Winter's End
The last day of August is a fairly exciting day really, as it (finally) means that winter's on its way out. While, of course, the weather doesn't just magically get better on the first of September, it's always a nice feeling to think that winter is coming to its end. When I think about it, it's been an incredibly roller-coaster last three months. From late May until now I almost can't believe how much has happened, how everything has drastically changed - initially for the worse, and then definitely for the much better. Oddly enough I actually feel like overall there is an improvement to things even from where I was back in late May. I guess it's slightly annoying to be back living at home, but then again that's not such an issue as Leila lives so close and it's very easy to see her regularly.

This site has magically transformed itself from "Agglomerated Insanity" into "Realistic Surreality" overnight. I spent much of yesterday changing all my 2003 entries from the old format to the new one, which although tediously boring in some respects was actually fairly interesting in others, as I had a pretty good read through that stage of my life. It's always useful reading back through my archives, refreshing my memory with regards to what was happening at a particular time in my life. Obviously what is written there never told the whole story, as this site has always been public and therefore required to be somewhat 'censored', it still says enough and gives enough clues into what was 'really' going on at that time.

After this site has struggled through much of this year I feel optimsitic about its future, as I look forward to updating each day, rather than not really knowing what to say but feeling like I at least need to do something to stop it from dying. Perhaps this is Leila's influence to some extent, as her interest in writing is making me also more interested in writing, and putting my feelings into this site.

All this talking about my site in the last few days has rather overshadowed mentioning anything that's actually going on in my day-to-day life. I guess we should be thankful then that it's been a pretty quiet week. I have Amalia for the weekend which should be really awesome, as if the weather is good I should be able to take her up to Mangawhai Heads for the weekend. She's always talking about the "beach house", so it will be nice to take her up there again.

Realistic Surreality
Agglomerated Insanity is getting a bit tired I think, the title not the blog that is. Now that I have my own domain name I tend not to even think about this 'subtitle' of my blog, even though it's seemingly plastered all over the place. I think it refers back to some time in 2002 when I thought I needed something more than just "Josh's News Page" to describe this site. Agglomerated is a geographical term basically similar to clustering, and the idea of clustered craziness seemed quite fitting of my life at the time.

Four years have passed since then (FOUR YEARS!!!!!), and over that time I think I've actually discovered myself to be one of the more sane people around. Furthermore, my blog hardly talks about the insanity of life very much, so it just seems like a rather irrelevant subtitle. I had thought about changing it before, but nothing really ever jumped into my mind as a suitable substitute... until yesterday that is.

For the past month or so I've embarked on a pretty long process of switching all my old blog entries from my old HTML heavy template to the new one, which is operated by Angelfire's Blog Builder. My main motivation for doing this is to make it easier for people reading past posts to link back to what I'm currently writing about, or what I wrote about last month for example. Anyway, this process involves lots of copying and pasting, which is rather boring, and then coming up with a title for the blog post before posting it on the corresponding date. I am now back to August 2003, which still means I have an awfully long way to go, but has been some progress which is good. So anyway, I was posting this post, which really seemed to fit the description of having the title "Surreality" when I thought that was such a cool word, one that I could possibly do a bit more with.

Then I thought perhaps this could form the basis for a new subtitle for my blog. Realistic Surreality. It's obviously contradictory, effectively saying "real... but not really real", which does quite effectively convey what a blog is in many ways. So I googled the phrase, just to make sure 10 million people hadn't thought of it first, and didn't really find anything. Surrealism is such a fun concept, as often when you're saying "Oh my god... this is so surreal", it's one of those absolutely awesome moments of your life (or I guess, one of those really really awful moments), and I feel like I want to incorporate it more into this site. It also feeds into that whole "Truman Show" idea where you feel like the whole world's "in on it", playing some massive big game with your life just to entertain themselves, which I tend to feel at times. So anyway, I still probably need to think about this a little more, to perhaps get a better idea about whether there's much point to this and whether I really feel like I'll miss agglomerated insanity.

The Patterns of Life
It's funny how life goes through various phases, at times things seem really changeable and there are lots of noteworthy things to write about or talk about for that matter, and then at other times it all settles down for a while. During the changeable times, the weeks seem to pass by so slowly, and what was only a couple of weeks ago feels like a very long time indeed. But conversely, during the more settled times it really feels like my life is just zipping by, and before I know it another month has ended.

