The Annoying Weather
Now Playing: Collective Soul - The World I Know
It was almost inevitable, after five days of utterly brilliant sunshine - between last Sunday and yesterday - when it really did feel like summer, the weather will seemingly back it in for the weekend. It always seems so frustrating when there's brilliantly fine weather throughout the week when you're stuck inside an office and can't really enjoy it, except for brief excursions out to get lunch or the odd occasion of having a site visit, but then when you do have the opportunity to actually enjoy the outdoors, namely on the weekends, it never seems quite so good. At the moment there's the weirdest psuedo-thunderstorm going on: thunder quite frequently and I presume the odd flash of lightning, yet so really any rain. One of those situations when the weather seems like it doesn't quite have the guts to do one thing or the other, and instead just flits between the two without really making up its mind at all.

I guess the good thing about having a proper house up at Mangawhai Heads is that even if it does rain the weekend won't be a total disaster. With a laptop that can play DVDs and play Sims, as well as a whole pile of toys to keep Amalia happy it's not like we'd go stir crazy with boredom. But there would still be this enormous sense of frustration I suppose, that after perhaps the best week of weather I can ever recall happening during a September, when we really wanted it to be fine it all turned to custard.

Perhaps I'm being pessimistic here, after all the weather forecast isn't too bad. Showers tomorrow but probably getting worse on Sunday. But then again quite often they're wrong...

Mangawhai
Now Playing: Evermore - Light Surrounding You
This coming weekend should be really awesome. I'm taking Leila up to Mangawhai Heads for the first time (although oddly enough she has been up there before many years ago with Ella), and we're also taking Amalia up there again. We're going to go up tomorrow night, and my parents will be coming up on the Sunday morning, so we will have the place to ourselves for most of the weekend which should be great. It's really nice these days having the opportunity to get up there quite frequently, and I have the added motivation because Amalia absolutely loves getting up to the "beach house".

I remember the first time I went to Mangawhai Heads actually. It would have been in about 1987 or 1988, and I think we went there as a detour coming back from staying with a friend at the Whangarei Heads. The beach was quite different to how it is now, because a storm had busted through the sandbar and led to much of the estuary becoming quite silted up. Since that time the sandbar has been mended and the estuary has been dredged to ensure it's all great for boaties while better isolating an important nesting area for Fairy Terns (one of the rarest birds in the world).

But anyway, I do remember a couple of things from that first ever trip to Mangawhai Heads. The first thing was all the shellfish everywhere on the beach, it seemed like everywhere I dug there would be all these Pipis - not just the shells but the actual live shellfish. I had occassionally seen them before, but never anywhere near this many. I would dig down into the sand in one spot and come across perhaps 10 of them, which would then oddly stick this "tongue" like thing out of their shells as they attempted to push themselves further down into the sand. As a 5 or 6 year old I was utterly fascinated by these creatures, not only because they looked so bizarre, but also because there were just so many of them. It seemed like I couldn't dig anywhere on the beach without coming across masses of them. I'm not sure whether Mangawhai Heads in those days was always like that, or whether it was just some freak occurrance, but it was definitely pretty cool and obviously something that has stuck in my memory for a very long time.

The other thing I can remember about my first visit to Mangawhai Heads was walking across where the estuary entrance now is. As I mentioned above, because a storm had broken through the sandbar some time in the late 80s, the main entrance to the estuary had become silted up as it was no longer flushed in that direction. As a result we could wander across very shallow water from the main beach to this previously isolted headland, which was pretty cool. The main thing I remember from walking across to the sandbar was the really cool squishy sand, the type that when you walk on it your feet sink into it. I had a ball with this sand, running and jumping to try and dig my feet in as far as possible, and generally enjoying this unusual sand. Now that the estuary has been dredged out and the gap in the sandbar replaced there is a slight tinge of sadness that it's a lot more difficult to get out to the isolated headland (although we do have kayaks that could go across to it). But on the other hand because of the headland's importance to the Fairy Tern (I think there are fewer than 50 birds left!) it's probably best that it is difficult to get to - otherwise dogs would probably rip the place up very quickly indeed.

