movies: bridge to terabithia

Today was the last of the $10 Saturday movies... the voucher didn't run out or anything, we just ran out of extra movies...

But I'm glad that Bridge to Terabithia was on our list of movies to see...

I have to say it wasn't quite what I was expecting... from the trailer I was expecting something a little more "Narnia-eske"... you know, kids find secret land, have adventures in said land, triumph over evil... that kind of thing... but actually it was more like how a kid's imagination actually works, or at least how mind did when I was a kid... you're in the real world, you know you're in the real world, but you get so caught up in the game that it becomes real.

Both of the lead kids are amazing... Josh Hutcherson for just his very solid "realness" and AnnaSophia Robb (Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) who is simply amazing... and if she doesn't emerg as The Next Big Thing in a couple of years, then there's something wrong with the world. Granted the costume designer gets some serious snaps for making her SO unique and funky.

Anyone who has ever been bullied or picked on in school will just get the bully subplot in this movie too... and in the case of Josh's character, Jesse, there can be nothing worse in all the world than having the guy who makes your live a misery sitting right behind you in class.

As I mentioned before, the journey to Terabithia isn't a magic doorway or wormhole or anything... it's just the gradual blending of two kids imaginations with the already interesting countryside around them. That doesn't detract from the story, it just means that it seems to be a much less CGI heavy movie than say Narnia or any of the other films in the same genre.

I'm not sure whether it's just the fact that I get sucked into this kind of movie, or whether it was actually the strength of the script and/or acting, but I did get very invested in the characters, particularly Jesse... even though I've never had sisters, or been in his particular situation, I did get drawn in.

Without giving too much away, the movie does take a slightly darker turn at one point, and I did end up crying (I blame the damn dog)... but, to me, it does finish on a high note.

yani's rating: 3 rope swings out of 5

the end... for now

The Universe was in fine form today... it being my last day of work and all... messing with me left, right and center...

Okay, maybe not messing with me per say... but this didn't seem like a "normal" Friday...

On the upside, I decided to go with my scarlet shirt and jeans combo again... so at least I felt somewhat stylish... plus it was a nice tie in, this being Red Nose Day and all... okay, maybe a tenuous one, but the red foam nose I bought at lunch (since it was the only thing left in the shop) is pretty much the same colour as my shirt, maybe a little brighter...

It also seemed like the theme for today was "Running Across Roads"... I only caught the early bus this morning by dashing across the road before the little red man stopped flashing... and just about every other time I've had to cross a road today it's ended up involving me running...

I decided to skip breakfast at home (which is partially why I ended up on the early bus) so I could go into Boost Juice and grab an "Oats So Good" hottie... which I did... but unlike the last time I had one, this one was much thicker for some reason... so it ended up being like trying to eat/drink porrige out of a cup... without a spoon either... still tasty, but a strange experience. And one that was made slightly stranger because I ended up having a protracted conversation about website information architecture and department structure and hierarcy while I was attempting to eat/drink it. Weird...

She Who Must Be Theoretically Obeyed was back at work after having been off sick for the last few days... and whether it was just my whole overeagerness to possibly get some direction in what was going on on my last day or what, I dunno... but I was feeling remarkably Tigger-eske (at least on the inside) for much of the day... very Bouncy. Maybe it was just Last Dayitis... added to the knowledge that I will be able to sleep in, go walking AFTER the sun has come up, cook some big complicated meal for dinner and generally lounge about come Monday. Actually the Tigger thing and the "Running Across Roads" thing could be connected... hmmmm...

Then we all (most of the wider team) went out for the farewell Morning Tea for the woman who is also leaving today... we went off-site and everything... and it wasn't anywhere near as painful as I thought it possibly could have been. I just sat back and enjoyed my Mocha Latte and Banana Bread (mmmmmm Banana Bread) and nodded and smiled as appropriate. I did realise about halfway through that the last time I was in that particular Bean Bar was my farewell from the land of Online Services... not only was it the same place we went, we actually sat in the exact same location up the back of the cafe. Scary!

I did have a nice chat with the Heap Big Section Chief outside the cafe before we headed back, and she said nice things to me essentially. She said that she had enjoyed having me around the place and that if they could get me back again later for some developments on another website project (the one that I've been tinkering around with in addition to the main one I was working on) then they would. See... once they've had me in for a while, they like it and want to have me again.

The exact opposite to my sex life really... *grin*

Although it did start me thinking about something. I know I'm not a people person... in fact, my rallying cry in Online Services used to be "I don't do people!"... but "people" doesn't seem to include the people I'm actually working with/for... at least not unless they're highly annoying... I'm fine with them (as HBSC reinforced), it's just everyone who ISN'T them that bugs me. Interesting...

Anyway because we did the whole coffee and food thing mid morning, I really didn't feel like going to lunch about half an hour after we got back... so I had a late lunch and decided that today was definitely the day to satiate the craving I've been having for a couple of days for a ham, cheese and tomato toasted sandwich... plus my last Hot Choconana from Booost for a while (although I may have to take Ma into a Boost some time this weekend and get her to try one).

Having worked in the same building for the last hundred billion years, you end up going to pretty much every possible food outlet at least once or twice... some more than others... and the place I went for my HCT is one I used to frequent most mornings (at least before I got addicted to the Boostness) in previous work related incarnations. And since it was after the noon rush the place was pretty much deserted. But it still threw me when the woman who was serving me (and who owns the place I think) said "You've lost a lot of weight haven't you?"... even if I'm not sure the term "lot of" is quite right... but then I'm not really looking at myself from the outside. Plus my shirt isn't tucked into anything today, so I'm sure I have a slimmer silhouette today than I would normally have when I'm working.

It's still nice to hear though...

Then I went off to get my last Choconana *faux sob*, and the perky little girl tried to tell me that I couldn't have my vibe discount off it... ummmmmm, 'scuse me? I've been getting the discount off it pretty much every day this week... in fact I got a discount off a different product in the same range just this morning... so WHATTHE? But no, she was adamant, even went out the back to check with the boss... so I just thought that was weird, but be that as it may... whatever... just give me my drink.

While I was waiting, the boss comes out and says that it turns out Perky was confused or asked her the wrong question or some such... but indeed the Vibe discount DOES come off the Hotties... well DUR! And she happily gave me a refund... weird, weird, weird...

The afternoon was fairly uneventful... well, other than the deleting of the emails and the moving/deleting other random files... then cleaning out my browser cache and history... basically returning both my workstation and my computer at large to the state it was in when I first walked through the door two months ago. I did leave my security card with the Admin Girly so that if I do end up back with them (or just back in the building in general) I can use the same card again.

And that was pretty much that...

To be honest I don't feel much of anything either way... I haven't been there that long, so I'm not really sad that I've left or anything... and after I got past some of the initial hurdles and I knew what I was doing, it wasn't a pain to drag my butt into work every day... well, other than the bouts of Thumb Twiddling, that was a little dull.

