hello, have you been torturing [refugee]?

Elbonian Ministry of Torture and Deprivation: We were wondering where he’d got to!

Australian Government: Yes, your government has been torturing you, so we’ll allocate you a place in a detention centre for the next 6 years.

Elbonian Refugee: Well, it’s better than the thumbscrews…

Elbonian Ministry of Torture and Deprivation: Well, he slipped away – but thanks to those helpful Australians we know about it and have all his personal details so now we can make an example of his family and friends! Glee!

And continuing with the general stupidity, the Americans may be drawing up plans to bomb Iran, possibly using nuclear bunker busters. Now I know Americans have no sense of irony, but surely even they can see the problem with bombing a country to stop it aquiring evil nuclear weapons, using nuclear weapons? Unless of course American nuclear weapons are ‘good’ nuclear weapons – which frankly is exactly the kind of feculant sewage masquerading as reason that seems to pour out of the Whitehouse these days.

Oh well, if Georgie wants to start the world’s second nuclear war, then who are we, the people, to stop him? 🙁

In conversation today I had reason to refer to Alyson Hannigan, however in a moment of abstraction I ended up calling her Alygan Hannyson.

I find this so amusing that I may well call her that from now on 🙂

OK, I’m really tired out so this may not be a particularly long entry, but at least I’m trying. I just spent a really enjoyable day wandering around the Art Gallery with Purdey (that’s her name, I’ve decided I might as well write it since she still inexplicably seems to like me 😉 which has left me both physically and emotionaly exhausted. But in a good way. And I’m less exhausted than I would have been last week. So I guess this dating thing is growing on me.

She came over about twelve and promptly got lost looking for my apartment. After we straightened that out (via mobiles) we hung around here for a bit, then headed down to That Food Company (where the garlic bread is excellent and the servings immense) for lunch. Then we walked over to the station and got the train into town. We spent about three hours wandering around the Gallery – particularly the Centenary Gallery where I had art classes years and years back and they have some amazing paintings – before getting all galleried out and heading back to the station.

Here – thanks to my ineptness operating an intransigent ticket machine – we completely managed to miss the train. However this wasn’t a huge disaster because there was another one along in fifteen minutes and it gave us some time to sit on the lawn and do dating type stuff *grin*. Once the second train arrived we got it back to my place and hung around for another hour or so talking and doing more dating type stuff *grin again*. Then we said our goodbyes and she left.

This was of course our third date. The second was last Sunday when I went around to her place and we watched movies together, specifically The Princess Bride and Moulin Rouge. I hadn’t actually seen The Pricess Bride in years, I’d forgotten just how good it is. Like the marriage scene! The priest! 🙂

Mawaazh! Mawaazh izh zha reezha wee-er gawaad heer hooway!

I’d never actually seen Moulin Rouge before but quite enjoyed it. You’ve got to like any film that starts with a narcoleptic Argentinian falling through the ceiling. And the “Like a Virgin” sequence is one of the most wonderfully silly things I’ve ever seen on film.

So that was a great day too 🙂

And of course on our first date we saw V for Vendetta, which I’ve been meaning to write about but really am not up to tonight. Expect a sort of review (or at least some comments) shortly though.

So, I had a great day, and things are going really well, and we’re probably going to hook up to see a movie on Wednesday or Thursday. This dating/relationship thing is extremely taxing on a poor introvert such as myself, but genuinely seems to be worth it 😀

Amazing isn’t it? You do something as simple as miss-set your VCR when going out on a date, and the producers of Smallville kill off your favourite character. Not just content with that, they also cut off Lionel Luther’s hair, give Lex some kind of deadly blood disease and turn Clark into a Kryptonian Fascist*Not to be confused with a crypto-fascist 😀. Then they recruit Margot Kidder to replace Christopher Reeve. Well, I guess that’s what happens when you manage to miss what was probably the 2004 season finale.

