After getting my Jason fix for the night in Peter Pan (hadn't seen anything of his in weeks due to the Olympics and being away), I put on The Man From Snowy River. I haven't seen that movie in *years*. And I hadn't seen it since we went to the set of Craig's Hut on Mt Stirling in Victoria. Not to mention I was literally just in the snowy mountains. Gorgeous film, and the making-of special was pretty cool.

Why are the Friday Q topics always so hard?? :) I have to *think* which is something my brain always protests over :)

FQ1: Where did you live out your childhood years?
I lived my entire life in the one house in Como in Sydney until I moved out of home four years ago. My parents still live there. They actually built the house (well a builder did, but my grandfather designed and drew it). I'd be very sad if they ever sold it.

FQ2: As a child, what was your favorite toy, book, television show, and cartoon character?
Toy: probably "Cutie". She was essentially a lop-sided pom-pom, but she went to America with me in 1983 and round Australia in 1984 and 1985. She is still at my parents' place.
Book: I was never a big book reader. I like Tin Tin and Asterix comics though.
Television show: I have a lot of favourites from my teenage years, MacGyver and Airwolf would have been top of that list. Astroboy and Starblazers I remember liking a lot from my primary school years.
Cartoon character: Maybe Astroboy or the Looney Tunes characters - Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner

FQ3: Charm us with a favorite childhood memory...
We went on some very cool holidays. America for five weeks in 1983 including all the big amusement parks in LA; Western Australia in 1984; Central Australia in 1985; Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands in 1987.

FQ PHOTO-OP: Show us a photo of just how adorable you were as a child.
See right..

Found this little list of questions I put together while reading the Harry Potter books for the third time through.

The first list is questions that I'd like to see answered in the last two books:

Yes, apparently I have. Just watched The Patriot where he plays another wonderful bad guy. I think I need to go on a mission to see all his other movies :)

I also think I need to move to England. British accents do it for me.. :)

Had a thoroughly unmotivated day today. Seems to be a habit lately. Not getting anything done which is frustrating. I think I need a holiday. One where I can stay home for three months and catch up on all the things that need doing. I miss the three month holidays I used to get at uni :(

So my todo list for the weekend now all has to be done on one day. fun fun fun

Found a *very* cool program on Eric Harshbarger's site last night - Mazaika. It's a shareware program that lets you build photomosaics. I've been fiddling with it ever since. I'm trying to figure out which sorts of photos give the best results. It looks like pictures that don't have too much detail work the best. The pic is a section of the betta photo I uploaded the other night. I gave mazaika 11000 photos in my collection (although a decent chunk of those are thumbnails) to index, and am wearing my poor little puta out making mosaics.

Work today sucked. Someone didn't bother to turn the air conditioner on after the holidays, and the place sweltered all day (or at least the first half). Then I got home and it was even hotter, and I just about lost it. I need to be cooool dammit!!

Anyways.. I've uploaded some of the mazaika images I've done to conspiracy.

The todo list is slipping badly. Everything takes a lot longer than it should and days are short. I sorely miss the three month holidays I used to get as a student.

I finished the bridge I was building last night, doesn't it look cool? I still have another one to make, but that's gonna have to wait a bit, I'm just too busy at the moment :/

24 hours and 17 minutes of this year left.

You're meant to be able to sleep in on your day off, aren't you? Well not me. Come normal waking time and I'm up. Had to force myself to try and get more sleep.

Didn't quite achieve all I wanted to today. But did get one thing done that I'd been putting off til the holidays. Then I wandered into the city to do some Christmas shopping. It's starting to get chaotic there. In the end I hardly got anything that I couldn't have gotten in the 'burbs. Still, it was very cool to see some books in Dymocks that a friend of mine wrote. I hadn't realised she was distributing them through big stores, I thought it was mainly schools.

I want to learn to play the piano. Is it too late to start learning when you're 30? My friends' kids are learning, and they're five-ish and already know about chords. I want to be able to keep up with them. I would love to be able to buy sheet music and play it. For $24.95 you can get all the music for Harry Potter. I'd love to be able to play it all. Of course I'd need a keyboard then, and somewhere to put it, and some beginners music to practise with. Not to mention I'd probably want decent lessons. I'll have to ask Sami (author of aforementioned music books) what she thinks, and how much it would be likely to cost.

oh, and I also saw the largest commercial jigsaw puzzle ever made - 18000 pieces!! It has four antique maps of the world, so it'd basically be like mixing up four 4500 piece puzzles (which is bigger than anything I've done to start with) and doing them all at once. Yikes! I shoulda checked the dimensions. I doubt I'd even have floor space to do it :)

Onya Sandra for winning Survivor VII :)

And now for a Friday Five on a Monday..

1. Do you enjoy the cold weather and snow for the holidays?
Well let's see.. normally we have 30C+ days here.

2. What is your ideal holiday celebration? How, where, with whom would you celebrate to make things perfect?
Which holiday? Christmas is for family, New Years is for friends. Christmas should also include roast pork at some point, and New Years should include fireworks.

3. Do you do have any holiday traditions?
I like Christmas trees and fairy lights. And roast pork.

4. Do you do anything to help the needy?
Just through church if anything

5. What one gift would you like for yourself?
See a previous post .. probably a digital camera is highest on the list.

It was totally unreal in Sydney during the Olympics. The majority of people were on holidays, so there was noone on the roads. I chose to continue working, so had dream drives into work, and then spent half my time watching "ip tv" olympics coverage, as there wasn't really much work to do any way.

Everyone was in a party/holiday mood. There was stacks of free entertainment round the city. The public transport system performed absolutely flawlessly.

We went out to Olympic Park to see a few things, and while it was insanely crowded, it was all very organised, thanks in no small part to the army of volunteers, and there was hardly any queueing for anything.

My biggest regret was not getting to see the opening ceremony. When I saw the opening ceremony for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles I thought at the time that it would be a such a once in a lifetime event that if it ever came to Sydney I'd *have* to see it. My mother and I both applied for tickets, but we didn't get them. I didn't regret not having to pay $1345 *per ticket*, but I still really would love to have been there. I also wanted to go to one of the dress rehearsals, but you couldn't get tickets for that (you had to know people or be involved). My friend Liz was a volunteer, and her "beat" was Stadium Australia, so she got to see it for free.

A google search on "Black Mountain Tower" brings up my holiday photo page on conspiracy from last year (here) as number 3! Go figure. I have no idea why, really, it's got two mentions of the place on the whole page, yet it ranks really highly in Google. Spins me out.

Didn't quite get around to posting last night, I realised after I'd turned the monitor off. Of course then I couldn't really be bothered as it was way past my bed time anyway. As it is I've got nothing to say anyway. Oh well, so ends another day in the boring life of kazza.