I'm gunna miss the paycheque more than anything I think though...

Current Mood:

random bathtime hotness

A special bumper Random Hotness today, mostly because I couldn't make up my mind about which of these images to use...

The shot of the guy in the middle, Felix, has shown up on a couple of other blogs recently, and I knew that I'd seen other shots by the same photographer back in my Photosig days... so now we have Christoph (left) and Simon (right)... not as cute as Felix perhaps... but I do love the whole partially submerged bathtub idea (especially with Felix's hair floating around like that).

Current Mood:

if i was

I lifted this one from Muzbot... I assumed it would be a doddle to fill out, but it actually ended up requiring more thinking than I originally anticipated...

If I was an animal I'd be:
A Grizzly bear... likes to hibernate in winter, and can be cranky if disturbed...

If I was on holiday I'd be:
In San Francisco

If I was in my dream job it would be:
Something creative, that pays really, really well and doesn't require too much work... plus I could wear jeans every day!

If I was dating someone famous it would be:
Neil Patrick Harris... actually probably not, but I'm not really having any full on media crushes right at the moment...

If I was a Superhero I'd be:
The Hulk... you wouldn't like me when I'm angry...

If I was on a TV show it would be:
Heroes... at least in a perfect world, because then I could have cool superpowers!

If I was on a magazine cover it'd be:
Slightly Odd Monthly... or else, you know, something photography realted...

If I was a colour I'd be:
Scarlet... bright, usually better in small doses and doesn't always play well with other colours!

If I was able to time travel I'd go back:
To either Ancient Greece, or else 1920's New York...

If I was (add your own):
Your boy, oh the things I'd do to you... (apologies to Ms Jackson)

Current Mood:

vanilla

It was a bit of a vanilla day today...

Not a whole lot of anything happened... well, stuff happened, but nothing particularly interesting.

I did discover that I've basically been overpaying for my daily bus ride by $8.40 a week. I buy a ticket every day... one into work and one home again, and I figured, since the total of the tickets was cheaper than a Multitrip ticket that I was doing okay. But it turns out that the type of ticket I buy, which covers two "sections", also comes in Multitrip form... which I didn't know... and instead of $22 a week, it should have been costing me $13.60... bugger, bugger, bugger...

So big thanks to Random Girly at work for pointing that one out, but big slaps because we had the conversation with four days to go before I stop working there, rather than, you know, two months ago when it would have been helpful.

Since I had to renew my internet connection today I made an interesting, if slightly annoying discovery. My ISP seems to have sent their billing call center to some offshore location (most likely India)... so instead of talking to someone less than 3km away to pay my bill, I was actually talking to someone over 9000km away... yeah, because that makes a whole lot of sense. Next time I'm going to have to make a note to pay by B-Pay instead... since they seem to be doing that now (they may have been doing it before, but I never noticed it). Stoopid international call centers...

It seemed like it might have been Old Homo Week at lunch today... while I was sitting in Subway eating lunch a guy I once had the Hot Sweaty Monkey Sex (no talking, just grunting and sweating and throwing bodies around) with wandered past. Time had not been kind to him...

Then, on my way back to the office, I happened to walk past Crow, in all his shaven, lumpy headed glory. I SO do not have a thing for that boy anymore... not even one tiny little bit. Thank god.

But I did have two minutes of "woe is me", especially when I realised MonkeySex Boy was on the other side of the street... not because I couldn't have either of them... more because life in general isn't... I dunno... going according to the grand universal plan or something I guess... but I pretty much got over that by the time I'd made it back up to work.

I'm also kind of banging my head on the desk at work, just because it's a whole world of "Slow slow slow slow FASTFASTFASTFAST slow slow slow"... not helped today because She Who Must Be Theoretically Obeyed was off sick today, so whatever last minute changes and random discussions we might have had about the website didn't happen. I just hope that she's in tomorrow, since I only have until Friday to finish this thing (somehow I think Friday might be a very busy day... at least in spots).

And added to that is the fact that the other group that I'm doing some work for don't seem to understand the concept a PDF file... specifically that they can't generally be edited... so if you want me to make those very minor and seemingly pointless changes to that document, then you better give me the ORIGINAL document, let me make the changes there... THEN we can turn it into a PDF again... *sigh*

Current Mood:

unconscious mutterings 229

Unconscious Mutterings time...

1. Compulsion :: Obsession


2. Spiritual :: Energy


3. Spray :: Bottle


4. Compatibility :: Rating


5. Pursuit :: Trivial


6. Fake :: Tits


7. Mobile :: Phone


8. Ceremony :: Wedding


9. Ribbons :: Red


10. Mozart :: Deaf (although that was actually Beethoven right?)

Current Mood:

rated r baby

I lifted this one from Real Euphoria... although he only managed a G rating...

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
hell (5x), gay (4x), kill (2x), bomb (1x)

Current Mood:

movies: fantastic four: rise of the silver surfer

What with the $10 ticket thing... and the running out of job soon thing, plus the plethora of current movies thing, we took ourselves off to the movies again today, this time to see Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer...

The original Fantastic Four movie was the second review I ever posted here, and basically what I said about that one pretty much holds true for the sequel...

"Okay... between you and me, I actually liked Fantastic Four... I mean its not the greatest movie ever made, its basically fluff, but its not trying to be anything other than fluff..."

And this one is very much more of the same... okay, it might actually be slightly more fluffy than the last one, but it's not pretending to be great art. And it's not a whole world of dark and brooding like a lot of the other superhero movies, but according to something I read earlier in the week, the comics aren't dark, they're fun and a little campy and, I guess, a little fluffy... so it's not like it's straying from that part of the source material's appeal.

It also has "To Be Continued" printed all over the movie in massive glowing neon letters... a bit like the first one I guess, but at some points this almost feels like half a story, since we don't really learn a whole hell of a lot (okay, if you have no idea who the Silver Surfer is, then you might learn things)... and we don't really delve that deep into the story, the whys and wherefores... but then I guess that's part of the appeal of this type of movie.

Speaking of the Silver Surfer, the animation is pretty good, which it should be, being Weta and all... so much so that later on in the movie when he loses his silver sheen for a while I couldn't actually tell if the non-shiny Surfer was a real actor or a CG creation (I'm guessing it could have been a real body with some work around the head in CG, but not with any certainty). They do have an actor listing for the Surfer, the uber talented Doug Jones (who was amazing in Hellboy), but that could just have been the motion capture actor, ala Andy Serkis as Gollum. I'm guessing that without the sheen he's pretty much all Doug under a ton of latex though.

They should also write in a much longer scene in the next movie (should there be one) where Chris Evans keeps his shirt off... I mean we do get a scene in this movie, just like we had one in the last movie (and it might actually be in the exact same corridor, or at least a corridor that looks very, very similar)... or else, you know, somebody should just point me to another movie where he runs around mostly naked... because, damn but that boy is hot... with the pecs and everything... even with the chest hair, it just works for him.

