Early Morning

I can't believe people get up so early on a Saturday. Can you believe it? They get up earlier than I usually do, considering lately my body clock has been so regular that on Saturdays I can't sleep anywhere past 8AM. Or it got lost somewhere at Edwards house amongst all the button bashing, and the screaming amazement as to why we couldn't finish off a Fifa Street game in less than an hour. I ended up getting home at like 6 in the morning! That's like nearly 24 hours awake!

Of course at 4:30 in the morning everyone's senses start to slowly fade away when they been up all night, and probably starts to get replaced with adrenaline. There were 9 of us last night munching on snacks and playing Burnout 3, Fifa Street, Halo 2, other assorted games, and messing up Ed's house (well not really, we're neat boys aren't we). First time I'd hooked up Xboxes really, and after a few minutes of explaining to those interested how I was setting up the network (read as "pretending to know what I was doing with trial and error") we were ready to go.

Burnout 3 was pretty fun as you got to pretend to drive cars at absolutely insanely high speeds and the aim was to pretty much crash your other opponents. Only 2 players could play though, so that didn't go too well. To all those game programmers out there, include more than 2 players in the racing game. Please?

And Fifa Street was hilarious because everyone was just tackling and doing crazy tricks. Yes, we really want to do that in real life, but we can't. Sorry. Keep dreamin' boys. I'm afraid we'll probably end up hurt - maybe more from attempting the tricks than tackling each other, but I think in the end it might result in more revenue from those physios.

Oh there was also some non-real poker were you didn't lose your money or your shirt or anything. They wanted to try see what it was like on that World poker championship show on Channel 10. And you've gotta be pretty lucky to win. Well mix that with some intimate knowledge, a hint of knowing body language, and a pair of steel balls if you like to bluff.

Figure 1: People losing fake money.

I lost straight away, but gambling's not for me. Why in the world would you want to bet your actual money that you actually work for when the chances are you'll lose it?! You work like hours on hours earning it, and if you're no good, you just throw it away. You know you can give me the money instead, knowing that you've made me very happy, you know :), I'll give you a hug, or something like that - which is much better than walking away from that poker table hanging your head in shame, and crazily conjuring up reasons to tell your wife why you won't be able to get her an anniversary gift.

Come on - show, me, the money! :)

Many thanks again Ed (and his lovely family) for having us over!

Jed-Ai Tunes

Edgar watches in amazement as Ai Hui uses her Jedi music captain powers. As strong as her, Edgar is not, hee hee hee.

Fresh photos from the funny farm fiasco

Like any other city slicker out there, I made use of my camera phone to capture those moments on the farm. Yes, the cameras on those phones do come in handy after all.

Can you believe this is real hay?! Dunno if I'd want to roll around in this.

The size of the bonfire for the winter solstice thingy. It was massive. Those are real people there by the way.

Fake cows at a real farm. I think there's at least one real one there.

Blurry chickens. I guess the same thing happens when you eat too much KFC too.

Quack goes the duck.

Honk goes the goose.

And well, the peacock just looks pretty. And pretty dangerous...

Burning down the house. Well there were so many sticks here, the pigs could have built one.

The grass wasn't greener on that side of the fence. Kinda lots of little round brown things everywhere.

Funny Farm

So the NAB has volunteer days, and today was one of those days! Our support team of 10 (plus or minus 2) headed off to the Collingwood Children's Farm! Yippee! Well not yippee really, I was quite dreading this day as I'd been ill for the previous week, and it didn't really seem fun spending your first day back at work actually doing manual work on a farm. But I'd have to state that it ended up being a very good experience!

I also woke up later which was a good thing :) I had to be there at 10, and I didn't expect that there'd actually be less traffic when I left the house at quarter to 9. It probably took me longer to get out of my suburb than to cross the city and get to Collingwood. Freakin' parents drive dangerous man... Don't underestimate the willpower of parents getting their kids to school to get rid of them.

Anyway I get to the farm. And for a Collingwood Children's Farm, it didn't look like they were farming many children. No children in their pens, no little kiddie houses, no fields with kids you pull out of the cabbage patch! *shakes head*

I mean there were produce, and animals and there are chicks everywhere! As in chickens hahaha, lots of hot, hot, plump chicks moving around and it's quite amazing that a place like that exists pretty close to the middle of the city. Not that there aren't plenty of hot chicks running around in the Melbourne CBD, but that fact that it's kind of situated a bit lower down in altitude kinda blocks out the whole city outside of the perimeter. So it's like you're out in the bush, but the air is still incredibly bad.

And the Chickens were HUUUUUGGEE!!!! Like they're on steroids! But they're not, and that's why they're so big! The geese were big too! I didn't know they actually go honk! I'd only ever heard it in movies, and in the Babe movie, they're actually talking geese, and I hear people like them every time I go on the train.