I get the feeling that my life is probably nearing completion of a big shift from the first of those times to the second. Ever since about February this year it seems like things have been changing this way or that way almost consistently. I guess there was a bit of a settled patch in late-April and early-May, but that was barely a month and when I think about it quite a lot was actually happening throughout that whole time and things hadn't really settled down awfully much. But anyway, obviously anyone who has read this page in the last few months realises that once again it's been a very changeable time for me, but after all the lows of June things have sorted themselves out quite nicely.

Therefore, while more settled and stable periods have the potential to be not quite so 'interesting' in some respects, I think that after everything that's happened I'm quite looking forward to things really settling down a bit. Over the next couple of weeks I'm having a new routine regarding when I see Amalia, which has some significant positives - like seeing her for much more extended periods of time over weekends - but also some negatives in seeing her less frequently during the week. I think that overall it's a more sustainable long-term arrangement, and should really be the last piece in this puzzle of sorting out my life into a new, very enjoyable and fulfilling, phase.

I guess my blog must be insprising in some respects, giving Leila the inspiration to start one of her own. I can't really take too much of the credit for that though, as she has wanted to have some sort of blog/journal thing for quite some time. However, perhaps with a bit of exposure and some reasonably regular readers she will have a bit of motivation to write. Her quality of writing will also undoubtedly put mine to shame...

Another Pretty Cool Weekend
Yes indeed I did manage to have yet another enjoyable weekend. No wonder I look forward to Fridays so much. On Friday night Leila and I went out for the evening, with Ella, Peter and Amber. We had a pretty cool time, getting pizza for dinner then heading into town to check out a few bars. It was all pretty low key, which was good in a way as I didn't really want to be out too late.

Then on Saturday I had a pretty quiet day, which once again was probably a very good idea as I still felt half asleep and slightly hung over for much of the day. I played a bit of Sims with Leila, which was good as we managed to finally finish off decorating a qutie amazing house that we had built earlier in the week. I do always enjoy playing Sims with someone else, even if you end up taking turns or playing different families in the same neighbourhood, as it means you don't have to do all the work to grow and develop the game. The Sims is one of those rather rare games that gets a lot better and more interesting the more you play it, as you get more characters who make more friends, and you get higher up career ladders etc. etc.

Then on Saturday night I had Amalia stay, which as always was really cool. We had nice cuddles in bed on Sunday morning, and actually (for the first time in forever) had really nice weather on Sunday which meant we could go to the park without fear it would start raining at any moment. On the down side of it being such a nice day the park was packed with people, and the ducks had been so overfed by everyone that by the time we got there bread was floating in the water everywhere and they weren't really that interested. I then got to pick up Leila after she finished work last night, which meant she could stay the night. Monday mornings are just so much more appealing waking up with my girlfriend next to me.

Yikes Friday Already
Well this week seems to have passed by pretty quickly, which I guess is a good thing. I've had a little more stability in my work this week, spending most of a day on one project and then most of another day on another, rather than chopping and changing all over the place. I've also been doing a few quite different types of projets, which I guess is a good thing.

Firstly, one of the resource consent applications is focused on activities that will take place within what's known as the Coastal Marine Area, basically the seabed and/or foreshore. This means that it comes under the Regional Council's jurisdiction rather than any District Council. This means that I had a whole new plan to look through and become accustomed to, which was at first rather daunting, but I guess in the end I've learned quite a lot from it. It's good to do a bit of work on the more "natural" part of Planning, as that's the bit I'm always a little less confident of my knowledge in - as my degree was largely based on human geography rather than physical geography. However, I now feel like I understand the format of the District/Regional Plans well enough to find out the information I need fairly quickly, and put it all together in a useful way that makes sense.

And then in the last couple of days I've been preparing a resource consent for an event, rather than a development. This is also rather different and a bit confusing as most of the rules and regulations assume that the consent will be for a development and go off talking about buidling heights and coverage, when that really has nothing to do with what I really want to know. But I think I've eventually sorted it out, and once again learned quite a bit about how to figure out something that doesn't appear as I would have expected it to. All good experience I suppose.