One thing that did keep distracting me from the moment though was the really appalling job they did on Jessica Alba's wig (it looks a little like it's been in the box too long and has a fold in one side), contacts (she just ended up looking stoned, since here pupils didn't dilate) and the godawful job her makeup artist did on here eyes, with this fat blue line along the lid... FUG-UL-LEE!

But then there's the skin tight blue costumes on Chris and Ioan Gruffudd that show off some nice shapes here and there... which more than took my attention off of Ms Alba...

yani's rating: 2 silver surfboards out of 5

photo friday: gingerbread

Remember that game from Sesame Street...

"One of these things is not like the other... one of these things is not the same..."

I got a little bored while I was icing my gingerbread men this evening... so, you know, I got a tiny bit pornographic with the second to last one... didn't quite turn out the way it was supposed to, but you get the idea... okay, so that bit was slightly less Sesame Street...

They came out pretty good overall though... although the "gel" that came in the pack doesn't look like it's actually going to set, which will be less good when it comes to trying to store them... but they look pretty good. Granted a couple look like they've got some exotic skin disease thanks to the wholemeal flour I was using to roll them out on.

Current Mood:

ten by five meme

I'm sure I've answered some of these questions in a million billion different ways in various other memes but I can never go past stealing a good meme from Tom...

5 snacks I enjoy...

1. Corn chips
2. Pringles
3. Just about anything chocolate
4. Crasins
5. Green seedless grapes (in summer I snack on them like they're going out of style)

5 songs I know all the words to...

1. If - Janet Jackson
2. Middle of the Hill - Josh Pyke
3. Leave Me Alone (I'm Lonely) - Pink
4. Rock This Party - Bob Sinclair & Cutee B
5. LDN - Lily Allen

5 things I would do with $100 million...

1. Build my dream inner city apartment (maybe here in Adelaide, or maybe Melbourne or Sydney)
2. Buy/build Ma a new house/apartment closer to me (if I were to stay in Adelaide that is) and a new car
3. Go on a Grand World Tour (okay, not the whole world, but all the places I wanna go)
4. Buy all the appropriate and some of the inappropriate Big Boy Toys I could ever need
5. Invest 10, give Ma 10, give my cousin 5

5 locations I would love to run away to...

1. San Francisco
2. Venice
3. Melbourne
4. London
5. Paris

5 bad habits I have...

1. Procrastination
2. Buying things I don't necessarily need
3. Sniffing instead of blowing
4. Goofing off
5. Having a short temper

5 things I like doing...

1. Cooking
2. Taking photos
3. Shopping
4. Fudging around on the internet
5. Going to the movies

5 things I would never wear...

1. Ugg boots... no way, never, no how, not happening
2. One of those big puffy nylon hip-hop type jackets
3. Any kind of AFL paraphernalia, including the shorts
4. Leather pants (they're just not me)
5. European style tank top (hate the shoulder straps)

5 TV shows that I like...

1. The West Wing
2. House
3. Lost
4. Heroes
5. Veronica Mars (come back Veronica, I miss you)

5 biggest joys of the moment...

1. Payday
2. Boost Juice's Hot Choconana
3. Leafing through Loving Brian last night
4. Planning to make gingerbread men
5. IT'S FRIDAY!

5 favourite toys...

1. Mobile
2. Digital camera (although I'm not using it nearly as much as I was)
3. My computer in general
4. Photoshop
5. DVD player

5 next victims...

1. You
2. You
3. You
4. You
5. You (yes, I stole that idea from Tom, but then I stole the whole damn meme from Tom)

Current Mood:

the great internet hamster

The Great Internet Hamster that powers my workplace's connection to the internet fell off his wheel today... normally it's his much smaller hamster buddy who powers the connection to the departmental server that (once in a while) falls off (which means you can access the wider internet, but nothing on the departmental servers)... but today it was the big guy himself...

I was right in the middle of stuff too... I'd just made some rather groovy looking (at least I thought so, She Who Must Be Theoretically Obeyed is kind of on the fence about it) changes to a particular page, and I was about to go and check it out, see how it looked, when I got the very annoying "The page cannot be displayed" message... I hate that message. A lot.

After that there was much hitting of the refresh button and reloading the page and closing and opening of browser windows and general muttering and cursing... just in case...

Then a little while later everyone got an email from the folks in IT, telling us all what I already knew... the Great Internet Hamster was no longer running on his big internet powering wheel. Of course they didn't tell us if he was dead, had broken something, or was just refusing to get back on the wheel... all we got was "our service providers are working on the problem as a matter or urgency"...

Which just means they're standing around looking at the dead/injured/recalcitrant hamster and shaking their collective heads.

And of course, since my whole entire job exists in it's entirety on the internet (albeit the departmental servers rather than the worldwideinterwebnetski)... well, I was pretty much left at Thumb Twiddle Central... total and complete Thumb Twiddle Central...

The really annoying thing was that this all happened just before lunch... but enough before that I couldn't just go and take an early lunch and get myself out of the office and away from the Hamsterless Internet... although thinking up stuff about the Great Internet Hamster did bring lunch closer sooner...

Then, when I came back after a very bad lunch (things that were fried, or covered in pastry, or both... lots of carbs basically... ethnically diverse carbs, but carbs nonetheless) it was still down... *sigh*

Fortunately one of the girlies I work with (ie Not She Who Must Be Theoretically Obeyed) distracted me with random questions about lunch, life, the universe and whatnot for a good twenty minutes or so, which meant that the Great Internet Hamster had time to get back on the damn wheel. Yaaaay!

And it also looks like, if I end up leaving the day I think I'm going to be leaving (29 June... which I just realised is a week tomorrow... damn!), then my leaving celebration (what little there will be of it) is going to kind of get merged into someone else's leaving celebration and there may well be excursions, coffee, cake and whatnot. Which is kind of cool, if a little, you know, confronting and more than I really want to be going on and stuff... maybe I can take my beverage and my cake related item and just meld into the background or something...

Then, when I got home, I kinda felt like a hamster (without the Great Internet bit) for a while... I was planning to drop my pants in at the dry cleaner anyway (jeans tomorrow... yaaay... since I had a whole conversation about the wearing of the jeans this week with the girlies at work and I figure, you know, this is the second to last Friday, so stuff 'em)... but when I got home I discovered that the nice people at Australia Post had a package waiting for me (well, a piece of paper telling me there was a parcel at the Post Office, god I love those bits of paper)...

It could only be one thing, my copy of Loving Brian (which is currently sitting on my big red sofa and keeps calling seductively to me to make me come and leaf through the soft and silky pages... okay, not really, but it feels like it is), which I ordered a little while back (and it showed up early actually... it wasn't supposed to be here until next week sometime)... it's been on the list for a while, and, well, with the disposable income and all I figured what the hell...

