Christmas 2007

WHERE DID MY TOES GO?
Christmas each years marks the annual disappearance of my toes due to excessive intake of solid Christmas Cheer. The only disappointment with our new oven (from Jennie's point of view) is that it's not quite able to handle two turkeys at once, and after observing the way my Dad hosed the bird of the day back on Tuesday I can now see the need. Have made a note to tie him to a chair until after everyone else has had their whack of the serving table before unleashing him. (At least I come by my appetite honestly).

ALIEN vs PREDATOR: REQUIEM
Saw this film at my local cinema yesterday, and what a massive improvement on the previous AvP it was! If you've read the comics or books, or played the games on PC you'd expect to see poor schmucks (us) caught between two very different types of hunters (aliens and predators). Alien vs Predator: Requiem delivers exactly that. In AvPR we finally get everything that was promised (and denied!) in the first AvP film, and more besides. The aliens are just as mad and bad as well all know and remember, and the Predator in this effort is like the galaxy's most extreme (and cranky!) garbage cleaner. On top of what we demanded after the first disappointment, we also get new toys and new Big Bads to punch a hole through your chest.
If there's any justice in the universe at all when it comes time to create the third film the Powers That Be will allow the same directors another crack at it, and make it a proper three-way fight between aliens, predators and Colonial Marines.

"Movement. I got movement!"

LIVING LIFE WITHOUT A SAFETY NET
I write this on my newly reassembled computer with a distinct lack of net presence - A presence that will remain somewhat lacking for at least the next 3 weeks. If you want to send me an e-mail, print it off and mail it to me - Believe me it'll be much faster that way... As it stands I'm saving this to a portable disc drive for cutting and pasting at work.
It seems that while we signed a contract stating that we were responsible for the digging of a trench suitable for Telscrape to run a phone cable down from the property line to the access point on the edge of the house, nobody had seen fit to draw our attention to that obscure little point buried on an obscure little page in a construction contract thick enough to choke your average crocodile. While I don't find this particularly suprising as such (indeed I find that no depth of incompetence is beyond Telscrape these days) it still strikes me as a little odd that they would find it so amazingly difficult to use the SAME BLOODY TRENCH to lay their phone cable as was used to lay the electricity cable from the SAME POINT on the property line to the SAME POINT on the house. I kid you not I'm going to have to dig a trench (350mm deep x 300mm wide x too bloody long!) right next to the one that was laid down for the electricity because some chucklehead at Telscrape is completely unable to find their own ass with both hands, even with the aid of a guide dog and a team of weathered-looking Sherpas willing and able to help.
To the funny looking troll-doll who says he's in charge of that particular company of fools (I'd call it a sheltered workshop for society's ineffectives, but that's what the Liberal Party is for) I can only say that a couple of 6-year olds with tin cans and string have more of a clue on how to build an EFFECTIVE communications network than your mob of sub-contracted suboids have. Sol, you can bite me!

LIFE IN A $300k MORTGAGE
Life at our new house is good, great in fact. It's peaceful (when the children are asleep) and serene (when the children are asleep), and amazingly wet the last couple of days. How wet? Too bloody wet, especially when I'm making the scooter ride from Heidelberg West to Tarneit and the heavens decide that I'm not looking tense and nervous enough on the way, and choose to "improve" that situation with a cubic ass-tonne of water falling on me every second of the trip. I also find that my motorcycle jacket's pockets are nowhere near waterproof as I would like, particularly as I find that I now have to find a replacement mobile phone for the one that was used to replace the first one to be drowned whilst in my jacket pocket a few months back. Still, it's cheaper, faster and far more reliable than the rolling ordure offered up by Connex on a daily basis, so I'll stick to what now gets me from 'Point A' to 'Point B'.

FOUR WHEELS GOOD, TWO WHEELS BAD
I feel justifiably anxious at the best of times on the roads because I know deep down that if I don't have 4 or more wheels moving me along I'm near the bottom of the traffic food-chain (cyclists, not having a motor at all, are at THE BOTTOM, and pedestrians are merely a tally mark on someone's scoresheet somewhere). Adding torrential rain to the mix adds damp terror and soggy misery to the journey as I try to anticipate the combined effects of sheets of water on the road with fleets of cars driven by dimwits with water on the brain. No way in Hell do I have any time to try and remember (let alone recite) Frank Herbert's "Litany Against Fear", I'm far too intent on narrowing down my personal universe to everything I can see around me for about the next 4 seconds or so. I would also like to add that I will be refraining from making the trip from Heidelberg West to Tarneit on my scooter as it seems that every time I do the heavens drop water, lots and lots and LOTS of water, on my every metre of the way.