Honk honk!

There's always been one thing that's been kinda shying me away from farms though. It's all the crap. There is so much crap on a farm it is not funny. Well it is funny if someone steps on it, and they set it alight, but apart from that, I think that there are only a handful of scenarios where crap is funny. I must have spotted like 15 different types of crap there and only spotted like 8 animals. Little round ones, large round ones, small oblong ones, and some large and amorphous ones that you just can't avoid, unfortunately...

You also can't avoid sticks. How many sticks can a farm actually have?!?! The main activity for the day was to build a massive bonfire for a Winter Solstice festival that they're having. Solstices occur when the length of day is equivalent to the length of the night, so it means that the day time will lengthen again after that, woohooo! More daylight! So we took a bunch of hours moving a pile of sticks (varying from twigs to trunks) from one pile, to an even bigger pile 3 metres away. The strange thing is why didn't they just put it all on the spot just 3 metres away?! Hmm... *scratches head* But out support team did it quicker than they expected, and that's what it's all about at the NAB right? (Yes, do everything as quickly as possible so that we can have lunch sooner, hehehe)

And we got to set alight a bonfire of our own with the left over sticks. Boy, there were so many sticks left over that we could have built 2 more of the original pile.

So now I smell of sweat and smoke from doing manual labour for the day, warming by an open fire, walking around on a farm, exposed to fresher air, and spending the day with animals and people. I had a headache when I got home, but I'm glad that I'm home. I'm sitting in front of this monitor, using my hands to type as opposed to shovelling, raking or grabbing sticks and more sticks. The lovely fluorescent bulb lighting the room and typing messages to people as opposed to talking to them. I'll wake up tomorrow morning to go to an office to look at another monitor and be lit by this cold white light again.

Ahh... better than any farm. Or is it...?

irk

I lead quite a boring life. I really don't know why I have a blog.

sick @ work

It's Wednesday now and this thing that has taken over my throat has now worked its way up to my head. Bleh. Being sick is not the best thing in the world, and not being sick enough is also kinda bad as it means I can actually come in to work to do some work. But the level of work isn't that difficult anyway, I sit here blogging so it's not so bad is it?

Well I grabbed a tissue box on my way out this morning, but I really have to ask, who in the world manufactured these tissues. These aren't tissues. The supposed Elite Softex is about as soft as the paper you print on. in fact I'm sure you can get much better print quality on these than the ones you print on at Uni. On teh box has photos of lions, leopards and elephants. This is quite unexplainable except for the fact they only those animals would probably use wipes like these.

I guess the tissues would help roughen up my nose and give me an even more genuine "sickly" look hey?
:)

Walking alone

I followed my cousin along the corridor at the YC. He was upset we wouldn't give him money to play video games. 5 year-olds these days...

Out on a limb.

I guess birds hang out there because they can. I wish I could fly like them. Lucky birds.

Monday.

Whoopeedoooda, it's Monday again, and what else do I have to say. It's the start of yet another glorious week and I'm finally putting something in my blog. There hasn't been anything pressing on my mind so I haven't been putting anything down on paper lately. I guess it's a good thing, I like where I'm at, at the moment. No need to complain about anything. Sometimes you just see blogs upon blogs of people complaining about something.

I guess it's good that they've got it on a blog. Imagine someone ranting about something again and again and again. If you meet anyone in a state like that, tell them about this site so that they can complain here. Technically they're complaining to everyone in the world because it's the Internet. But the good thing is that you don't have to hear/see/listen to them if you don't want to! Isn't that great!? Ahh... the miracles of technology.

Oh and if you haven't been to the Viking Mistresses' blog yet, they're having an auction that even some site like eBay wouldn't think of doing.

eBay item of the week.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISA
PI.dll?ViewItem&category=56265&a
mp;item=8194175930&rd=1&ssPage
Name=WDVW

A very item with a funny description.
It sounds like the guy mentioned in the description is a real doofhead. hehe.

Cloudy days.

Is it just me or has the sun decided to go take a holiday somewhere? It's averaged about 15 degrees max for the past week now and isn't it such a nice way for the weather to tell us that it's winter. :)

The Sun's quite pudgy and unattractive cousin, Cloudy, has reared it's head once more, and it's partner, Freezing winds (and I'm sure the both of them are quite compatible with each other) have come along to join us this season. And they both encourage me to stay in bed and stay at home, when in fact I have to go to work. Bleh. I just need that extra 10 hours sleep above the 7 that I already get and I should be fine.

Maybe their kid, Rain, would like to join them on the trip this year togive everyone a break when Sun comes back with his girlfriend, 40-degree heat. ;)

Thursday's advice: upgrade your gadget's firmware if there is an upgrade available! It makes a world of difference!