So I basically got home, changed my clothes, turned around and went back out again, jumped in the car and headed out to the shops... picked up the book at the Post Office, dropped my pants at the dry cleaners (okay, that's not ACTUALLY what I did, but you know what I was trying to say), went to the supermarket to get something for dinner, then back home again, all within half an hour...

Crap... I still can't get that thought out of my mind... a week tomorrow...

Bugger...

Current Mood:

random denim hotness

Mmmmmmmm... denim flavoured Random Hotness... there's nothing quite like a hot guy falling out of a pair of jeans!

I wish I could remember where I got these from... but I've been flicking around a bunch of different "pic heavy" sites of late, and I know they came from one of them.

Ah well, just enjoy the freeballing...

Current Mood:

top 100 movies meme

Take the IMDb's listing of Top 100 movies (well, actually, the first 100 out of the list of Top 250) and bold the ones you've seen. I also italicised the ones that I own.

1. The Godfather (1972)


2. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)


3. The Godfather: Part II (1974)


4. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (1966)


5. Pulp Fiction (1994)


6. Schindler's List (1993)


7. Casablanca (1942)


8. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)


9. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)


10. Seven Samurai (1954)


11. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)


12. Star Wars (1977)


13. Rear Window (1954)


14. 12 Angry Men (1957)


15. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)


16. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)


17. City of God (2002)


18. Goodfellas (1990)


19. The Usual Suspects (1995)


20. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)


21. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)


22. Psycho (1960)


23. Citizen Kane (1941)


24. North by Northwest (1959)


25. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)


26. Memento (2000)


27. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)


28. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)


29. Fight Club (1999)


30. Sunset Boulevard (1950)


31. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)


32. The Matrix (1999)


33. Amélie (2001)


34. The Departed (2006)


35. American Beauty (1999)


36. Taxi Driver (1976)


37. Apocalypse Now (1979)


38. Vertigo (1958)


39. Se7en (1995)


40. Léon (1994)


41. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)


42. American History X (1998)


43. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)


44. Paths of Glory (1957)


45. Chinatown (1974)


46. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)


47. The Third Man (1949)


48. M (1931)


49. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)


50. A Clockwork Orange (1971)


51. Alien (1979)


52. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)


53. The Pianist (2002)


54. Downfall (2004)


55. Spirited Away (2001)


56. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)


57. L.A. Confidential (1997)


58. The Shining (1980)


59. Das Boot (1981)


60. Requiem for a Dream (2000)


61. The Maltese Falcon (1941)


62. Double Indemnity (1944)


63. Reservoir Dogs (1992)


64. Saving Private Ryan (1998)


65. Hotel Rwanda (2004)


66. Metropolis (1927)


67. Raging Bull (1980)


68. Aliens (1986)


69. Modern Times (1936)


70. Sin City (2005)


71. The Lives of Others (2006)


72. Rashômon (1950)


73. Singin' in the Rain (1952)


74. Grindhouse (2007)


75. Forrest Gump (1994)


76. Rebecca (1940)


77. The Great Escape (1963)


78. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)


79. Some Like It Hot (1959)


80. All About Eve (1950)


81. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)


82. Amadeus (1984)


83. Touch of Evil (1958)


84. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)


85. The Seventh Seal (1957)


86. Life Is Beautiful (1997)


87. Jaws (1975)


88. The Prestige (2006)


89. On the Waterfront (1954)


90. The Sting (1973)


91. Strangers on a Train (1951)


92. The Elephant Man (1980)


93. Full Metal Jacket (1987)


94. Cinema Paradiso (1988)


95. Batman Begins (2005)


96. Braveheart (1995)


97. City Lights (1931)


98. The Apartment (1960)


99. Million Dollar Baby (2004)


100. Blade Runner (1982)

Current Mood:

movies: oceans thirteen

See, now, there are "third" movies (triquels?) that don't live up to the promise of the other two... and there are "third" movies that do...

Shrek the Third was a little bit of the former... but Ocean's Thirteen was very much the latter...

Actually, Thirteen lived up to the promise laid down by Eleven... because, frankly, Twelve was a big fat STINKER! So much so that I was a little hesitant to go and see this new instalment... fearing it would just be more of the same. But they definitely returned to form this time around... it's fast, it's witty, it's beautifully lush to look at (well, in that whole Vegas casino kind of way)... and, well, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Scott Caan (see my earlier point about beautifully lush to look at and times it by three)... and yeah, I guess George Clooney too (I'm not generally a big fan, but there is something about his Danny Ocean character)... the only downside was a total and complete lack of Julia Roberts... but there wasn't really a part for her, at least not without just shoehorning her in at the beginning or something.

It was also nice to see a bunch of the folks from the previous movies popping back again here and there... you know, other than the original eleven guys... Bruiser (who actually showed up in both movies, although I don't remember him from the sequel, and his part this time around was a "blink and you'll miss him"), Vincent Cassel (the villain of the last movie) and last but not least Eddie Izzard (who I have a big soft spot for... and who, also, was in the second movie, although I honestly don't remember him... I think I blocked large chunks of that movie out of my mind)...

It's definitely one of those movies that will make more sense and also become more enjoyable on the third or fourth viewing... there's too much going on (although not really in a bad way, it's just fast paced), and too much that they're not letting you in on because of the whole "con"... so you miss little bits and pieces... like I didn't actually realise who Vincent Cassel's character was until the very end of the movie... although that could have been something the film makers did intentionally... you know, to add confusion.

I will say that everything is SO much bigger in this movie than it was in Eleven... a bigger casino, a bigger scam, a bigger payoff... bigger everything really... but it always manages (I think), to stay just this side of really, really silly... granted there is a whole world of "suspension of disbelief", but I think it all holds together nicely. The only thing that I'm not sure is "bigger" is the villain... don't get me wrong, Al Pacino does a good job (even if there are some very small instances of scenery chewing)... but Andy Garcia was such a good villain in the first one, that just takes some topping.

Oh, and we finally get to see the rest of Rusty's tattoo...

yani's rating: 4 loaded dice out of 5

random monday musings

You know, I haven't done a Monday Musings (or better yet, a Monday Montage) in what feels like forever... mostly because I've been doing the rambly post shopping roundup thing on a Saturday, leaving Mondays free for, well, a general sense of Mondayness really.

But since I did the Shrek movie review thing on Saturday, I just felt... I dunno... like I missed out on a good solid vaguely pointless ramble. Not that there is a whole lot of anything interesting to say, I just feel like a ramble...

We had another day of rampant cold in the office again today... I didn't notice it at first, I thought it was a little nippy, but as the morning progressed, it just kept getting colder, until I ended up having to put my jacket on again... once in the morning and again in the afternoon just before hometime. What the hell is up with that... could they just fix it already please!!! Especially since last time this happened I ended up getting sick... so I don't really want to be having a repeat performance of that thank you very much!

