Mickey Mouse

Bought new fish on my way home from work today. I've been meaning to add to my tv-quarium for a while, but it's always the same old things that you see at the aquarium shops. Worse still, they're usually red, which my tank is dominated by. I went to a different shop today, at Baulkham Hills, because I know they have the more unusual stuff & a great variety. I wasn't disappointed. As my tv-quairum houses only livebearers (bar the 2 silversharks & a bristlenose cleaner) I wanted only to add more livebearers. This shop at BH have a lot of varieties of livebearers, saltwater fish, rarer goldfishes, parrots, rabbits, spiders, & even a snake. I ended up buying a pair of platies that I've never seen before - they're called the Mickey Mouse platies, because if you look at their tails from the side they look just like MM's head! I also bought 3 golden swordtails just to balance out the colours a bit more. Videos still uploading... (1) (2)

Shall try & upload some 'smaller' videos from my trips when I'm at a faster connection next wk.

Rustic framing

Having another day-off at home to, umm, 'work' on my thesis. And of course, during stressful times like these 1 has to find ways of unwinding and relaxing. A couple weeks back I finished doing up the classic poster series of a Casablanca jigsaw puzzle & of course have backed it up with backing paper & cardboard. Now it's stiff as. And with the passionfruit vine torn down there are extra lattice lying around in our backyard, & I though what better way to complement the classic poster series than with a rustic frame!?! At first I was just going to go to the shops & buy a frame then 'rustic' it up, but there are any that are big enough. So not to chop down the jigsaw puzzle, I resorted to making 1 up myself. A quick stop at the hardware store to get a mitre box & it's an hour or so in the backyard sawing, staping & nailing up my new frame:

It fits like a glove but alas the rustic look doesn't fit all that well. Now I've painted it sandy yellow with a golden top layer (& a crackling layer in between so the sandy yellow would still come through) to sort of match up with the bought 1 that I have for my Gustav Klimt 'Kiss' jigsaw puzzle which I still have yet to finish doing up. Hmm, project, project...

新年快樂

恭喜發財 & 新年快樂 to everyone!!

NO apols to anyone who can't read traditional Chinese. Tough!

Oh how I love you how I love you ...

For starters, that is the song from a Sydney Swans commercial from a few years back, kind of a retro-link to a Jolson song. And yes, I DO love them heaps. can you imagine anything more exciting than a good-ol' game of AFL (watching of course, I can't play it for peanuts!), particularly a Swans game?? I've been to a few over the years, and like last year we're buying the Telstra package again this year, only this time minus the SCG game (but cheaper!!) Here are my beloved Swannies doing a fan-fest thing at my local shopping centre today. F-ing hell, so many people! I could only get 3 autographs of the 6 that were there the lines were so long! Granted I was there a little later than they had arrived because I was at work. But still, oh Swannies!!!

Electric explosion

The electric substation of the building next to us (at work, not at home) threw a bit of a hissy fit last Thursday. I guess it might be a bit old & it was a bit of a humid day, but soon after lunch (1:30-ish) when Barb came back from lunch she told us that there were black smoke coming out of a roller door downstairs (we didn't know what is/was behind that roller door at that stage), & out of curiosity Faye (who is also our floor's fire warden) when downstairs (to take a ciggy break of all thing!?!?!) & checked things out. By that stage the fire trucks had already arrived & they told Faye that we better start packing 'cause they were evacuating us soon. We did as such, & not 5 minutes the alarm sounded & we were scuttled downstairs, cross the closed-off road, went around the building & went to the assembly area 5 minutes or so away. We're on the 4th floor so naturally be bump into people from lower floors as we went down. By the time we got to the ground floor & crossed the road, the 'thing' behind the roller door start exploding (not like nuclear bomb, mushroom cloud explosion, but loud bangs in quick successions. Much like chinese fire crackers but not as quick in succession). After waiting for a while we were told not to expect to get back in that afternoon, so we all went our separate ways. SOme went home (actually most went home) while I, who is without a ride until 5pm, had plenty of time to kill. Did the library, window shopped, & finally sat down & had a haircut instead. 4-ish & I decided to sneak by to see if there's anyway of going back to the office & surf the net, & the fire trucks were all gone & doors wide open. Great! Spent the rest of the time surfing the net. Lesson of this incident is, while we were praised for our prompt respond to the evacuation alarm, DON'T complain about having to WALK DOWN 4 FLIGHTS OF STAIRS!! Can you actually believe someone complained about having to walk down some stairs!?!?! My typical sarcastic respond was of course, "well then, jump!" No, really.

Meanwhile, the substation is still being fixed. I walked by at least 4 times yesterday. 8:30 - arriving at worl. No one was working on it. 12:30 - out to lunch. Workmen standing by it talking about something electrical. 1:30 - back from lunch. More workmen turned up to sit around the burnt substation having coffee & snack. 4:30 - going to post office on way home. All workmen, including the van, were gone. Roller door pulled down, presumably so that can't tell if any work had been done on the substation. Today (1 week post-explosion) - roller door area still cordoned off, no sign of workmen, again.

