catch28

So I’m an uncle now. Time to start project "be cooler than other uncles."

His name is Lachlan, and here’s a picture (taken today, he’s about 19 hours old at the time). 

I think the name is quite fine, but my brother and his girlfriend are just a smidge westie, so it could end up being spelt entirely differently on the birth certificate.  

So the Incredible Beatbox Band are pretty awesome. I saw them last night at the Festival Bar at the Hyde Park Barracks where they played a half hour set as part of a night sponsored by FBi Radio. I wasn’t expecting to be so blown away, as the theme of the night seemed to be local and alternative hip-hop, which can be a bit hit-and-miss. But these guys rocked, beatboxing a ten minute version of Seven Nation Army by the white stripes. Check them out.

So I’ve enrolled in uni, to finish that pesky post grad thingy I started years ago, and technically I only need to complete 1 full subject and 3 half subjects to have done the entire thing. That is, 1 full subject and 3 half subjects would be all I needed to finish had I still been doing the original course I started, at the uni I started it at. So in order to complete this course I need to finish 4 full subjects, which is fine I figure, as the 3 half subjects are curriculum and as its been over two years now since I last did anything in those areas the refresher would be useful, even though I’ve done much of the work before. Stupid thing is, in order to complete two of the subjects, the assesment requires me to also do a practicum in the same year as I do the subjects. This totally sucks arse, and not in the good Seymour Butts way. I’ve already completed the required amount of practicum, but because of the stupid assessment in these two stupid subject, I’m gonna have to do another one. Which means I’ll have to take 4 weeks off work later in the year, and during those 4 weeks I’ll have to friggin’ work! I am not a happy chappy.

Last night I wrote a blog post detailing the toilings of my day, which involved swollen tonsils, bad pasta, general desperation not to get sick, and redemtion in the form of an offer into the grad teaching program at UNE. It was a great blog post, full of nouns and adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and punctuation. But alas, it appears the internet ate my blogpost. When I checked my blog this evening I noticed my post was missing, and a draft post had been saved instead. I hoped this draft was my blog entry, but was sadly disappointed that the draft post that had been saved was empty. So it’s gone, and my tale of tummy trouble and gastric woe goes unheard.

But, on the plus side, I did get into and enrol in the grad course at UNE, which is great. Distance education is way better than trekking out to classes in Penrith each week for the course I got into a UWS. Of course, technically speaking, that’s also a kind of distance education, being that Penrith is about and hour and twenty mintues travel time away from my little place in the inner west. Still it has ment that I’ve had to do much running around today at work in order to get some time off

because I have to be in Armidale in eleven days time for a block week of classes!!?! 

What the hell am I going to do in friggin Armidale for a week? Sure, class will take up a bunch of time, but that’ll finish around 4.30pm, and because of daylight savings that means a good 4 hours of daylight left. Everyday. In Armidale.

I hope there’s gaybos (gayboes?) up there willing to take advantage of a drunken city boy.

In other news, some of you would already know I am the son of an avocado/ mango monger. Well my avocado/ mango monging father has been selected by the Royal Agricultural Society to be a judge at this years Easter show. We are all rather excited.

1) read your old blog.

2) blog on your new blog about reading your old blog. 

So I was really really tired all day today. This is mostly because my days have been very active, and I’ve not been getting much sleep, cuz for some reason I think to myself: "Hey, you’ve only go to go to your boring boring job for 8 hours tomorrow, you don’t need more than 5 hours sleep to cope with it, why don’t you stay up late and read your old blog for hours?"

Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid.

Of course I need the damn sleep. I only had a brief nap this evening, which does not at all make for only having 5 hours sleep last night, and 5 hours sleep the night before. And now I’ll only be getting about 5 hours tonight. Great, just great. Can someone please slap me and tell me to wake up to myself?

 On the plus side, reading my old blog was actually really quite enjoyable. This is dispite it mostly being a journal of pain covering a really tough time in my life. As a record of events goes, I found it rich and textured. And no, I shan’t tell you where it is. No need to dredge that up again… again. Unless you already know where it is, and I’m sure competent persons would be able to find it. So if you do find it, be sure to read it quickly. I think I’ll take it all down and delete the thing this weekend.

Oh, and does anyone want to hear about that dream I had where the old alien tries to go me with a butter knife cuz he’s upset with the carrots? Just let me know if you do. 

So, I’m not that great at the html it seems. My last blog was at blogspot, which i abandoned due to uninteresting blog templates and some vaguely irritating blog stalking, but it was absolutely mindless in running the thing. Blogsome seems to require one to be a smidge more technically literate, and as I tend to write my blog posts in the few minutes i have between doing thing, I can sometimes go days and weeks without realizing there are errors that need to be corrected. So, my apologies to people reading this (appearently there are actually people who read this! who’d'a thunk it?), but I have now corrected two major problems I was having with the formatting and the comments. cheerio!

So the other week they upgraded the surface of platforms 3 and 4 at St Peters station, and in doing so, they removed the bins that had been there for years and years. Now the whole area around the station is a lot more rubbishy, especially the laneway the runs from King St to the station. This is not pleasing me, as it compounds a problem already made annoying by people dumping their MX newspapers on the ground in the allyway. So I went to the cityrail website and complained. 

And this was the response I got;

 Dear Mr. name deleted by me,

Thank you for your email concerning the removal of rubbish bins on St. Peters stations.

Name deleted by me
Case Manager
RailCorp Customer Relations

This of course leaves me with a few questions. What information has cityrail recieved that makes it so vital that the bins be removed now, when events such as 9/11, or the bali bombings, or the london bombings, or the many many many other bombings that have taken place in the last few years were not enough for them to be removed? Why has the cityrail employee designated to fob me off used a plural when referring to St Peters station? Why isn’t cityrail taking more responsibilty for keeping the areas surrounding the station clean? What should I do now? Should I follow this up myself? Or perhaps I should forward the information to a crack investigative agency like Today Tonight and let them go to town?

What do you think readers? 

I’m counting 2007 from the 29th December 2006, and I just noticed that its been ten days now, which puts me in mind of that Missy Higgens Song "ten days," which makes me wonder what ever happened to Missy Higgens and her oddly simple lyrics? Ahh, I hear you interrupt, but why counting from the 29th, instead of the 1st of Jan, like all sane persons? Well, I was getting to that, but like so much of my life I enjoy things that are tangental. Like today I wiki’d halal, cuz I have a common sense understanding of halal as a white non-muslim person (ie as someone who does not adhere to halal, but comes into contact with the concept quite often), and I wanted to clarify/confirm that what I was vaguely understanding was vaguely correct. But back to the 29th. Well let’s just say the for me 2006 was one of those solid progression years. After the disaster of 2005, I spent much of 2006 getting my affairs in order, and generally moving forward with life in clear, solid, stable and utterly boring ways. And to do this, and help with the stable bit, I had been performing a certain behaviour all year, and the 28th of Dec was the last time I did it. Which means the the 29th of Dec is really the start of my new year, which will hopefully be less steady, more unpredicatable, and hopefully a more thrilling year than last. I’ve built my solid foundation, and now I think its time to see how high I can jump. Which marks this day as the tenth day of my new year. Sure, by tomorrow I’ll have to settle back into the normal counting of days, but I thought I’d just take a moment to say; hazzah for me!