Ah this weekend should be good. My weekends have tended to be really awesome lately so I'm quite looking forward to the next couple of days. :-)

Being Knowledgeable

I had an interesting day at work today, going to a big high-powered workshop on one of the large projects we're currently working on, the project I've spent much of the last couple of weeks reading through masses and masses of information. It was interesting seeing people from all the involved councils in the Auckland area as well as people from the designers and their clients. They went through the changes that had been made since the original documents were issued back in May, justifications for those changes, and then any further developments that had been made during this time. Effectively it was a response to questions we had sent them, asking for further information or requesting some changes in the project.

It was really good having read through all the information on the project, as I felt like I knew it about as well as all these other people in the room, most of whom were vastly more experienced than me. I even asked a few questions myself that brought about quite lengthy discussions and it was good to feel like I really belonged in a group of people like that. Funnily enough I do really tend to enjoy the personal interaction parts of this job, going to meet with councils or clients and actually discussing the projects with them, and having the confidence in my knowledge of the particular situation to actually ask something meaningful or provide some information myself in certain circumstances. I guess it makes me feel like I "belong" in the planning profession, even though I've taken somewhat of a backdoor to get there. All the bits and pieces of my knowledge seem to be pulling themselves together now and I find myself going "ah... so once they've got that approved then they'll need to do this... but someone could end up disputing that and then this would happen.." It's good to really start to feel like I have some idea how the process all really works and fits together. Obviously I still have a massive amount of knowledge to still learn, although with this kind of job every project is slightly different so I guess no matter what I'll always end up learning new things all the time.

The Weekend
Wow... I had one of my best weekends in ages.

As I mentioned in my Saturday post, that evening I headed off to the Bledisloe Cup match with my dad at Eden Park. Although the All Blacks had already wrapped up the Bledisloe Cup for this year, having won in Christchurch and Brisbane, there was still much riding on the match - as if the All Black won the Tri Nations series would be secure. I had spent the whole day up till then with Leila, which was really nice, and things timed themselves pretty well as she headed off to work at the same time we headed to the match. Walking there it was pretty obvious that this was a "big one", the crowds were really getting pretty thick and everyone seemed quite excited and anticipatory. As usual my Dad got everyone he knows to pick a score before we left the house, I originally chose 36-16, but then on reflection changed that to 34-26 as I though Australia would get pretty close to us. My Dad said "yikes, that'll be a fantastic game if that's the score!"

We arrived at the ground about half an hour before the game, which was good as I needed to pick up the tickets and didn't want to be stressing about not having enough time before the actual game started. The whole ticket collection process actually turned out to be really quick and easy, and we also found our seats quite simply. As we sat around waiting for the game to start it was interesting to check out the ground, and truly imagine what it's going to be like once the redevelopments for the 2011 world cup are complete. With the South Stand likely to be almost as high as the current light-towers, it will be a pretty damn impressive structure. The pre-match entertainment was typically boring, apart from some rather impressive fireworks. The national anthems and then, particularly, the haka, got everyone pumped up before the match actually started.

By half time Australia was leading 20-11, which was slightly worrying. The All Blacks had been pretty unlucky, with Australia getting an incredibly dodgy try, another from an intercept, and Dan Carter unusually missing some kicks. However, as the match wore on in the second half things slowly began to right themselves. We were sitting next to an Australian guy, who slowly got quieter and quieter as the match wore on and the All Blacks slowly clawed their way back before taking the lead with a couple of tries in quick succession. However, Australia then scored again which meant it was a pretty nerve-racking final 10 minutes. But in the end the All Blacks won 34-27, incredibly close to the score I had predicted before we left the house. And it was a really awesome match to watch, pretty flowing rugby as both teams were willing to take a few chances and pass the ball around more than they have done so recently. Overall it was just a really cool way to spend Saturday evening, and I am going to make damn sure when All Blacks games come around next year at Eden Park I will get tickets to them too.

