I've known for quite a while that the riff in Sting's "Russians" is actually by Russian composer Prokofiev - the Romance theme from the Lieutenant Kijé Suite.  So it was no surprise hearing it yesterday during ABC Classic FM's Russian weekend.

But I was completely taken by surprise to hear The Right Stuff soundtrack suddenly pop up during today's music.  Turns out that bit of the music (which I really love and so hence love the soundtrack to that movie) is actually by Tchaikovsky, and not by Bill Conti!  Mind.  Blown.

Then again, my favourite bit of the Babe soundtrack is actually by Camille Saint Saens and not by Nigel Westlake, who did the rest of the soundtrack.  

I forgot to turn on the radio before 12pm today so missed Peter and the Wolf.  Oh well.

So after yesterday's pretty average day, we watched a free-to-air Air Crash Investigations and then we thought we'd watch a movie.

That was a very silly idea.

Our internet is so bad that Netflix is pretty much out of the question.

The DVD part of our PS3 died years ago so we couldn't watch a dvd on that.

My DVD recorder has recently been dropping out the video and it's been getting worse, dropping out all the time and making movies pretty much unwatchable.

So I dug out my old Toshiba DVD player from under the house but then I was looking at the back of the recorder and all the fricken outputs have cables hanging out.  So I couldn't even easily tell which outputs it was using to swap them to the other player.  So I went and lost it for a while.

Came back a while later and traced through some of the spaghetti.  There's standard video/audio out going into the tv, although I don't think we've been using that.  But I plugged those into my dvd player and set the tv to av mode and up it came.   W00t.  So we put Enemy at the Gates on, which I'd seen a long time ago, but could only remember the beginning, and Stu had never seen it.

Half an hour later it degraded so badly that we couldn't watch it.  I thought it was the dvd, but (after battling for ages to get it to even play) it played through that part of the disk on my computer.  I tried to get a little wifi dongle working in my computer so that I could Chromecast it, but it wouldn't work.

So I went to bed.

Sigh.

Got to sleep ok but woke up when Stu came to bed and stayed awake for ages.  And hurty kept me awake for a while too.

So I was still super grumpy today.

So I went into work to use the internet to geotag all my holiday photos.  About the only success I had all weekend.

Mostly did a jigsaw in the afternoon.  It rained, it even hailed, so didn't do any washing.

Around dinner time (Stu was still cooking and cleaning, bestest sweetie ever), I went down to Kit's to meet the new Ben, and after a glass of wine and a bit of socialising with Kit felt a lot better.  I was telling her the sad story of the dvd player, and she pulled an old one out of her cupboard and said, here you go, try that.  So we did.  And it did actually work for the most part, although it did have similar problems with audio and video a couple of times while we were watching it.  So it was a very frustrating experience.  But we did finally finish watching the movie.

I feel like I need a weekend to recover from my weekend.

Had a very quiet long weekend.  Didn't really do much other than house stuff.  Stu went to work and I went with Chris and Kit to Salvos and Vinnies.  Not much else really.  Did finish up all the fresh food in the house though which was good.

Well not much really.

Wednesday night we ran the trivia night which was pretty well attended and enjoyed.  Only two questions that noone got right, but twenty-three that *everyone* got right - whoops!

Thursday had a training day which I always find a bit draining, but learnt some things, even if I won't get much exposure to them in real life.

Friday night we had dinner at Hero Sushi and did some clothes shopping.  The girl at City Chic was quite nice and unthreatening which made the whole process of clothes shopping not *completely* stressful.  And only spent nearly $300 on four items.  Hrmmmmmmm!!  (Vinnies was *much* better value!!)

The weekend was pretty much just *getting things done*.  Had dinner at Annie's last night, but really the weekend was just getting things done that hadn't been gotten done on account of trivia nights and stuff...

Tonight we watched some Voyager, and Particle Fever, which was pretty interesting.

And I made a zucchini bake using one of Serena's epic zucchinis

Other than going out on Saturday to do some clothes and food shopping, pretty much all I did all weekend was work on our next trivia night.

And tonight was finding images to make it all pretty.

Except Open Office is completely retarded.  It crashes spectacularly when it runs out of memory.  But it doesn't just crash, it corrupts the file as well, so half the slides will lose their background, or all the images will disappear.  Super frustrating and I lost maybe half an hour or an hour's work when it did that to me - twice.  So I've got fifty thousand backups of backups in the hopes that further corruption won't lose too much work.  At least it's pretty much finished now, so hopefully won't have to change much more on it.

The other week we finally finished watching Star Trek: The Original Series.  Last night we started watching Star Trek: Voyager.  I tried getting into Voyager when it was on tv twenty years ago, but after a season and a half I lost interest.  So watching them all again now.