When we were looking for a place for our beach house in the mid 1990s I never really thought that we would end up at Mangawhai Heads. Most of our searching had been on the Coromandel Peninsula, as that what where we had spent a lot of our holiday times (due to having family in Thames). It seemed almost inevitable that we'd end up getting a place at Onemana, as my mum really liked it there and that was where most of our searching was concentrated. We also spent quite a lot of time looking around Hahei and even found a really nice place for sale at Hot Water Beach - which was a stunning location but a shockingly terrible old bach. However, there often turned out to be something not quite right with most of the Coromandel places, and we ended up buying our section at Mangawhai, then building the house which sits there today on it. In hindsight I'm actually really glad we've ended up where we are, as most of the Coromandel Peninsula is at least two and a half hour's drive away, compared to just over an hour and a half for Mangawhai Heads. Furthermore, buying a section meant that we were able to get exactly what we wanted from the house we built, which has turned out to be a really really awesome place.

Can't wait for tomorrow afternoon now.

The Comfort Zone
Now Playing: Collective Soul - December
Life does seem to be awfully comfortable at the moment. I guess there's this sense that everything's going almost too well, and that because there are relatively few stresses in my life something is almost wrong, because this never happens. Perhaps it's also because things have been rather repetitive lately, not necessarily in a bad way but just in a way that is making the days and weeks fairly indistinguishable from each other. If I think "what was I doing three weeks ago?", I'm most likely to be able to answer that question by thinking what Leila was doing at that time, and then relate myself to that. While I certainly don't envy everything she's had to get up to in the last few weeks, her life's certainly been a lot more... eventful... than mine.

I think perhaps that has a reasonable amount to do with work lately, which has seemed fairly quiet and has a lot of rather boring and repetitive type jobs. I mean it still obviously has its interesting moments, but a lot of the time I'm thinking "hmmm.... another bunch of things to copy from here to here". Quite a few of the projects I'm not quite sure how it's all going to fit together, which means that I'm a little cautious about really getting into it and doing it the way I think it should be done, because that might end up being a big waste of time we don't really have for that project. So instead I find myself chipping away at things, flitting from one thing to the next and to the next, without ever really being able to sink my teeth into anything in particular.

I quite enjoyed reminiscing about my standard 4 camp in yesterday's post. I think that perhaps I will try to recall a few more interesting times of my childhood in this site a bit more, not only to share them with the world, but to also refresh my memory of them a bit. From past school camps in particular I have a tonne of interesting posts to write, as yesterday's one was about the camp that quite possibly has the least notable memories for me from all school camps (though I'll struggle to distinguish between my form 1 and form 2 camps as they were at the same place). However, I don't think I really want to reel of posts of school camps one after the other after the other, but it seems there are a lot of stories for me to tell, which should make fairly interesting reading in the future.

Parau
Now Playing: Keane - Bend & Break
The weather seems to have forgotten Spring this year and just jumped straight from Winter to Summer. Oh I'm definitely not complaining here, as it's been really nice the last couple of days actually thinking it might be nice if it was a tad cooler, rather than the predominant feeling of "Oh my god I wish it was warmer!" One of the jobs we're working on at the moment required a site visit out to Huia, and a bit of bush-walking, which was nice on such a fine day. Huia's a rather bizzarely isolated part of Auckland, on the road out to Whatipu, the most southern of Auckland's west coast beaches. I know I've been out to Whatipu a few times before, but the only time I ever previously recall stopping anywhere near Huia, was for my standard 4 school camp, which was actually closer to Parau. As we drove through Parau I actually spotted the PIC Camp, which looked incredibly run down and decrepit.

But it brought back quite a few memories of my standard 4 camp, that's for sure. School camps in primary school were always exciting if slightly scary prospects: a week away from home in the wild outdoors where I'd have to somewhat look after myself. There would be the insanely long bushwalk that would basically take a day as we would inevitably get lost, there would be the obstacle course where someone would come off and break at least one bone in their body. There would be the disco on the Thursday night... oh the disco.

