[Please forgive my stuffed sinuses induced stream of conciousness rambling, but you know, there’s so much to say.]
You know how a lot of people are whiny cry babies and every little cough or cold is ‘the flu’ and stuff? Well, I have a cold. It’s annoying, I have a runny nose. But I’m not being a sook about it.
However, I went to the market to get sick guy supplies, hoping for a nice big bottle of Lucozade, and what do you think I found? Well, you already know this, and so did I, but let’s pretend it’s new news that Lucozade decided to jump on the energy drink bandwagon, so I decided to jump off the Lucozade bandwagon, and instead got a couple of tubes of Lift+. This is some good sick guy shit. It has a medicinal taste, including slightly nasty aftertaste, so it’s perfect.
Maybe the aftertaste thing is just due to having given up softdrinks (yes, again). It’s about 3 or 4 weeks now. It’s great at McDonald’s, as I can swap the softdrink in any combo for a tiny little bottle of milk. w00t.
Anyway, about the whole "not updating for over a month" thing, I know, I know, I’m real sorry. I do have an excuse, but it’s a lame one, I was planning on updating loads of photos, and then the camera died, so it’s off being looked at so the distributor bastards can decide if they can easily screw us over and get around the consumer gurantees act, and while they do that I guess I just stalled on the photos thing. Now this is a super lame excuse as all the photos ever taken on the camera are actually on my hard drive already, so… Hmmm.
Oh, we finally got rid of one of our scooters, the delightfully fast & reliable Bajaj Chetak, it was a cool bike that one, but not very useful for taking George to the park, or kicking it over to the shore to visit the extended family, so away it went. Now, I don’t know if we’ll keep the other one, we had, at one point, 2 scooters & two cars, and only 2 people, so, way more vehicles than we reasonably needed, and now that we’ve almost completely given up on the central city as a wasteland of horrible ghetto housing and (more importantly) no parking, and instead go to fun places like west coast beaches, and, err, St Lukes (for movies, you know it has the best cinemas in Auckland, you still didn’t know that?).
Anyway, long story cut down to only medium length, I’m the only one that uses the other scoot, which we originally got for Claire (she had one when they first came out, and completely loved it, until someone else loved it enough to chuck it in the back of their truck and steal it, hooray for insurance though), and I only used it for going to the post office to send out invoices and pick up cheques.
Speaking of which, I’ve decided that I’m either going to add another business to my quiver, or get a job with actual people for a while, it’s pretty lonely working from home sometimes, with only my little four-legged friends to keep me company, they’re not much on the conversation — especially little Miss Edward Truffles, she’s thick! Oh, she’s also no longer looking like a weird sphere covered with fun fur, she now looks just like a real cat, only about half size.
The business I’m thinking of starting (in addition to the current one, as opposed to instead of, the current one is a good money spinner, but not every month) will probably be network troubleshooting and maintenance, ideally installing wireless setups, or something like that. But we’ll see. Claire has suggested another business as well, reselling various cool shiny things. The banks are a big problem with that, there really are no decent NZ creditcard payment systems – they’re all stupidly overpriced and complex. So we’ll probably go with Paypal or something lame and overseas, but they have drawbacks of their own.
Anyway, I usually make it a habit to not talk business here (and I’m definitely not going to mention my really cool new client, finally one which you’d recognise the name of). This is for tomfoolery and beer. Not that there’s been much beer lately. We’ve been drinking mostly merlot & shiraz lately, and of course the trendy (is it passe yet?) pinot gris. We got some stupidly oversized glasses, they rock. (540ml bulb!).
Oh, movies, it’s been a bad year for movies, for the most part. Or so I’m prepared to claim, and what with Village finally reaching the previously undefined tipping point of $15 per ticket, we stopped going to crap movies, so where Village were previously getting a visit from us every single week, they’re now getting us infrequently at best, indeed, I’m a Douglas Adams fan from way back, and even there I waited until a $4.25 night to go and see HHGTTG. I didn’t wait for Star Wars, of course, I booked my tickets a couple of weeks in advance for first day showings, and got super awesome seats in a super awesome cinema. Coincidentally I’d been pretty much immersed in Star Wars for a good month beforehand, what with Knights of the Old Republic 2, and the New Jedi Order books I’ve been chewing through (at a rate of maybe 2 a week). I’m not a dork though, I promise. I just need to read to get to sleep. And there are stacks of Star Wars books available. Some of the people that somehow fluke into being published are really lame, with a serious fanfic feel, but most of them are actually quite fun.
Now, the movie, though… It was ok. I was amazed at how much more violent it was, that whole ‘body and face on fire’ thing was pretty extreme, didn’t you think?
I still maintain that they fucked up Anakin from start to finish though, his motivation for going gradually dark was supposed to be about winning all the time, and being the best… That was why he raced, after all, his unceasing desire to win all the time. So that petulent child bullshit… It was just so wide of the mark. I understand that it wasn’t actually young Hayden Christiansen’s fault though, and he was under strict direction to not play it the way he wanted to. A tragedy, in my humble opinion.
Who’s up for a monster Star Wars marathon once all the DVDs are out though? I think it’s be great fun, especially if we can play some sort of bourbon drinking game at the same time, those very few of you that experienced the wonders of a bourbon improved Hard Target will know that it will probably make even Jar Jar Binks bearable.
Oh, anyone else have exciting fanboy moments when people were itroduced as, like, Captain Antilles (though not enough of a fanboy to know where he is Wedge’s father, uncle, or older brother), or when they were on Bail Organa’s ship and there was a sudden moment of recognition and a "Hey! That’s the corridor! WOOHOO!" (all on the inside, of course.)
The other movie, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, well, I’m and old old fan, I remember watching and loving the TV show way back in the 80s, I have all the books. I even got the Illustrated one a few years ago, maybe a 1997 anniversary thing? I played the game, and never won, but you know. I’ve listened to the radio show. I was a bit sad when Adams went and managed to get himself living impaired, and I’ve wanted a guide of my own for the longest time, I don’t know if this is why I purchased my now long mothballed Apple Newton MessagePad. But the movie, it was just… Well, it was really well made, and some of the changes were for the better, but it just ended up missing the mark. The vogons RAWKED, and it was great to see Trillian being the uber smart hot girl she’s *meant* to be (as opposed to the bubbleheaded space bimbo she was in the TV series). Oh, it was an opportunity for another fanboy moment, when they were in the vogon ‘whatever’ office, trying to sort out the forums for Tricia’s release, there was the original chunky Marvin robot, waiting in the line they pushed through. Nice.
I think I’m about the run out of steam on this post. I expect you’re thinking "if only you done that about 10 paragraphs earlier," but hey, you’re the sucker that’s reading this stuff. Which is worse, the sucker that makes suckers, or the suckers that suck suckers?
Well, suck my suckers gentlemen, and good day to you.