In other news.  Saturday morning was up for a few hours in the middle of the night thanks to hurty.  So had a very late start.  Did house and hobby type stuff in the morning then headed out for lunch and then out to Fyshwick to have another go at going to Material Pleasures.  There was barely anything in the way of evening wear, and the few things that I did try on looked pretty hideous or just didn't fit.  So left in tears, further cementing my hatred of clothes shopping.  Did our food shopping on the way home.  Stu wanted to go to Aldi.  We always spend a lot less there, simply because they just don't have much.  They're ok for meat and cheese and maybe frozen food, but that's about it.  They're absolutely terrible for fruit and veg and anything that's a little bit non-standard.  Like you can't buy a single cucumber, you have to buy a whole tray.  And you can't buy a single brown onion, you have to buy a whole bag.  They don't have rice bran oil, or any of my toiletries.  Really don't like going there.  So I went next door to Coles to pick up all the essentials.  And a cucumber.

Today went with Chrissie to the Beer and Meat on Stick Festival (aka the Multicultural Festival).  The last time (and first time) I went was the morning after dad died three years ago, which made for a very strange day.  Today we had beer and meat on a stick.  And potato on a stick.  And fetta/spinach pastries.  And gozleme.  And cider.  It was pretty crowded, but there was seemingly a lot more food and drink stalls (including at least three potato on a stick stores) so you could always find one with a short queue (a couple of stalls did have very long queues, we just avoided those). 

Came home and did papercraft and we cooked Scotch eggs for dinner and watched more Voyager.

Another model I started making nearly three years ago was a paper geodesic octahedron.

Or, if you please, a geodesic hexahedron (cube).

It's a dual model because the model is made up of forty-eight triangles and you can look at it as eight faces of six triangles (octahedron), or six faces of eight triangles (hexahedron/cube).

This was another pretty simple model to make, with the net taken from Vince Matsko.  You'll need to print eight pages of that net, but there's a catch: you need to make half of the triangles "left-handed" and half of the triangles "right-handed" - folding the strips "inwards" for half, and "outwards" for the other half.  If you want to make a two-colour model, as I have above, you'll need to make all the triangles of one colour left-handed, and all the triangles of the other colour right-handed.  Again, I stuffed this up when I was making it, and so I've had to make two models - oops!

A little while ago (crap it was nearly three years ago!) I started building one of Vince Matsko's geodesic dodecahdrons out of paper, based on Magnus Wenninger's Spherical Models.  I finished it a weekend ago (after realising I'd stuffed up when I started and was trying to do it with three colours, but it looks a lot better with four colours, so had to make the white pentagons as you see below).

It's a pretty straightforward model to build.  Each pentagon face of the twelve faces of the dodecahdron is divided into five triangles, so you'll need sixty triangles.  Vince Matsko's net has twenty per page, so you'll need three pages.  Although if you want to make different colours like I have you may need more and have some leftover.  When you fold each strip, the little tab will always be right in the middle of the group of five triangles.  I stuck each group of five triangles together, giving me the twelve faces, then glued the twelve faces together into the ball.

A simple and fun little model to make.

While mum was here over Christmas, we didn't spend a whole lot of time with her, on account of that's my only week off at home like ever, and so my only chance to really get things done around the house.  I still miss uni holidays.  Sigh.

Anyways, I said at the time she should come again for a weekend in say February, so she did.  She came down Friday night and we all had a swim to cool off (Friday was *stoopidly* hot).  Cooked sausages for dinner and we watched Shrek Forever After.  

Saturday morning I woke up at 4am and never got back to sleep - spine hurty and brain that wouldn't shut up.  Got ready and we all headed out to the club.  Were we sat in the pool and hid from the sun.  And then had lunch.  Then sat in the pool.  Then went home.  And sat in the pool.  Saturday was *stoopidly* hot as well.  I cooked honey mustard chicken for dinner and then mum and I did some photo labelling.  Well, all her photos are labelled, but there's plenty of photos where there's people's names, but I don't actually know the people or how they fit everything in.  I really need to do family trees for all that side of the family.  Mum's father's side is well documented, on account of us being First Fleeters, but mum's mother's side, and all of dad's side is a bit lacking in who's who.  Not that anyone will care after I die.  Heck I barely even care ;)

Sunday was a bit cooler.  Mum went to church in the morning so I finished scanning the last album I wanted to return.  Then we did more labelling.  Then off to Scott's with EffanC for drinks and nibbles and music and pizza.  Quite a pleasant afternoon.  Mum wanted to watch MKR when we got home so I stayed til the end of that, then had an early night.  

And then mum went home this morning.  

Well short in that I didn't get as much to myself as I would have liked.

We watched Mockingjay part 1 at some point, I think on Friday night.  

Saturday morning a bit of house stuff before heading down to babysit Zac.  His neighbour took him swimming for a few hours which freed me up for the afternoon which was nice.  In the evening I cooked pasta for dinner (although noone was interested in it - they wanted chips and ice cream instead :( ).  Then we watched Shaun of Dead which was a bit more gruesome than I remembered it.

Sunday morning was mostly computer stuff, then round two of babysitting Zac at his place.  Got some papercraft done which was good.  In the evening we watched Mockingjay part 2.  Last night was humid and disgusting and it took me *hours* to get to sleep :(