Good night out, good work-out

The made-up holiday of Valentine's Day is coming up yet again which means that Robson's birthday is also near. This year we went to a favorite haunt of ours - the Heritage Belgian Beer Cafe down at the Rocks - this past friday. It was a great night out as I decided not to do anything during the day either except clean up bits and pieces & clear out some stuff from my hard disc to DVDs. I bus-ed in early to the city to have a bit of a walk around, window-shopped at the Rocks & took some photos (which I still haven't downloaded onto my laptop...). The beer, food & company were al very good, & we stuck around for 5 hours! Well, I stuck around about 5 hours. Some stayed on after I'd left to catch my bus home at 11:30.

The following day it was time for a good work out. Physical work out. I've been planning this for months and now it's finally the right time. The trellis that my passionfruit plant has been leaning on for the last few yrs is/was all brittle & keeps falling over, so yesterday morning (after sleeping in, naturally) I spent a couple of hours collecting the remaining fruits & chopping the whole plant back to its barest. A quick stop for lunch, then it was building the new metal arches that it now climbs over, forking out compost, sugarcane mulching, & some power composting (lawn-mower over the passionfruit vines that I chopped down, pressed down by a heavy layer of chicken shit). I was thoroughly soaked through halfway through that work out (we're unseasonably humid at the moment). Now it's looking all bare & naked. Hopefully it'll fruit again at the end of the year (1 vines produces about 100 fruits a season, which is more than we can handle in this household. I've had to resolve to making passionfruit muffins & cookies before they spoil!). Still no flowers on my guava trees though...

Chinese New Year dinners this coming friday & saturday.

How excitement!

It’s been a bit of a strange week so far & today I took a turn for an even stranger ending to the week. Locked myself in the house for both Sunday & Monday to finish rewriting Ch 6 before a day at uni on Tuesday. Tennis as usual that night & didn’t play well. Back again at uni on Wednesday which threw me off pattern a bit seeing that I haven’t spent that much time at uni in any week for a very long time. I was there to meet an academic who is based in ADFA (Canberra) but was travelling up that day for his own meetings. He squeezed me into his schedule to talk a bit about finishing off my thesis (unfortunately not ‘for me’, but more like ‘help me finish it’ kinda thing). Kev (supervisor) & I had talked about bringing him on board as a co-supervisor also so the more reason to meet with him. Now the end is finally very near. There’s just some paperwork to do next week to sign on the new co-supervisor & get on with it. The worst bit, though, is that I still haven’t had from someone who had they were going to give me an answer about 3 weeks back & I don’t know where I would be/how much time I would have in the next few months for the thesis. It’s simply unsettling. Hassled the guy again on Tuesday via email but still no reply. Is he off his nuts or just ignoring me & put me on the blocked list? Must investigate more next week.

Meanwhile, after pretending to be sick (mentally, obviously) so I could go to uni yesterday (some strange logic here, but it’ll make sense if you read on) I returned to WESTIR today for ‘work’ work. Still no word from freaking Penrith Council, i.e. can’t start on the new project --> sitting around without much to do. That part of my life has turned out to be a real boring drag, ‘cause you see there are only so many relevant websites & report that one can visit and, more importantly, endure. Without the go-ahead for this new project, we don’t have much to go on because the new Census data won’t come out for another 8 months. But luckily, as far as I can tell we’d get some answers from Council early next week & start delegation immediately. Have not been this eager to be given work in a long time.

But just as we were all settling back into the mundane boredom after lunch today an unexpected excitement came along. Barb was coming back from lunch & she saw black smoke coming out of a roller door next to out building’s entrance. Soon after the fire brigade arrived & Faye, who was taking a ciggy break at the time, was told by the firemen to get ready for an evacuation. Evacuation! Not a pretend 1, but a real thing! Haven’t had that for a long time! The smell of the smoke was not very pleasant anyway so it was better to be out than in. The alarm finally sounded & we made our way down the fire stairs & out the building. Stupid thing was that roller door wasn’t that far from our fire stair exit (probably about 20m, 25m max) & the smell of that smoke was just overwhelmingly intense as we exited & were rushed to the left (roller door on right). We haven’t even been out of the building 5 minutes, & needless to say haven’t even half finished joking about the situation (eg, “must be some disgruntled fatties trying to bomb Jenny Craig”) (Jenny Craig was the 1^st shop next to the roller door) than the roller door started exploding!! OK, so it wasn’t like the-plane-crashed-into-the-World-Trade-Centre kind of exploding, but a more like a quick succession of loud pops that went on for maybe 3-5 minutes. We were of course hurried off by the fire brigade to get away. The floor fire wardens stuck around to find out what was happening & we were told we wouldn’t be able to get back into the building for an hour or 2 (mind you, this was only ¼ past 2 even after all that excitement. It’s taking me longer to type this up than to live through the whole thing!). We decided it wasn’t worth it to wait around so an early mark for everybody! Yippy! Seeing that my ride wasn’t getting off work until 5, I had a bit of time to kill. I checked out stuff at Westfield, went to the library, checked out stuff at the mall, I even had time for a hair cut before finally decided to go pass the office again at ¼ past 4 to see if it was safe to sneak back in (It was). Oh my beloved Internet, how I missed you! Thus ended the excitement of the day.

Curtains.

The end.