But anyway, I remember my standard 4 camp was a bit different to the previous school camps I had been on in standard 2 and 3 because it was at the end of the year. This meant it seemed like an eternity since the last school camp I had been on, which was back in April the year before (April 1991 in fact!) So it must have been some time in December when we headed out to Parau. Unlike the time when the school camp was at Piha, this time the nearest "beaches" were the correctly named "Big Muddy Creek" and "Little Muddy Creek". I remember from either the first or second day of the camp wading out into the mud of the Manukau Harbour getting incredibly covered in mud and dirt, while other people tried to bury themselves as deep as they could into the mud. There was a girl I was quite keen on at the time (oh the 10 year old crush!) who I ended up having probably a more in depth and interesting conversation with on that trek through the mud than I had ever managed in the 4 years she had been in my classes for, and ever really managed again after that. From memory, that was definitely the highlight of the week, after that it all seemed to go downhill.

There is a magic rule about going to school camps and actually enjoying yourself, and it all comes down to socks. No I'm not joking. There's a formula for working out how many pairs of socks you might need to get through a week: take the number of days you'll be away, double it, add in some more... and you'll still not have enough pairs. If I remember rightly my standard 4 camp was the time I really got that formula wrong, because I remember having to trek around in bare feet for much of the second half of the week. This might not usually be a problem, but for some reason the grassy fields around the camp seemed to me like the grass version of gorse, as I remember taking a painful eternity to cross one of the fields, jumping from one little patch of slightly less prickly grass to the next. I really regretted not having those extra socks, or some sandles... or anything that wasn't mud covered by about halfway through the week.

My memories of the second half of the week get a bit confusing. I know that the disco turned out to be the biggest flop ever, which was somewhat of a surprise as the previous two (towards the end of my standard 2 and standard 3 camps) had been really awesome, with everyone dancing (to MC Hammer!) quite easily. Perhaps there was a smaller group of people this time around, which made everyone more self-conscious, but the only thing that really seemed to happen during the disco was everyone standing around trying to build up the courage to ask the girl/guy they had secretly admired all year to dance. As normal primary school custom seemed to require, even if the girl/guy who you really liked asked to dance with you, you had to appear highly reluctant and totally conceal the fact that you were actually amazingly happy about it. I played along, and when someone suggested I should dance with the girl I was qutie keen on, I did the normal thing and seemed reluctant. However, I was taken seriously and passed over the one chance I ever really had. I'm pretty sure that would have been the Thursday night, as that was the customary "Disco Night", but I had strange memories of the second half of that school camp slowly falling apart as people seemed to disappear off home, including most of my friends. Perhaps they just went off early on the Friday as they were picked up by their parents, or perhaps it was something a little more severe, but as it was 14 years ago my memory is a little fuzzy on it.

In any case, I'll always be reminded of my standard 4 camp whenever I go out near Parau, Huia or Whatipu. I have been to Piha so many times it doesn't really remind me of my standard 2 camp, while I haven't really been back to the sites of other camps I had in primary or intermediate school. Perhaps one day I'll get around to writing about these other camps. I actually think I'll remember them more than the Parau one for some reason.

The Neglected Blog
Now Playing: Snow Patrol - Run
Well I guess my blog has been somewhat neglected in the past few days. This weekend I didn't find myself particularly motivated to update, as I spent much of the time playing with Amalia (on Saturday) and then playing Sims with Leila (yesterday). Blogging is one of those things that the more I tend to do it, the more I seem to have things to write about. It's like the whole thing gets momentum going and I think in my everyday life "hey... that would be something cool to write about in my blog", whereas when I'm not really getting into it quite so much I get to the update page and go "hmmmm... what on earth am I going to write about", and end up making a somewhat boring "yesterday I did this, then this, then this" kind of entry.