Speaking of cold... and jackets for that matter... it's been cold here of late, Thursday, Friday and Saturday last week it was just FREEZING! On Saturday we're talking a 1.5°C minimum at 6:30am and it only got to 3.7°C when Ma and I headed out to on Random Shopping Adventures™... it was "scrape the ice off the windshield" cold in fact... well, Ma had to before she left her place, I never went and looked at my windshield. Don't even ask about me getting up at 5:40am to go out on my walk on Thursday and Friday either... the less I have to think about that the better... I ended up wearing gloves and a very unstylish beanie on Friday...

But back to the jacket related stuff... since it was SOOOOOOO cold on Saturday and I had rather foolishly left the house without a jacket or any additional layers (I figured... house to car, car to supermarket, supermarket to car, car to house... there wouldn't be much time spent out of doors, how bad could it be), we checked out the menswear section of the Red Circle Boutique just to see if they had anything even vaguely interesting of the jacket persuasion... every other time I've looked in recent weeks I've been pretty disappointed, it's all either been Uglytown, or else there's just nothing around. Plus all the jackets I still have in my wardrobe from last year are a little bit like wearing small tents of some description (yaaay me, but boooo not having stylish outerwear).

Anyway, the Fashion Faeries were obviously taking pity on me, because I was actually spoiled with a plethora of possible choices... but in the end I culled it down to two, a black faux suedey type finish one that's a little more "work appropriate" (and thicker than the jacket I have been wearing), and a general "sweatshirt" type material one with a big design across the front of it (albeit bisected by a zipper). And because RCB were having yet another one of their seemingly neverending sales and/or price reduction specials, both jackets were about 40% (I think) off, so it almost ended up as a "two for one" thing. Unfortunately the checkout girly didn't play the "swipe the security tag" game when we were at the register, so the more expensive jacket (black and suedey obviously) set the alarm off, and when the nice doorboy came over to investigate, he just pulled the security tag sticker off of the lining of the pocket instead of just cancelling it out... the upshot of which is that I had a pocket full of sticky label residue this morning... not so nice... but it seemed to sort itself out as the day goes on. Don't even get me started on who's dumbass idea it was to PUT the sticking inside one of the two main pockets in the jacket in the first place though...

Also while we were out and about I decided that even though it was twice the price of all the others I had to get my hands on the final season of The West Wing before I ran out of job, and therefore, out of disposable income. Interestingly enough, when you do the math on it, all it means is that I paid maybe $5 more for each of the other seasons... it does make for a scary total though, so I'm not going to think about the math too much. We also won't think about how much money I spent back in the day on all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on VHS which I haven't watched in forever, or what I paid for the full run of Buffy (although they were on sale at the time) ... why are we still talking about this?

Moving on...

Since I'd just bought two new jackets, and we had some time to kill after we got back from the supermarket but before we headed out to see Shrek the Third, and I've been lamenting the fact that all my existing jackets were too big, etc... I decided to do a brief mini wardrobe cull on Saturday afternoon... partly because I only did a halfassed one at Christmas after I got those new clothes, but also because there hasn't been a single occasion where I've gone back and worn any of the "bigger" clothes since I got ones that fit better... and if I haven't worn them at this point, it wasn't ever going to happen. So pretty much all the old teeshirts went, as did the old longsleeved teeshirts (a couple of which I still love but which look like crap when they're on me) and almost all of the jackets (including my very favourite but now monstrously oversized and sacklike green jacket with the hood... *sob*).

While I was moving things around and throwing things away (and changing over some of my older, "non matching" crappier coathangers for some of the better ones) I decided to try on my black trenchcoat, just to see how it was fitting. I might have tried it on last time I did a wardrobe cull, I honestly don't remember... but it fits again... yaaaaay... possibly still a tiny bit snug, but I could do up all the buttons again. Woohoo me. It did however need a bit of a clean (unidentifiable lapel and cuff smutt... plus I'm not sure that it ever HAS been cleaned up until this point, and I've had it for at least eight years), so that went off to the drycleaner before possibly going back into rotation.

You know how you get cravings for particular food items at certain times? Well, for some reason, I've been craving really good gingerbread men for a while now... actually it might not even be "really good" ones... I think I'm actually craving the ones that Pizza Hut used to do (they may still do them, but I haven't been inside a Pizza Hut in YEARS)... and for whatever reason, the ones I keep finding are never quite right... so this week I took matters into my own hands. We were wandering through the cooking supplies aisle (I think we might have been reviewing the soup choices on the opposite side) and I noticed that Nature's Selection have brought out a range of "Kids Cooking" cake mixes... and yes, one of them was for gingerbread men... and came with it's own little cookie cutter and a little piping tube to add the icing. So at some point in the next week or so (maybe next Friday night) I'm going to try my hand at quasi homemade gingerbread men... scary.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before in so many words... but Heroes ROCKS! Ma and I have been watching it together on Saturday afternoons (since I watch House and tape Heroes and she's out on Wednesday nights and just tapes House)... and usually at some point in the proceedings I end up talking to the teevee. Part of me wishes that I'd gotten Ma hooked on Lost way back when... I think she could have been addicted to that right along with me... but for the moment, Heroes is enough. I'm not actually sure how far behind the States we are, I know that they've already finished the season, and I think we have like three episodes left... which is just annoying, because I don't want to look online for anything in case I fall across some spoilers (because spoilers are BAD m'kay!)... but last week's episode was the "five years in the future" episode... and obviously the key to living five years in the Heroes future is that you slick your hair back... everyone was doing it (okay, not EVERYONE, but there was a lot of it going around). And how hot was Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) with the scar and the slicked back hair... plus all the additional superpowers. NUMMY!

Big Brother Season 7 continues to be the most vanilla and bland season thus far... I don't know why they couldn't just have come up with an "Adults Only" show that wasn't quite as full on and filthy as previous years (and honestly, with this season's crop of housemates, I don't know that they would have had to worry about anything resembling controversy) and didn't get the morality police all hot and bothered, but still gave us some idea of what was going on in the house in a non-6:30 time slot. And this whole concept of putting it all on the website and calling it "Premium" and charging money for it, BORED NOW... I don't want to pay to watch online what should be a free teevee show... in fact I don't want to watch any kind of teevee show online, that defeats the purpose of both my computer and my big beautiful teevee. This is the first year in a long while where I haven't seen any of the male housemates naked... granted I haven't gone looking (although I think somebody was looking for shots of Thomas showering on here the other day, since I got a search engine hit from it), but I shouldn't have to... they should just be around (having said that I might have a dig around later, see if anything turns up). Either that or they should sell Big Brother to SBS, I'm sure we could see all the nudity we wanted then.