-- Dear Santa (or Dear Family Who Says They Love Me), this year for Christmas, more than anything else in the whole wide world, I'd like a pair of rain pants to help me cope with those times when I face the very real danger of death by drowning AND vehicular trauma simultaneously.

A view from the trenches...

Hooray! My wife and I are now the proud owners of a brand new $300 thousand dollar mortgage. Oh, there's also a new house to go with it too. I find I am now in that state that is a precursor to complete physical and mental collapse. Today was busy as all get out and now I have the dubious pleasure of being trapped home alone with a surly 8 year old and a grumpy 19 month old who's teething (and probably tired).

The house looks okay, inside and out, but (like my youngest) there have been some teething problems of our own to contend with:

• We need to dig a trench from the front of the property to the phone access point so that our telecommunications infrastructure monopoly (Telstra, but let's call them Telscrape after the telecommunications abortion that they aspire to be) can finish connecting our home to the local telephone circuit. I see quality time with a shovel in my immediate future...
• Did I mention no domestic internet service until the line is physically connected? After more than 13 years of near constant internet supply how the hell will I cope?
• The people who supplied our oven shipped it with the wrong style of range hood. The error wasn't noticed until after the electrician tried installing it. The carpenter, brought into fix things, pointed out the mistake. Oops... Our building supervisor (an amazing bloke by the name of Mark) was making a trip out to Geelong the last I heard to grab the proper fitting from the distributor.

Add to that the sheer, unbridled joy of trying to salvage bunk-beds that have been comprehensively battered into stressed-metal submission by two thirds of the domestic terrors in this house as well as the geodesic climbing frame thingy that they also met in mortal combat (and prevailed), and my day has been hot and bothered to say the least. Hard rubbish is now richer by one disassembled tubular steel set of bunks and one butt-load of plastic crap that was once a green coloured eyesore in my back yard. Can't say that I'm not happy to see them go...

Need beer, badly.

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Now playing: Juno Reactor/Don Davis - Mona Lisa Overdrive
via FoxyTunes

Moving day mania.

Just a quick note at the end of a rather frantic day. We move house on Thursday and, thanks to a combination of procrastination and children so hopped up on whatever the hell it is that children younger than teenagers snack on when their (long-suffering, believe me) parents aren't looking, we're pretty much leaving everything to the last minute. Lots of boxes were packed today and many more need to be packed, and our kids were a huge help to both Jennie and I, although I am at a loss to explain how several hours of playing on the PS2, bickering, squabbling and whining whilst under foot could qualify as "helping". I find myself resorting to a mantra that I developed to help me cope with the after-effects of all this help.

Breathe in. "I love my children, I will not kill them." Breathe out.
Breathe in. "I love my children, I will not kill them." Breathe out.

Repeat as needed. Then wait until late at night so you can walk the dog in peace and quiet - Find a nice private part of the local park and scream. It helps.

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Now playing: Enya - Tempus Vernum
via FoxyTunes

Dipping my toes in...

Time for a confession: I'm something of a hold-out against the march of progress, at least when it comes to social networking and "web 2.0" (whatever the blinding hell that means). What was wrong with learning to slap a few web-pages up (using raw HTML if you please) and then unleashing that on an unsuspecting (global) public? As far as I could see, nothing. Back in the day if you were really serious about generating site traffic you could join a web-ring or, dare I say it, come up with something that, by virtue of actually being good, was really worth visiting and revisiting. Now it seems that no-one is capable of taking anything seriously without an RSS feed, a companion video-clip hosted by YouTube and with photos provided by Flickr.

Now I can't talk to any of my friends in the office without being asked if I have an account with Facebook yet. The answer to that question is still a resounding "No", and it's looking like that is the most popular choice of answer until some time after the sun explodes. -- Yes I am aware that our sun won't explode but will instead swell in size until our world is swallowed whole by it, but that's cumbersome to say so I won't. (I have yet to run into the situation where someone I know tells me that I can only keep in regular contact with them by visiting their profile page. I guess that it's only a matter of time, and will be heralded with the simultaneous death of every e-mail server on the planet).

Still, I have been encouraged to create something like this by Jennie (my wife), who thinks that somebody out there might like it (and thereby stop me from inflicting this on her I suspect). I don't see what her problem is, her usual reaction to pretty much anything that I say is to hit me over the head while yelling "Lemming!" over and over again. My sole attempt at trying to fit in with the rest of the W2.0 crowd, other than this blog, is over at Last.fm, (Where you can see from my profile that I am something of a basket-case for female vocalists of all kinds...)

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Now playing: Joss Stone - You Had Me
via FoxyTunes