The last couple of days have been a bit of a blur.

Yesterday after breakfast Stu said he felt like a kranski. Well that was enough to make me want one too :) We had to get some groceries anyway, so we went to Ascot Provisions for lunch. Their kranskis aren't on the lunch menu, but I asked for one anyway, and got it along with a plate full of vegetables - roasted capsicum stuffed with other vegetables. Was very yummy. And my weeks worth of vegetables right there :)

An afternoon spent pottering and watching Firefly and/or Star Trek. Stu put a coat of varnish on the fish tank stand.

Then to Chay and David's for an utterly delicious (as always) roast chicken and vegetables, followed by music trivia (which I mostly sucked at, but did a lot better in the second round), followed by Sing Star 80s (which I had a lot more fun with than the newer music versions where I don't know half the songs), followed by David and I belting out Queen karaoke songs as only drunk people can :) Got to bed very very late.

Also got up very very late. Late enough for me to feel a bit grumpy about half the day being "wasted" (I tend to feel cheated if I lose daylight hours to sleep :) ). We were going to go for a swim, but decided against it. Instead just watched Star Trek and Firefly for most of the day, did my longstitch, while Stu tidied and varnished.

And now it's now. :)

Cause nothing much interesting happened today.

The winning Star Wars Trivial Pursuit piece:

Tank number 5, finally wihout the under gravel filter, and all cleaned up:

heh, it seems I've used that title before :)

Saturday.
Unpacked 13lb of lego I got from Canada in the post this week. There's a couple of cool space sets, but the rest of it is just classic lego, not terribly interesting. Took over three months to get here by surface mail - yuk!

Then went out for Thai with J&G and a bunch of their friends (which is impressive in itself since neither of them will eat spicy food). Experienced the joys of going to places alone.. after being held up behind an accident for fifteen minutes, so was running late, then had to navigate as well and try to find out where I was actually trying to go to, then had to park right in front of everyone which meant I hit the curb - twice, and after all that couldn't drink because I was driving. Except then James offered to drive my car home for me, so I finally relaxed and enjoyed the night. Which went very late. Didn't get to bed til 2am - whoops.

Sunday.
Today after church (through the pouring rain) and a bit of a chat to Stu, I cursed undergravel filters, as I had to pull the entire tank apart to clean it. Pulled out the undergravel filters and am going to stick to power filters. This was after the second tiger barb died, probably due to fetid conditions in the tank.

And tonight I went to the parents with Dave & Yvonne for dinner. After dinner we played Scategories (which mum won) and Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, which is a heck of a lot harder than I thought it would be. We didn't use the dvd because mum was watching telly, so just did all the questions from the cards. I declared the game finished when Dave finally got all six wedgies (I had five). Think I need to watch the movies a few more times. And read the books. And watch any making of specials (one of the questions was what did they mix with glass beads to make fake snow for Hoth). Much fun to be had with that game methinks. And I kept getting annoyed at Dad & Dave getting easy questions all the time. Oh, and if in doubt answer "Obi-Wan Kenobi" - it's seriously the answer to half the questions in the game ;)

I felt strangely at peace today. Of course a solid 8.5 hours of sleep helped immensely. But unusually I wasn't stressed about being late for work or adding 15 minutes to my trip by crossing to the other side of the road to get petrol (a trip which involves crossing the highway twice and three sets of traffic lights), or crazy people on the roads, or the impending deadline for our new website (which Peter is much more stressed over than anyone else). I felt vaguely like there is much more to life than day-to-day trivialities. That Stu is probably the only thing of any real importance in my life at the moment, the only thing worth worrying/caring about. I had all these ideas about some sort of profound blog entry about it all, but two sentences was about as good as I could get it, heh.

I did get moderately stressed out when I spent most of the day trying to get one thing done that should have taken an hour or two, but blew out to four or five after interruption after interruption after interruption. I was getting ready to disconnect my phone and shut down icq just to get some peace.

Spent the evening catching up on blogs, chatting to Arian and half watching reruns of CSI and will wander off in the general direction of bed shortly.