I'm not sure whether it's just the rampant beigeness of the shows in general or just the vanilla flavouring of the housemates, but I'm rapidly loosing interest... I'm still watching, but I'm not always paying attention (or even in the room if it comes to that)... in previous years I've been addicted to Friday Night Live... but at least twice this season I've just given up and gone off to watch other things instead (especially when it looked like the people I really didn't like were going to make it past the second round)... although whether that's because I have six seasons of The West Wing that I can watch (have I mentioned I'm just a little tiny bit addicted to that at the moment, even on my second viewing of the fifth season) or the fact that the winners don't seem to be as random as they have been in previous years, I don't know. On that note, how good was it that Jamie took it out from three time winner Andrew this week... viva le nerd!

This morning, when I was doing my usual stats check I noticed that a hell of a lot of the traffic seemed to be coming in from Best Gay Blogs... which as at yesterday morning had been on hiatus for almost two months (although I just realised maybe not, since I've been checking the .net site rather than the .com site, so it could just be me), but it seems like they are back with a vengeance. And at the top of the list when I stopped by to take a look at the new and improved site was... *insert fanfare* ME (see pictorial evidence and everything)! They sent out an email to everyone in their database (I assume) saying that if you wanted to be a featured site, to fill out the questionnaire and send it back... so I did... and there I was (and still am, at least as I write this), front and center. Yay me! I'm not sure how I feel about their new layout just yet though... it will probably grow on me over time, but I kinda miss the old version.

And just as a random musing to the universe... if you were going to send a bunch of workmen to work on scaffolding between the building I work in and the one next door, do you think you could have seen your way clear to providing a few more pieces of worthwhile eye candy? Or don't they let the young and the pretty up on scaffolding these days? Actually, it was probably better that there weren't more, since that could have been far too distracting, and I KNOW I would have gotten busted perving. It was a little creepy to have them THAT close to the window though... we could see them, they could see us... it was a whole world of less good. Fortunately they put up some boards later on this afternoon, so now we can't see them at all...

TORCHWOOD DEBUTS TONIGHT! Bisexual, time travelling, Captain Jack is back! No, not THAT one, the OTHER Captain Jack... it better live up to all the hype... and Network Ten better not pull it off the air after half a dozen episodes... I can almost guarantee that they WILL move it to some godawful timeslot between now and then though... the sooner the ABC can buy the rights (like they did with The West Wing when Channel 9 didn't know what the hell to do with it), and show it back to back with Doctor Who, the better...

Current Mood:

unconscious mutterings 228

I think maybe today we're a little more unconscious than usual for Unconscious Mutterings...

1. Riding :: Horses


2. Actress :: Gown


3. Flowers :: Folding (not sure about this one, maybe it's an origami thing)


4. Making :: Whoopee


5. Robot :: Pants (I'm a world of randomness today)


6. Enjoy :: Life


7. Identify :: Fingerprints


8. 22 :: Catch


9. Busy :: Signal


10. Forward :: Motion

Current Mood:

gay paree

You Belong in Paris

You enjoy all that life has to offer, and you can appreciate the fine tastes and sites of Paris. You're the perfect person to wander the streets of Paris aimlessly, enjoying architecture and a crepe.

What European City Do You Belong In?

Current Mood:

movies: shrek the third

I got one of those "$10 movie ticket" card things in the mail sometime this week, and since there's a few things out at present that we're going to want to see, we decided to go and see Shrek the Third this afternoon.

It was actually pretty much the way I expected... good, but not great... which doesn't bode well for number 4, due out some time in 2010. I'm guessing they pretty much ran out of story at some point between the second and third movie. This version has some nice moments in it, but overall it's not wonderful.

What does blow my mind with each successive movie is the quality of the CGI... the textures, the realness of the backgrounds, all that stuff. But then I am a big geek when it comes to stuff like that. Just little things this time around like the fact that Shrek's signature white jersey has little loose threads and "pilling" on the sleeves... and the skin texture on pretty much everyone... it's impressive. True the "extras" all look very wooden limbed and some of the cloth work looks a little off, but they'll get there eventually.

All the old favourites are back... including some of my personal faves like Dragon and after their brief appearance in the credit "tag" scene, the Dronkeys (dragon/donkey offspring), who, to be honest are just too damn adorable for words, as were the Ogre Babies (can somebody say Spin Off Cartoon Series?). And speaking of adorable... I know he was a computer generated creation, but Justin Timberlake's character, Artie... a bit cute... you know, for pixels...

I also quite enjoyed the section with the "Princess Warriors"... but, to be honest, there wasn't enough of it. And speaking of Princesses, Sleeping Beauty gets my vote for the best of the bunch...

In the minus column was the return of Prince Charming as the "villain" of the piece... he was good comic relief in the last movie, but you just can't take him seriously... plus, you know, he's annoying...

It was all a bit "been there, seen that" actually... a few nice moments (Donkey is annoying, Puss is smooth and very Spanish, Shrek is, well, Shrek) and enjoyable enough while you're watching it, but there wasn't really enough of any one thing... the good bits didn't last long enough (Merlin, Princesses, Artie, whatever) the ending was a bit "after school special" and it honestly felt like they were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Lord knows what they will end up with for the last one... something with Ogre Toddlers, grown up Dronkeys and Artie's kingdom maybe... I dunno...

yani's rating: 2 Dronkeys out of 5

photo friday: fractured

I snapped this today at lunch... actually I saw it on my way out to lunch, then came back with lunch, picked up my camera and went back out again briefly so I could take the shot...

This pretty much sums up how my day went... a little bit fractured and while giving off the appearance of being all together, I was really all over the place... this is what happens when you end up doing three different things on three different websites pretty much all at once. Seriously, I spent more than a little time of late with the thumb twiddling, and now suddenly everybody has stuff for me... *rolls eyes*

But, as always, it's better to be too busy than not busy enough...

I do want to hunt down and give some serious noogie action to the guy who was doing all of these other sites before me though... not only is all his code full of useless code that doesn't do anything and just takes up space, but he also didn't have much of a clue about the concept of Information Architecture... *mutter*

I'm whipping as much of it into shape as I can though...

And they're keeping me on (in theory anyway) until the end of June... which is pretty much what I had already guessed, I just got it confirmed today.

I was also finding far too many things far too amusing today... I think it was a Friday thing, because I'm pretty sure none of it was as funny as it seemed...

Viva La Weekend!

Current Mood:

random adrian hotness

Today's Random Hotness is another visit to Model Land...

Anyway, this is Adrian, a model from Melbourne, and his pics comes to us via All Aussie Beef (although I can't find the original post right now)...

Current Mood:

countdown meme

I'm not sure where I got this one from... I think it actually just combines a bunch of other meme's to be honest, but a few of the questions are new(ish)...