Then yesterday we took Amalia to Western Springs Park in the morning, which was pretty cool. As I've mentioned before I have lots of memories of going there when I was younger, and it's nice to share the same type of memories with my little girl. When she's a bit older we should be able to do a little more exploring of the lesser known pathways around Western Springs, the places that I particularly remember having fun when I explored them. Then in the afternoon I got out my old Lego for her (well..... for me too I guess). Throughout my entire childhood I probably spent about 75% of my play-time with Lego, and 25% with everything else, so it was really cool to once again share these memories with my little girl. Though she's probably still a little bit young for the Lego overall, as she got frustrated she couldn't put the pieces together as well as she wanted to, she still enjoyed playing with all the people and putting them in cars and taking them out. It also gave me a good chance to have a good sort through the Lego, throwing out broken bits and taking out stuff that isn't actually Lego.

In amongst all of this I also managed to spend a considerable amount of time with Leila this weekend, which was also fantastic. And furthermore I didn't actually feel too bad about going back to work this morning. So yeah, a pretty good weekend all up.

Is there really a change?

After my big long spiel in the previous post about really transforming this site into something a little more interesting for people to read, and broadening what I write about to include a little more "comment" on things that are going in that are semi-related to my work, all the fantastic ideas I had about what I was going to write about seem to have disappeared. Funny how that always seems to happen. I guess it would be easier starting afresh if I was to make such a momentous shift, so I will for now probably take things quite slowly in terms of adding in a little bit here and a little bit there. As I said, I don't want to change this blog, I just want to broaden what I write about.

Anyhow, I'm off to the All Blacks match tonight which should be pretty cool. This year's rugby has been quite good for the All Blacks, although each time they play the other teams seem to get a little bit closer. The last match against Australia was very close in particular, and we were pretty damn lucky to get away with the win quite honestly. This time around the Bledisloe Cup is safe, and while it's still necessary to win for the Tri Nations there is a little bit less pressure on the game than previously. Hopefully that means it turns out to be quite an open game.

Work was reasonably boring this week. I spent a lot of time working on basically the one big project, which became rather tedious by the end of the week. I guess it's a very interesting project, and a very interesting job for us to have, but there's only so much reading and paraphrasing you can do before it starts to get to you. Next week should be a bit more interesting as we have some meetings that should drive the project forward a bit, and it also seems like there are some other jobs that I can get onto doing, which will break things up a bit.

There were a few interesting articles in the Herald this week relating to future projects that we might become involved in, and generally commenting on the progress (or lack thereof) of a few major roading projects that are upcoming in Auckland throughout the next 10 years. The Waterview Connection is the big nasty project that is really essential for the future of Auckland's motorway system, but at each and every stage seems to become more difficult and impossible to implement. There have been plans for this stretch of motorway for many many years, but each time it seems like it's getting somewhere there are further setbacks and delays. To me this isn't particularly surprising, as I drive through the area where the motorway is likely to go at least every second day, and always find myself thinking "where the hell are they going to put a motorway through here??" The latest developments seem to indicate yet another year of delays, and although the positive spin of undergrounding large sections of the motorway is a good sign, I imagine that the end result will be "we could do a tunnel... but it would cost like $3 billion... so back to square one".

I also sometimes wonder about the intelligence of investing billions in our motorways when for all we know by 2020 petrol might cost $10 a litre (in today's prices) and nobody will be able to afford to use them. They'll be the widest bicycle lanes in the world!

Making Some Changes
I was thinking about how this site seems to have been evolving over the past... well 5 years I guess last night, and sort of discussing it with Leila as she's thinking of starting her own kind of blog, and it seems like I need to inject something a bit new into here. Not only to make it perhaps a little more interesting to read, but also to hopefully give me a little more motivation to update more regularly, and with more interesting updates.

Generally this page mainly talks about what's going on in my life, which at times can be pretty interesting, but a lot of the rest of the time it's like "well... same again". If I was able to detail what I get up to at work it would obviously be more interesting, but I've explained in the past why that really isn't possible. But I think I figured out a way to get the best out of both worlds in a sense, by hopefully using all the knowledge and expertise I am developing at work to comment on things that are happening 'in my field', but not actually talking about the exact projects I'm working on.