Anyway, yesterday I finally got to sleep in properly for the first time in forever. Every second Sunday is like my one sleep in opportunity, and it was rather frustrating two weeks ago when our cat Blossom decided that she would meow outside my window at about 7am wanting to be let inside. Well there went that opportunity. This time we were smarter though, and I stayed at Leila's place on Saturday night so that problem would be avoided. Somewhat annoying I then found myself naturally waking up at 8.30am, but I did manage to get back to sleep and by the time I woke up properly I think it was about midday. There's always a bit of a double-edged sword though when it comes to having big long sleep-ins. They're great once in a while because it's frustrating having to get up at like 7.30am every day to go to work; but at the same time there's this tinge of sadness crawling out of bed so late because half of your Sunday has gone, which means that you're that much closer to Monday and being back at work. However, fortunately after yesterday morning had disappeared the afternoon seemed to go by fairly slowly, so I had a quite relaxing time. Leila and I managed to figure out how to transport Sims houses and characters from one computer to another, and then import them into the game. This is pretty cool as it now means the neighbourhood on my computer is pretty damn full and a lot more diverse than it was before. In fact there are now probably more houses and possibly more characters than I had when I was playing Sims on Jess' computer, although as yet the characters are nowhere near as well developed. After the annoyance of losing all those characters, it's really great to get back in a situation that is going to be even better than before. As I've said previously, it's a reasonably good metaphor for my life actually.

Sensing Summer
Now Playing: Coldplay - The Hardest Part
Since the start of September the weather has been almost remarkable in its improvement. In the past I generally laugh at the idea that the seasons can be neatly divided into four, but oddly enough it seems like this year the day September 1st rolled around the weather decided it wanted to be spring. Today was a bit cooler, but yesterday in particular I really got the feeling that summer was well and truly on its way, a nice feeling of familiarity with something that's got really nice connotations. I don't know whether it was the different shade of light, or the fact that I could walk around in just a shirt and jeans without feeling freezing cold, but the combination of everything really made it seem summery for the first time.

Summer has always been my favourite time of the year. Although I'm not hugely an outdoor person, many of my happy childhood memories, as well as a lot of the good times in my life more recently have come during summer. Taking Amalia swimming in the sea at the start of the year, making big sandcastles with her (though we did that in winter too!) Because of these reasons it just has such a nice feeling for me, a sense of happiness and optimism about life that I seem to lack during the winter months. Summer has these associations that just bring it alive: the sound of cicadas, the smell of barbeques and sunscreen, and the long evenings where you can still be outside at 8.30 or 9.00pm and it's not cold and dark. Bring it on!

Furthermore, I will have the chance this summer to have a reasonable length proper holiday for the first time since July last year when I went overseas. Sure I have had a few days off here and there since then, including about 4-5 days over the new year, but nothing really that substantial. That always seems to be the tricky thing about being at university, on paper you have hugely long holidays (except when you're doing a thesis), but throughout those holidays you always end up working significant hours to either pay the student allowance you can no longer get, or to save for next year's fees. Conversely, even though only having four weeks of holiday seems like nothing compared to the months of university 'holidays', it will actually be a chance to have real break. I have four weeks annual leave, of which so far I have only taken two days, which leaves me with quite a significant amount of holiday time left for the end of the year, so I should really have the chance to get a decent holiday. But I can't be too excited quite yet, as my holiday is still just over three months away. Hell.... even CMJ II will be finished by then.

Time
Now Playing: Coldplay - Spies
I have quite often written in the past how it seems strange how my perceptions of time can vary so widely: that some "stages" of my life seem to have stretched out and anything before them seems like ages ago, while other stages seem to fly past really really quickly. I have often found myself thinking "I can't believe we're over halfway through the year already! New Year's just seems like a couple of months ago!" For me at the moment it doesn't really seem like this year has just disappeared by really fast, and in actual fact the beginning of the year seems like quite a long time ago indeed. Furthermore, months as recent as April and May almost feel like a lifetime ago, yet at the same time my trip to Mt Ruapehu doesn't really seem that long ago, but was in fact almost two months back. Another situation where my perception of time was completely different to reality was in my trip to Canada and the USA last year. Towards the end of the trip I remember talking to my mum about how it seemed like we had been away for ages, and we both agreed that it felt like it could have been almost 3 months we had been out of New Zealand, rather than just the three weeks. This was by no means a bad thing at all, as you never really want your holidays to disappear too quickly.