10 FAVORITES

Favorite Color: Purple
Favorite Food: Depends on my mood I guess... but I guess I would have to say chocolate overall.
Favorite Month: March... it's my birth month.
Favorite Song: Nothing springs to mind... I have phases with songs, I might like something for a while, then I get over it or find something new. I am currently enjoying the Ant Music cover by Hyper (I think) though...
Favorite Movie: I can never just pick one movie... I have a ton of favourites.
Favorite Sport: Can't say that I actually have one... I usually say "diving", since male divers wear hardly anything and stand around in full display for a while, but it's not like I would go out of my way to go and watch it.
Favorite Season: Autumn
Favorite Day: Saturday
Favorite Ice Cream: Ranieri Chocolate (which they haven't made in about ten years, or at least they stopped stocking it here in Adelaide, but it was the BEST chocolate ice cream ever created in the history of the universe and I miss it a lot and weigh all other chocolate ice creams against it)
Favorite Time of Day: Evening

9 CURRENTS

Current Mood: A little bored to be honest (or at least I was when I originally filled this in at work)
Current Taste: I'm not completely sure what that means... what, the current taste in my mouth? Or my current taste in fashion or what?
Current Clothes: Dark purple business shirt, black dress pants, black work boots, black socks, black CK boxerbriefs.
Current Desktop: At work it's this cool stylised graphical thing... at home it's one of any of about a billion options from my Webshots program (actually it's some random naked dude right now).
Current Toenail Color: Natural
Current Time: When I was filling this out it was 10:25am (I had a slow morning)
Current Surroundings: Work (again, at the time)
Current Thoughts: "Will you just shut up... I can't stand hearing you!"

8 FIRSTS

First Best Friend: Amelia.
First Kiss: First kiss ever, Mary-Jane Something, we were like 12 I think... first guy kiss I've already blogged about.
First Screen Name: Actually I think my first one was yani/yaniboy... then I went through a bunch of others, and now I'm mostly back to it.
First Pet: Beauty the Budgerigar.
First Piercings: Right earlobe, age 15 or 16
First Crush: Dean in primary school... brown hair, brown eyes, cute as a button, and later he had those really veiny hands/forearms that I still love. I'm not sure if he was really the first, but he's the first that I still remember.
First CD: Michael Jackson's Dangerous in about 1992... before I had a CD player actually.
First Vehicle I Drove: Technically that would be my driving instructor's car... first car I owned was a 1977 mustard yellow Toyota Corolla...

7 LASTS

Last Cigarette: Hmmmm... From memory that has to be about nine years ago... I've never actually smoked, but I did go through a stage of having the odd cigarette when I was out drinking with friends. It didn't last long, and came to like a grand total of about four cigarettes.
Last Drink: Another good question... if we're talking alkyhol, then... ummmm... maybe Christmas... but I think I took one taste of the "boutique" beer and decided against it. Other than that I can't actually remember the last time I had alcohol.
Last Car Ride: Saturday, with Ma
Last Kiss: Well, let's see... I went to the Sauna the weekend before last... so it would have been then...
Last Movie Seen: The Covenant... a slightly cheesier all male version of The Craft (not quite, but it had that vibe to it), but there was lots and lots of hotness (and bare naked male buttocks briefly), so I can put up with the cheese...
Last Phone Call: Last personal phone call? Possibly when Ma called me on Sunday night. And nobody actually calls me here at work, yes, my phone rings, but it's never for me.
Last CD Played: Pink, I'm Not Dead, from whenever the last time I took the car out was...

6 HAVE YOU EVERS

Have You Ever Dated One Of Your Best Friends: No... I had sex with one though.
Have You Ever Broken the Law: Yes.
Have You Ever Been Arrested: Yes.
Have You Ever Skinny Dipped: Does a nude beach count as skinny dipping? If it does, then yes, if not, then no.
Have You Ever Been on TV: Yes, quite recently actually...
Have You Ever Kissed Someone You Didn't Know: Often (see "Last Kiss" in the section above)

5 THINGS

Thing You're Wearing: Livestrong bracelet
Thing You've Done Today: Went for my walk.
Thing You Can Hear Right Now: People talking, typing, airconditioning hum... just random office noise.
Thing You Can't Live Without: My mobile.
Thing You Do When You're Bored: Surf the worldwideinterwebnet.

4 PLACES YOU'VE BEEN TODAY

1. Work
2. Home
3. Subway
4. Boost Juice

3 PEOPLE YOU CAN TELL ANYTHING TOO

1. J
2. Stu
3. Lownee (or I could before she vanished)

2 CHOICES

Black or White: White
Hot or Cold: Cold

1 THING YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE

Leave the country

Current Mood:

how smart am i?

Your IQ score is 113

Your overall intelligence quotient is the result of a scientifically-tested formula based on how many questions you answered correctly. But it's only part of what we learned about you from your answers on the test. We also determined the way you process information.

The way you think about things makes you a Linguistic Architect. This means you are brilliant when it comes to language and words. You are also very good at understanding things on an abstract level. You are at your best when you put those two skills together to communicate new ideas and see how they fit into different contexts. You understand math and science on a gut level, even if the equations and science don't come as easily. You can use these skills to be a great communicator or to create a masterpiece.

How did we determine that your thinking style is that of a Linguistic Architect? When we examined your test results further, we analyzed how you scored on 8 dimensions of intelligence: spatial, organizational, abstract reasoning, logical, mechanical, verbal, visual and numerical. The 3 dimensions you scored highest on combine to make you a Linguistic Architect. Only 6 out of 1,000 people have this rare combination of abilities.

How Smart Are You Really?

Current Mood:

unconscious mutterings 227

Welcome to today's installment of Unconscious Mutterings... oh, and for the record, I've managed to avoid the "no walk guilt"... so far anyway...

1. Acoustic :: Guitar


2. Sanity :: Lacking in


3. Mambo :: Number 5


4. Session :: Make Out


5. Hound :: Dog


6. Cat :: Woman


7. Coward :: Yella


8. Trunk :: Call


9. Hold me :: Touch Me (it's a Producers thing)


10. Psychological :: Mumbo Jumbo

Current Mood:

long live the queen... or not

Queen Emma finally got thrown out of the Big Brother house... thank you Australia!

And with 76% of the combined vote... I think possibly only BB3's Jo (who got kicked out with, from memory, 86% of the vote) was more disliked (or just voted out with a higher percentage, whatever)... maybe it's the "blonde from Adelaide" thing (well, Emma used to be from here, but we can play that one down)...

Seriously, she should have been out at the first eviction, but with this whole new power that people have to save somebody and put another person up she's managed to avoid the bullet way too many times... and then the times she has been up, there have been housemates that needed to go even more than she did. But with all her sniping and snideness and bitching and manipulation and just general cowness, she had to go... and tonight was that night...

I also loved that since it was another double eviction (hello, "two men enter, two men leave" revolving door BB house or what?), and she had pointedly said there were certain people she didn't want to be evicted with, she actually got evicted with the person she liked least (well, one of her top two anyway), Rebecca...