I'm not quite sure how this might all work out yet, and obviously I do still want to keep a decent record of what's going on in my life as that's always been the prime concern of this site, but perhaps this will give me something else to talk about and will also perhaps give me a few more regular readers as I might pop up in some Google Searches for terms like "State Highway 20 Avondale Extension", "Greenhithe Deviation", "Victoria Park Tunnel" and so on. Last year I seemed to find a reasonable balance in my posts between talking about what was going on in my outside university life while also having a bit of a debate about the topics of my thesis. While I will make sure I don't put forward any information that wouldn't be otherwise available to the general public, I think I should be able to put an informed spin on things that might make my site a reasonably worthwhile read.

New Patterns

It's pretty cool to see things shifting into a new pattern for me. I guess all the changes going on in my life begin to settle down and form a new "normality" for me I'll probably feel like I can open up a little more on this site. At the moment it feels a little difficult to write anything particularly meaningful other than "hey wow... things are great". But then again I guess on the other hand it's really really nice to be able to write that, and really awesome to be able to again be happy with how everything's going.

Through everything that's happened recently it feels like the last couple of weeks have taken aaaaages. It's quite bizarre to think that it was only like 11 days ago that I started going out with Leila, as now it feels like so much longer than that already. I guess that has to be a good sign, that we feel comfortable with each other pretty quickly to the extent that it feels like we've been together longer than we actually have.

Anyway... so what else has been going on in my life lately? I guess everything else seems to have been somewhat excluded from my writings here for a little while. I've been seeing Amalia quite a lot in the last few weeks, settling into a pattern of weekends here, then Tuesdays and Thursdays at Natalie's. While it would be nicer to have Amalia here a bit more, the whole distance thing makes that rather impossible as spending 2 hours driving there and back twice is rather pointless. Amalia is really getting the whole talking thing now, putting words together into sentences and using these sentences to effectively communicate what she's thinking. This ability to properly tell people what she's thinking and what she wants seems to have helped her out quite a bit, and she seems less frustrated a lot of the time. Of course she still has her moments, but then again what two year old doesn't, and overall it does seem (at least to me) that she's less likely to tantrum than she was perhaps a couple of months back.

I'm going to the final Bledisloe Cup match this coming Saturday, which should be fun. The last time I went to an All Blacks match was back in about 1995 so it will be pretty cool to get there. For the past how many years my Dad and I have always said that we 'should' get around to getting tickets, and nothing's seemed to eventuate from it, so it's nice to finally have it sorted and to really enjoy the atmosphere of it all.

A Drought of Posts

It's interesting how I always seem to post more when my life isn't going well, and then when it is going well they seem to rather dry up. I guess perhaps I have more to complain about at other times, and therefore more to write about. Perhaps it's not really that surprising in that sense...

I had a pretty cool weekend I guess. I spent quite a lot of the time playing Sims 2, which I'm finally getting back into. Although I've lost all my old families and houses, over the last couple of weeks I've installed both the University and Nightlife expansion packs and played them for the first time, this has definitely made things quite a bit more interesting and different, and has kept me rather busy in the last couple of days. It's good that I can now play Sims 2 without thinking of Jess, and perhaps in a way it's a good thing that things turned out that my old families and houses didn't transfer when I reloaded the game. This way it all seems new again, and with Leila helping me out rebuilding a neighbourhood that should eventually be better than what I had before, it's an interesting metaphor for my life over the past few months. Sure things were pretty good and then everything fell apart, but in every sense what I have rebuilt out of the mess that things were not too long ago has not only made up for what I lost, but has gone past that to end up with something even better.

When I think about things that way I suppose it really has proven that I've bounced back incredibly well over the past month and a bit. Things working out with Leila has really fitted in that key piece of the puzzle and I feel incredibly optimistic that things are looking up and that I've got a great rest of the year heading my way.

The Early Stages

This has been a pretty funny week really, as in some respects it seems to have taken so bloody long to get through, but on the other hands I now find that it's almost over and it really seems to have just disappeared after all. I guess the first half of the week seemed to go by pretty slowly because I was forever waiting until Wednesday, but now it all seems to have flown by.