I was talking with Leila last night about why the same period of time can end up being perceived so differently in our memories, and why (for example) two months ago can seem quite recent, yet three months back feels like ages ago. Eventually the answer ended up seeming surprisingly simple, that our memories obviously remember events rather than actual days or weeks that pass, and that the more events we have in our lives over a certain period the "slower" that time is likely to be perceived by us in the long-run.

This ended up making quite a lot of sense to me. Of course my three week trip to Canada and the USA would seem like a whole heap longer, because we did so much in those three weeks. Not only were we doing stuff all the time, but we were also travelling from place to place, and everything was so memorable. Try thinking of the last time you could remember in detail what you had been up to for every day in the past three weeks. Conversely, when life is rather monotonous and repetitive time will obviously fly by in your memory of it, because there just isn't much particularly memorable about that period, and the days and weeks just merge together in your retrospective view of it.

As well as simply the 'number of memorable things happening', notable changes to your life also seem to have an impact on your perception of time. That's clearly been the case for me this year, as the latest phase of my life: since I started going out with Leila - is quite distinct from the phase before that: living at home but before I was going out with Leila - and the one before that: living with Jess in Takapuna. Shifting from one "phase" to the next and then to the next seems to make those previous phases seem like much longer time ago than they actually are. For example, the first week I was going out with Leila seems an awful lot more recent than the last week I wasn't going out with her, even though there's only a week between the two.

So yeah, overall I guess time fascinates me because we all think its a constant that doesn't change in its speed (which is obviously technically true), but at the same time our perception of its passing can be so varied. This is probably my geographical side coming out, as the same thing is obviously true for distance: that while distance is a constant (100m is always 100m), our ease of travelling that distance greatly affects our perception of it. I mean who would have thought Waiheke is much closer to downtown Auckland than Manukau City is?

The "......" Year
Now Playing: Seal - Cry
I do wonder how I'll look back on 2006 in the years to come. This has well and truly been the most bizarre and topsy turvy year of my life for quite a long time, although if I really think about it out of the nine months (almost) that have gone past so far in 2006 only June and July were really that bad, and in fact most of the other times were in fact really damn good. At the start of this year I was unusually confident that this would be a good year, and although things have turned out rather vastly differently to how I anticipated them to, it seems like I will end up being quite correct in my confidence.

So what's with all the reminiscence? Well today I was reading through Imogen's blog, and her latest entry is a real simplification of her past few years down to "The Purgatory Year", "The Discovery Year" and so on. I found this really interesting beause I have often thought how I could "classify" a particular year of my life. Generally my classifications are based around the large events of that year, or what I was generally up to, rather than an overall "feeling" I got from the year, but that is a really interesting way to think about things. I'm not quite sure yet what "feeling" I would attach to this year, but it could almost be a "surprising happiness", based on how I have managed to get through and recover from a tremendously bad series of events in June and July. I am still quite surprised at how I managed to pick myself up from everything, considering how it all seemed to be one thing after the next after the next, and have actually managed to get myself in a situation where I'm now actually happier with my life than I was back in May before everything started to turn to custard.

I also get the feeling that in the past everything that did go wrong a few months back would have got me down for a lot longer than it did this time. Although there's no mistaking that I did feel like utter crap at various stages I always had confidence in my ability to bounce back from it all, confidence in myself to find an even better girlfriend and to sort out everything else that has messed up. In a strange way, because things had gone really well most of my time with Jess I knew that there was no reason why that couldn't happen again, to an even greater extent.

So anyway.. my last few years:

2001: The Big Change Year
2002: The Moving Out Of Home Year
2003: The McDonald's and Oh My God I'm Going to be a Father Year
2004: The I Am a Father Year
2005: The Improving Year
2006: The Surprisingly Good Topsy Turvy Year

Of course this is like the biggest over-simplication ever of my past few years, and you would only need to read the past months to realise that, but it is interesting to see how I could simplify my life down to the sentences above.