Now Rebecca was never one of my favourites, but I gotta say, both with her new hot hair and the "realness" she showed during her eviction, and in her "message from the grave" which I just caught on the Sunday Up Late show, you gotta give the girl snaps. And now Emma has to spend the whole week travelling everywhere with Rebecca, doing all the interviews and being asked a million billion questions about the fact they didn't get on. To quote the highly annoying former Housemate, Brodie... "Suffer in ya jocks!" (and god, how lame and 1983 is that phrase).

And tonight they've sent in two new intruders (yes, even more intruders very early in the series)... a possibly female version of uber-Aussie Travis (so she has maybe half an hour before I want to gouge her eyes out), and the gayest, gayest, gayest, gayest housemate ever in the history of the universe... I mean, seriously, the little I've seen of "Zach", he makes Rob from last year look butch... I mean he went into the house looking like an extra from a big gay musical and wearing a corset that he made himself... which isn't surprising, since that's what he does... he makes corsets... GAYEST! HOUSEMATE! EVER!

Lordy, lordy, lordy... And I can't wait until some random naked and inappropriate images of him surface... coz you just know, given the photos he took himself for his BB montage (I'm sorry, you took photos of yourself in your underwear inside a tanning bed to be screened on national teevee?), that there have to be some out there... he just has that "look" about him... there has to be some solo porn in his past somewhere. I could be wrong (he could be much too "particular" to be flashing his business to all and sundry)... but give it a couple of days and we'll see if anything surfaces...

I mean I know I was lamenting the lack of gay housemates this year, but then we had Nick, who I quite liked, even if he was a little paranoid and grumpy for a while there... but they possibly needed to have backed off the gayometer on this latest one just a touch...

And for the record, I'm gunna do my list again...

Most Appealing Male Housemate: Still Thomas... he won't win, but I'll bet he makes it to like the final five.

Most Appealing Female Housemate: Currently nobody... there are only four of them currently, one original, two previous intruders and the new intruder and I really can't be bothered with any of them

Most Annoying Male Housemate: Travis again... mostly for the massacre of the English language and just not knowing when to SHUT UP!

Most Annoying Female Housemate: Intruder Laura for being a big baby this past weekend

Housemate Who Shouldn't Speak Ever: A tie between Travis and the new girl, Michelle

Housemate Who Is Growing On Me: Sadly, now that she's been evicted, it's probably Rebecca

Housemate Most Likely To Be Voted Out Next: Laura... Actually I've been doing pretty well with my predictions... I don't think I've actually been surprised by a single eviction... and tonight I'd actually already decided that it would be Emma and Rebecca getting booted before the show started, so my batting average remains pretty high.

In slightly related news (not really, but work with me here)... given the fact that it's the Queen's Birthday holiday tomorrow (see, look at that, Queen's Birthday... Queen Emma... Zach's a big queen... it all fits together seamlessly... much like Zach's corset *rolls eyes*) and I'm still getting over being all sicky (I'm much improved though, no more breathing through my mouth and I feel like a person again... so I really should make a sacrificial offering to Codral at some point), I've decided that I'm going to give myself a day off from my walk...

This is going to be the first time I've just taken a voluntary day off since I started... and only the second weekday I haven't been for a walk... so dammit, I deserve a holiday. Having said that, if I happen to wake up at the crack of dawn (unlikely) and get the guilts (possible) then I might go anyway... but there will be something nice and decadent about being able to just get up when I feel like it on a Public Holiday.

And, now, I think, to bed... even though I'm not sure that was actually a sentence...

Current Mood:

lime tree

You Are A Lime Tree

You are intelligent, hard working, and innately successful. You try to change what you can in life - and you accept what you can't change. Tough on the outside, you are actually soft and relenting. Jealous at times, you are extremely loyal and giving to those you love. You have many talents, but you don't have enough time to use them.

What's Your Celtic Horoscope?

Current Mood:

i said it was a true story

Thank god for Codral!

Seriously, I'm only four tablets along and already I feel like a person again.

Okay, it could be a coincidence and I might have been feeling like this anyway, but I kinda doubt it.

Other than the getting of the betterness, today was kind of an exercise in adventures that didn't quite work out the way we'd expected...

The Regular Shopping Thing™ went off okay, and I picked up a couple of cheap DVD's (The Covenant, Evil Under The Sun, The Trouble With Harry) and a new long sleeved teeshirt (since all my "winter" tops from last year are kind of like wearing small tents) at Red Circle.

And when we came back here we had a look through the "Things to do" folder and decided we would go and check out this cool portrait exhibition in Norwood. And because we thought we knew were it was, we didn't take the address with us...

Big mistake, I know...

Although, when I look at the article we saw it in, it doesn't actually have the address of the place, just the name and the suburb (not terribly helpful)... anyway, when we got to the place that we thought was the place it was, it obviously wasn't the right place, but we went in and had a look at the stuff in that gallery instead, which killed about ten minutes or so, then decided to stop off at another gallery/cafe place... but that looked too crowded, so we didn't bother...

Then we went off to Unley to take a look at this place selling designer cupcakes (damn you Andrew, you got me all worked up about cupcakes now), but we got distracted along the way by the Haighs Factory, and more specifically, the Haighs "Visitor's Centre"... so there went another quarter of an hour...

After the chocolate spending spree we finally found the cupcake place, Just Tickled Pink... oh lordy it's a world of pink and fru-fru, and a lot smaller than I expected... on the plus side, their lemon cupcake is amazing...

Because we'd seen a sign advertising a book sale at the Showgrounds, we decided to take the backstreet route from Unley to Wayville... which is doable... but, to be honest, we might have been better off just going back to the main road and following that along...

And luckily, unlike my trip last week, we managed to find a parking space out on the street, because when we looked in at both the type of people, and the type of merchandise that they all seemed to be selling, it wasn't so much of a book sale as it seemed to be some sort of heavy metal convention... so we didn't bother going in (we might have if there hadn't been a $5 entry fee)...

Then when we got back here, I was going to check my email, but my computer seemed to have frozen up... so I rebooted it... at which point it gave me a strange and unusual message about what "mode" I wanted to open the system in... after which it started loading Windows and then went to a black screen and stayed there... so, as you can imagine, I had a very slight thermonuclear meltdown... I tried hitting the reset button again... I tried unplugging it and starting over, I tried everything... and it just kept getting to a certain point, and then stopping... I kept having visions of having to reboot the whole system, deleting everything and starting from scratch... so I was not a happy little Vegemite and gave up for a while... but after maybe fifteen minutes of watching one of my new DVDs, I came back in here, armed with my official Windows CD, determined to make the damn thing work. I plugged the CPU back in, inserted the CD and just left it alone and let it do it's thing... and eventually it sorted itself out and loaded. I don't know if it was the CD, or just leaving it alone, or what, but I'm just happy it worked, especially with all my "tech support" friends either MIA or on the other side of the planet.

So, yeah... that was about it really... not terribly exciting, but thus is my life... and to quote a favourite teevee show... "I said it was a true story, I didn't say it was interesting"... *grin*

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