I definitely feel happier with my life now than I have for a LONG time. It's really cool during the early stages of a relationship when everything is new and exciting, and you find yourself looking forward to each and every time you have with your new partner. While of course things never last like this, which isn't necessarily a bad thing as it would be rather unproductive if I was like this all the time, it's nice to feel really happy about things and really feel like my life is totally going in the right direction again. It's also fantastic having a girlfriend who only lives a 5 minute drive away, and once we've sorted out each other's timetables and commitments it's really great knowing that I'll be able to see Leila pretty damn frequently.

My week at work has been rather uneventful to say the least. Lots of bits and pieces projects, and as my mind has often been elsewhere it really has felt like a bit of a drag. What I really need to do is get stuck into a project so that it becomes interesting and I feel like I'm getting something out of it, and ironically I imagine once I've done that the time will probably zip by a whole heap quicker. We've managed to finish off a few projects in the last week or so, although we've picked up a few new ones as well. While many of these still fit into the category of "do a little bit here, wait a while, do a little bit more.... and so on" there are a few upcoming ones that look pretty big and that should in many ways be much more interesting as I will get the chance to sink my teeth into it and really feel like it's my project. Larger projects are also good because you don't have to worry quite so much on an every day basis about how many hours you're doing on each little thing as they're more likely to balance out in the long run.

My Interesting Subconscious

I had a really interesting dream last night, like I had all these thoughts rolling around in my head and it took my dream to sort them all out. I think overall it proved to me that I am happy with how everything has turned out, that that my life is heading in the right direction. It felt like a finalisation on everything, that I was putting my past behind me for the very final time and looking forward with things. It was good to get this confirmation from my subconscious that things are heading the right way, and that I am taking the right steps with my life. I sometimes feel that I can convince myself into something through over-thinking it, but it's good to have my dreams to perhaps remind me what I "really want", and it's good when that appears to confirm what I'm doing in "real life". Now that I have had a little bit more time to reflect on the weekend I feel happier than ever about how things have turned out. Everything seemed like such a blur to me, a half-asleep blur at that. But as I'm now rather more awake it's really awesome to think that I now have a really nice girlfriend and I really look forward to the next stages of my life. Seems like 2006 might be a good year after all.

Yesterday I had a pretty cool day with Amalia. The weather has been utterly horrible for the past few days - reminding me every last little reason why I don't particularly like Auckland's weather in winter. So we had a pretty quiet day inside, watching some DVDs and playing with her toys. It's a bit frustrating when I can't take Amalia outside and make the most of the time I do have with her, but I guess at the very least we could spend some good time together and have good cuddles and the like.

Wow.... Things Worked out for Once

Well quite a few of my entries last week hinted towards something happening on Friday. I felt like I couldn't really say too much in case things didn't turn out quite as good as I hoped. But they did.

Anyway, enough with the annoying hints. On Friday I went out for dinner with Leila, Ella's friend who I had briefly mentioned a few posts back. I knew Leila through Ella at high school, although not particularly well. But we went out for dinner, then a few drinks, and to cut a long story rather short we're now going out. It's like everything I had really hoped for, but then had been too pessimistic to really believe would happen. Of course everything is at the really really early stages, but I feel very confident that things will turn out well.

It's actually pretty amazing how my life has got back on track in the last month. As things had hit such a low I'm pretty surprised how they have picked up so competely. For the first time in quite a while I do actually feel happy with my life, which may not seem particularly special unless you realise what a rollercoaster my life has been in the last three months. It's a very good feeling to get back to where I am now...

Internetting

It seems a bit stupid that after spending most of my day at work sitting in front of a computer, I find when I get home that I also end up - you guessed it - sitting in front of a computer. I guess I'm generally doing rather different stuff, but it all seems to make my home life seem awfully similar to my work life. Hmmm... I should probably read more.

But anyway, instead of wasting away my time on the net too much this evening, I did get stuck into reorganising the archiving of this blog. Up until February 2005 I did all the HTML programming manually, which made it really tricky to organise all the links between different months of archives. Each month I would have to update links on each and every past month, and it all became rather tedious. Across three and a half years of posts that was over 40 pages that needed updating every new month. Unsurprisingly I gave up on that after about November 2003, which means that if someone is to end up on one of those older pages they'll have a bit of a mission actually getting back to my main page, or to any other month that is more recent.