Memories
I had Amalia for the whole of the weekend again, which was really cool. Although we didn't go anywhere, it was great to have her for an extended period of time. When I have her the whole weekend it almost becomes "normal" for her to be here with me, which is a really nice feeling. I also took her to the Domain and Cornwall Park today, a good way to enjoy what was a reasonably good day weather-wise actually. It's really good in the last few months that I feel like Amalia has begun to really understand me, and I can explain things to her a lot more than was the case in the past. She's also always had a good memory of things, often better than mine when it comes to "where did you put....?" questions, but its interesting to think that only very recently is there really a chance for her to permanently remember anything that's going on in her life.

My earliest memory would have been from November 5th 1984, which would have made me just over two and a half at the time. I know the exact date because it was Guy Fawkes that year, and I have a distinct memory of sitting between my parents looking at a sparkler and being really amazed by it. I remember the side of the house we were sitting against, which wasn't actually at my home now but at a place near the top of our street. It's funny to think that in about two months time Amalia will be that age, she will be of an age where there's a distinct possibility that she could get to adulthood and remember some event that happened. I guess this could be a bit scary in some respects, but in other ways its actually something of a relief I think as there's always this "shit... if I disappeared then there's a chance she would never actually remember me" fear. Obviously unless I get hit by a bus tomorrow that's a very unlikely occurrance in Amalia's case, but I have wondered about how well I would be remembered by people such as Natalie's cousins, who I had a lot to do with when they were really young, but haven't seen nearly as much throughout the last year or two. I do still see them from time to time, but it has made me wonder if there was a really long gap between seeing them whether they would remember me at the end of it.

Memories are a very strange thing, most obviously in the sense that I can remember events that occurred over 20 years ago but at the same time can't remember where I put my damn wallet/cellphone/car-keys seemingly every morning. Obviously my mind prioritises what's important and what's not, and certain things stick in my memory whether I want them to or not (oh how I wish I could forget intermediate!) But when it comes to really early memories the actual "memory" is obviously after a few years just a memory of a memory of a memory, and has probably been somewhat modified over the years, in a "chinese whispers" kind of way. The two memories I have which I can date from before I was three (the one mentioned above, and also another memory of later that November when I went to the hospital when my cousin was born), stand out because I prioritised remembering them in the past because they were my earliest, but in fact may have just been two of many others I have locked away somewhere in my subconscious. There are other snippets I have which may date back to that time, but I can't be quite sure because there's no real way of knowing exactly "when" they were, and there are others which I am not quite sure whether they are dreams from later on, or actual memories themselves. It feels really frustrating knowing that I do have all these other memories locked away in the depths of my subconscious, but that I'm unlikely to ever be able to access them again, or to sort them into something comprehensible enough to "date" it. It's that same sense of frustration I have with myself for forgetting dreams the moment I wake up each morning, but at the same time knowing I had an immensely rich and detailed dream that would be fantastically fascinating to ponder over and write about.

I think that possibly one of the reasons I have been thinking about the whole "early memory" thing a bit lately is because of this realisation that Ella will be going overseas in November for potentially a couple of years, and obviously will miss out on a big chunk of Amalia's early years. Hopefully with the help of programs such as Skype we will at least be able to talk to and see Ella while she's overseas, but it will still be a long time, especially for someone like Amalia. I guess it will be interesting how "unknown" Ella will be to Amalia when she does get back from overseas.

A Weird Week
This week has been a bit odd. Work has drifted by pretty slowly, as although the 'big picture' of what I've been doing is fairly interesting, the little bits are quite the opposite: searching through cadastral infromation for certain numbers, searching for certain landowners and searching for different developer companies. It has been interesting though to find out where all recent development is taking place throughout Auckland, and as a result I feel like I 'know' the city even better now - not only the parts which have been around for a long time but also those which are growing at the moment. But overall work just seemed a bit slow and dreary for much of the week, and although the work was there for me to do I didn't really seem to have tremendously much motivation.