.. oh I forgot.. I also spent a couple of hours after work today flying up and down the coast on Google Earth, marking out points where I took photos out of the plane. And only did about half of them too :)

It's only Tuesday isn't it? blah.

Two hour staff meeting at cia. blah.

Bookcrossing meetup at the Porterhouse Pub in Surrey Hills. Stayed for three rounds of trivia, where we were losing, but I got a few answers right. Only brought home one book, and that only cause I started reading it (short stories) and felt like I should finish it. Had to put up with Sunday drivers on the way home and lights that favour side streets.

And now it's 11pm. blah.

So my day started with someone commenting on my 100 things list about how lucky I am that I know what I want in life (although I'm not sure how he got that idea).

It descended dramatically when I had to buy petrol this morning. The local Mobil was 115.9c/L, yet across the road it was 108.9c/L. The problem is, to get across to the other side of the road takes a good ten minutes as it requires getting through the same intersection twice against peak hour flow. After having to stop at the same set of lights three times I decided to bite the bullet, put $5 in at the Mobil and get more after work. I'm not sure which works better as a protest, not buying anything, or buying just enough to give them the message that I don't want to buy from them.

Then Marc sent this link round the staff list. You put your income in and it tells you where you rank in the grand scheme of things.

(big chunk of post removed, the thoughts had no socio-economic basis in reality)

I know damned well that I have it good in Australia. Every so often I have to convince myself that I do actually have friends, even though it doesn't feel like it sometimes. I probably have more money that most people I know. I know that complaining about the price of petrol between different petrol stations, and the ten minutes extra out of my life it takes to get a discount is among the shallowest things you can do.

I would simply like the ability to appreciate the good things and not get stressed out by trivialities.

Watching the final movie in the Airport Terminal pack - Airport 79 - Concorde. I've only ever seen this movie once, and the only thing I can remember from it was Patroni firing a pistol out of the window and doing all sorts of acrobatics and I was thinking "yeah right" (apparently the barrell rolls were possible, but 360 loops were not). The good thing about this Airport movie (and the previous one) is the glorious footage of the aircraft. The Concorde was such a beautiful plane. So jealous of Luc for having flown in it.

Sadly, according to IMDB, the same Concorde used in the movie was the one that crashed in France and signalled the end of all Concorde flights.

I saw Finding Neverland tonight with the parents. It was delightfully sweet, I really enjoyed it.

Of course I had a powerful urge to come home and watch Peter Pan afterwards, which I'm doing now :)

I also found a cool page that has a stack of trivia, like for example that Sylvia (Kate Winslet) was the aunty of Daphne du Maurier (author of Rebecca).

Thanks Makybe Diva, you won me $25 in the office Melbourne Cup sweep! My first ever win on a sweep, it was pretty cool. Actually I didn't even know it had won until after the race when they put up the results - the tv was a bit blurry and the volume wasn't loud enough. Funny stuff.

Other useless Melbourne Cup trivia: the horse that won in 1986 was called "At Talaq" which I found out recently means "divorce" in Arabic. The horse was owned by a "Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum" .. maybe the dude was going through a rough patch when he named the horse :)

2:24am. Whoops. I'm going to be tired at work tomorrow! er, today ;)
Was it worth it? <sheepish grin> yeah :)

That is one damned long book to read in a weekend, especially considering what a slow reader I am. It took a while to really get going (although some good scenes near the beginning) and there were a few scenes that really just added length but not a lot of meaning to the story. But the imagery was fantastic and the story impressive. You wouldn't want to read this without having read the others first, most of the things that happen (from the major themes to trivial things such as the Marauder's map) would be meaningless otherwise. I remember in the second one she went to the trouble of reexplaining things like Quidditch, but this one had no such filler. The ending doesn't leave you hanging nearly so much as the Goblet of Fire did, which is good, as I only had a six month wait until this one, it'll be a good couple of years before book 6 comes out :)

I'm aching all over though - neck from hanging over the book, and arms from propping myself up, as I took alternate positions. The things we do, hey?

Well anyways, I'm off to bed, night :)