One solution is to flick everything over onto my current formatting style, using Angelfire's blog builder. This is what I've been doing since February 2005, and has gone a long way towards ensuring that this site has been resurrected from the dead, and also making life a whole pile easier as it does all the archiving itself. Although I create the links back to older months, once I've done it for one page it's updated for all of them. The only problem is shifting everything from my old style of formatting to my new one is likely to be an incredibly tedious process, as I would anticipate there would be close to 1000 posts to copy from one format, into another, then change the date of the post so it's in the right spot, then think of a title for the post, before actually being able to publish it and move onto the next one. However, I decided to make a start on it. Obviously I'll never get to January 2001 working backwards, but perhaps each month that is 'flicked over' will make life a lot easier and achieve what I really want, which is to abandon that old format as much as possible and get everything consistent on the new format. At least if I can get back to November 2003.

I also had a pretty good look around on Google Earth, every geographer's dream program. It was quite interesting trying to compare my memories of places such as Sydney and Brisbane with what appears on Google Earth. I also had a nosey at Dubai, which has some absolutely insane construction projects going on at the moment - which generally seem to revolve around pumping large amounts of sand into the sea offshore to create artificial islands in the shape of a palm or the world. For an urban planner developments like these seem impossibly fantastic, though my enviornmentalist side makes me wonder if we really should be created such artificial islands and shapes in the ocean, especially on such a massive scale. It's really quite incredible.

Another Day of Normality

It was actually a fairly busy day at work, with projects seeming to come at me from all angles. A couple of jobs that have been sitting in the background for a while have jumped back into life in the past couple of days with quite a sense of urgency. This is good I suppose, as it keeps me busy, but it also pushes some of the larger things I was working on into the background for a little while. However, a couple of projects that have been hanging around for quite a while (including one since about March) should be able to be totally finished off within the next couple of weeks - which will be very good indeed.

I guess my life is fairly unsurprisingly revolving quite a lot around work at the moment, especially during the week as I'm there for about 9 hours and then either come home or go see Amalia. I am finding that with a little bit of care I can actually say a surprising amount about what I'm up to at work without giving away too much information. I probably would have an awful lot to say if I was to talk about more specifics, but understandably that's not really possible, especially for jobs that are not even finished and in some cases are potentially quite high profile. I really really would not want to read the Herald one morning saying "new site of school/motorway/development revealed in online blog, residents outraged!" That would be a real good way to get myself fired. So that leaves me in the situation of giving out a few details here and there where they are vague enough, and talking a bit more about how I'm feeling about work, and the range of things I'm up to rather than any specifics. I guess that works well enough.

Ugh it's not even half way through the week yet...

250th Post

Well I made it there. 250 posts since I resurrected this site back in February 2005. There was a time, just before then, when I really thought that it was the end of my blog. That would have been rather sad, considering I've kept it going in some form or another since January 2001, which is five and a half years if you include the down times when I haven't written anything (which was about 9 months). Obviously this site has evolved a tremendous amount, particularly from its early days back in 2001 (I don't even want to think how many posts I made in my old formatting style). Generally I think that evolution has been good, as it's mirrored how my life has changed (very dramatically I guess if I think about it) during that time.

However, I find it a little bit tricky to update these days with anything particularly meaningful. I can't really talk about work in much detail because that would compromise the obvious confidentiality that is important with clients, I can't really comment on other aspects of my life because I'm not quite sure how things will turn out and don't really want to jump the gun, so I'm often left feeling like I can only really give a half-assed version of what I think. I guess that's a little frustrating at times, though I'm sure I'll work through it to a point where there is more going on in my general life that I can properly talk about, so that I don't have to give a little hint here and a little hint there about how things are going.