(Yes, I know Chloe almost certainly isn’t actually dead since her coffin is empty and – much more importantly – Alison Mack is still in the credits – but still)

The hot water situation continues. The flood had abated last night and the water was a little warmer so I was able to have a slightly-warmer-than-luke-warm-but-not-actually-warm shower. This morning it was back to luke warm and on leaving for work I discovered the flood was back, with ruptured pipes pumping out water at roughtly the speed of an emptying washing machine. Foolishly I decided to wade through the deluge and discovered that my shoes are not rated for depths of greater than 2 inches. My socks ended up completely soaked, so I’m probably now going to contract the ague and expire.

Actually expiration may be a smart idea, because the Government is after me. There was a curt little note in my letterbox last night from the Electoral Commision saying that they’d sent the boys around because there’s no one on the electoral roll for my unit (it’s one of those things I kept meaning to do after moving and then didn’t) but no one was home. It also said that they’d be coming back on Monday.

Now I know that the Government probably presumes that people not on the electroral roll are anarchists or terrorists or tax cheats or other enemies of democracy who spend all their time building bombs and watching daytime TV, but some of us*That is to say those of us not on the electoral roll – in the current climate a grammatical ambiguity like that could end you up in Gitmo. do actually support the economy by working, and hence cannot be expected to be at home on a weekday afternoon. Perhaps they might want to consider sending their witch hunters around on Saturday mornings in future? It’s a well know fact that terrorists enjoy a good sleep in on the weekend after all.

In any case I’ve got the forms all filled out and will be posting them off today for delivery on Monday morning. I just hope the communications down at the Bureau for Un-Australian Activities are efficient enough to get word to their goons before they smash down my door, seize my computer and interrogate my furniture.

(I’d better hide the ammo cases and fertiliser bags just in case though… 🙂

PS: I actually do have some ammo cases – they’re good for storage. I’d probably better hide them 🙂

Subject – Bad Things:

The signals system on the Midland line broke down yesterday while I was on my way to work, meaning my train sat at Claisbrook for a good twenty minutes. This completely negated my efforts to go in early and get some extra work done.

A pipe burst at the complex last night meaning no hot water from about 8:00pm onwards. Luke warm shower last night, no shower at all this morning and wading through two inches of water to get to work.

Too much work on for me to take my usual two week break over Easter, meaning I only get one week off and will probably go mad from stress before long.

Subject – Good Things:

Ryan dropped by with a completely FREE recordable DVD player last night. His dad (who operates a skip bin service) recovered about a dozen perfectly good ones thrown out by a supermarket chain. Free recordable DVD players for all!!

I now have a post office box and can thus order things online without having to send them to my parents’ place or have them stolen from my mailbox by the various indigent savages inhabiting the complex.

Really good second date watching movies at her place last Sunday. Hopefully really good third date at the Art Gallery this Sunday. Lots of emails, texts and online chat in between 😀

Expect more details on some or all of these points over the weekend.

Helen has written to inform me that Saint Germain (without an ‘e’) is in fact an artist – specifically a jazz artist. Damn, I was hoping for the alchemist. I’m also slightly miffed that Dale knows more about music than I do 😉

I have about a dozen emails to answer from various people (including the aforementioned Helen). I meant to get to grips with some of them last night but my brain refused to co-operate. Hopefully I’ll get them sorted tonight.

PS: Tuburculosis (or consumption) is spread by infected droplets produced while coughing. Blue eyes are in fact a recessive trait. Was there anything I’ve forgottten? 😉

PPS: Apart from how to spell ‘forgotten’ obviously? 🙂

PPPS: Rebecca has also emailed me to point out that Saint Germain is a jazz artist. Am I the only person in the entire WORLD not to have heard of this person?!

PPPPS: Apparently.

From Zeldman…

Ain’t that the truth? 🙁

PS: Dale is talking to a potential wedding DJ client on the phone, telling them that he could play some ‘Saint Germaine’ during dinner. I don’t know if…

1. There’s an artist named St Germaine, which there well may be.
2. He means Saint Etienne, who could actually be quite good dinner music.
3. He has recordings by the semi-mythical, immortal alchemist of that name, possibly explaining how to turn base metals into gold 🙂