The best posts of my last 250? Well there would be Amalia's 2 birthday posts, and the few I sent when I was in Canada and the USA, though if I had to choose one favourite overall this would be it. There have been many more insightful ones I guess - though often they are rather outnumbered by the less than insightful ones. The hardest post to write? No contest there. Sometimes I think that I probably used to write better posts, back in 2003 it seemed like they'd be really long and quite insightful, like I tried harder to write something interesting. But then again, I have found as I read over past months and years of entries, that often the times I have tried to be clever and witty it's just turned into pretty unreadable nonsense, while at other times when I have just kept things short and simple I've gone "ohh.... so that's when that happened". In many ways I feel that my writing style on here reflects how I feel in my life, where the current state is definitely "cautiously optimistic". I guess I've been knocked back so many times in the last couple of months that I am afraid to get too excited about thinking my life is really back on track, but at the same time I realise that I've regained just about everything I have lost during that time: I now have a better car, a better iPod, a better computer... and hopefully I'm on my way to getting a better girlfriend.

I think then I will really feel like I have reached the end of this tunnel, that I will feel confident about life yet again, and I will feel like I've learned a lot from this tricky time, but that I've pulled through and I am now really moving forward with things.

See you at post number 500!

Another Week...

Well another week gets started again. My life feels like it's well and truly into a pattern now - with fairly boring and repetitive weekdays, enjoyable weekends and so on. I seem to find myself really looking forward to Fridays, and although I don't exactly dread Mondays it's a bit annoying when I wake up Monday morning and realise I do in fact have to get up for work and can't just lie in bed for a while longer.

That's not to say I'm getting sick of work in any particular way. In fact, at the moment I'm getting stuck into what is really a pretty massively important project, processing part of a major motorway development in Auckland. I guess it's quite exciting to think that in a few years time I'll be able to drive through it and think that my work was involved in getting that built in a way that worked well for the local community and didn't mess up their lives too much during construction. It's quite cool being involved in projects like these. I thought when I started off working as a planner that a lot of my time would be spent on relatively small projects: resource consents for individual landowners or perhaps a few larger jobs that were a bit more strategic. In fact, I've found that we get involved in some pretty massive projects: motorways, schools, road improvements and stuff like that. Although my contribution is generally pretty small in the overall scheme of things, it's quite cool to think that I did my little bit. In a few years time I imagine I'll be able to drive past schools, along pieces of road or motorways and think that I had something to do with that development.

So hopefully this week will be reasonably interesting at work. It's good to get stuck into a few big jobs so that I don't find myself doing messy little bits and pieces all the time. I'll be looking forward to Friday again, as my life continues to step in the right direction I hope.

The Weekend

After my holiday last weekend it's quite nice to have a pretty relaxing weekend this time around. My weekday life has now got itself into a bit of a pattern, after the craziness of the last few months, and it's really nice to be able to have an unstructured day of doing pretty much nothing on the weekend. It's a good opportunity to get stuck into building a coupe of new "The Sims" houses, which I have been slowly getting back into throughout the last couple of weeks since I got my new computer.

Amalia is staying tonight, the first time I've had her here for a couple of weeks. It will be really nice to have her here again, and hopefully tomorrow the weather is nice enough to go somewhere with her. I guess that was the flip-side of having such a nice holiday last weekend, that it meant I didn't see Amalia for a whole week and not having her here since two weekends back.

Overall I have had a pretty quiet day. I had a nice time last night with Ella, Peter, Amber and Leila. It's good to have a bit of a social life these days, and although we didn't go out anywhere it was good to catch up with everyone.

Another Week

Well Thursday night already, another week has just seemd to fly by. As I wrote earlier in the week, this isn't really a bad thing as I get paid Saturday morning, and I'm quite looking forward to the weekend. It will be good to have Amalia on Saturday night, as I missed not seeing her last weekend. Although I have seen her a couple of times during the week this week, it's always nice to bring her back here for her to stay the night, and then to have her here in the morning when I wake up. Hopefully the weather is nice on Sunday so we can go somewhere nice.

I had a reasonably interesting day at work, as we went to a seminar in the city run by the Resource Management Law Association about Maori perspectives on the Resource Management Act. The seminar was pretty short, which was quite good (not to say it was boring though!) and I spent quite a bit of time getting to know a few other people 'in the field'. I felt a little out of place with all these lawyers around, though it once again reinforced the fact that what I'm doing for my job an awful lot of the time is actually environmental law. I am working with legislation and legal processes all the time, which I guess I somewhat expected but it's quite interesting to actually think about it from that perspective.

Going out tomorrow night so I probably won't update.... I've kept up pretty well lately though I think!