I think that I've also ended up sharing Leila's frustration about her cold just not going away, and actually further deteriorating in the past few days into a fairly nasty fever. There's always this sense of frustration and hopelessness when someone close to you is sick. You feel like you need to do something more to help them feel better, to really look after them and nurse them back to health; but at the same time you realise that there really is bugger all you can do to make them better, and that all you can really do is say again and again "I hope you get better soon". It is really frustrating for Leila that this has come at a time when she can't just take a few days fully off everything to properly recover, as she has her show performances each day from yesterday through till Sunday - including two tomorrow.

It's always ironic that you seem to get sick at the very times when it's most inconvenient. It's like your body waits until you have many university essays due, or other important commitments before finally ticking over from the "manageable but not quite right", to the "ugh I need to collapse". I mean if I was to get sick now it really wouldn't be a particularly big deal as there isn't anything going at work that finishes within the immediate future, and pretty much everything else would be able to sort itself out. But no, I'm pretty much healthy at the moment. I can almost guarantee that the next time I do get sick will be when everything truly demands me not to feel bad. Life is very ironic at times.

Thursdays
Thursdays have always been the most nondescript day of the week. Mondays, while annoying as hell because you're back at work/school/uni, is at least noticeable for being the first day of the week. Likewise, Friday is notable for being the last day and Wednesday the middle day. For some reason Tuesdays always seem a little more notable than Thursdays for me, possibly because at high school we had a different timetabling on Tuesdays and finished early. Then again at McDonald's for quite some time the first three days of the week were notable for specials on particular burgers, before nondescript Thursday came along and was totally notable for... well... nothing really. On the bright side, Thursday is the day before Friday, which is the day before the weekend. So it's not all bad.

Leila has her first performance tonight for the production that her theatre class has been working on intensely (big understatement there) for the past few weeks. Her latest illness has come at absolutely the wrong time, just before this production, but hopefully the worst has passed and she'll be fine for the next few days. I'm still quite amazed that I've avoided getting sick in the past few weeks as it seems almost everyone I know has got something - at least to some extent. There were a couple of nights where I felt like I might have been coming down with a bug, as my throat and eyes got a bit sore, but then by the morning I felt fine again. I am generally quite resiliant against getting sick, as I never seemed to miss more than 2 or 3 days a year of school, compared to other people I knew who would miss a day every week or so it seemed. In the past few years I seem to have caught colds and the flu a bit more readily than before, although I can only remember once, back in about July 2003, when I took more than a day off work. And this year the last time I remember being sick was in about February, when I spent a whole day lying in bed playing Sims with a fever, which was a really weird combination of things and had my mind racing about Sims, day and night, for about the next three days.

Some people have really cool dreams when they're sick, and I think sometimes I am like that. When I'm really feverish it seems like my mind suddenly operates at about four times its normal speed, and the most inane little things (like how four pieces of lego would fit together) will just flit through my mind again and again and again. My dreams are sometimes unusually vivid and realistic, although generally just fit in with that same "hyper-speed" feeling that I have when awake. I guess when you're having a fever your brain is warmer than normal, so perhaps that makes things zip around it faster than normal. If you didn't feel so wretchedly hot and cold at the same time, it might actually be quite a fun sensation.

The Calm
This is turning out to be another one of those weeks that disappears by pretty quickly. I am guessing this is largely the result of things actually being in some sort of a pattern for the first time in quite a while. My life altogether doesn't seem particularly busy at the moment, which I guess is a good thing as I do feel generally a lot more relaxed and laid back about things than usual.

In total contrast Leila's life is incredibly busy at the moment, with rehearsals for a theatre show which starts tomorrow, as well as other papers and essays. I guess this combination of her being really busy and me feeling quite the opposite is probably why I'm ending up talking about her life in my blog. But anyway, this is her last half-semester of university for her entire degree, which is exciting. I remember the last few weeks of my Bachelors degree, back in October 2002, as being probably about my best time at university. After having our fieldtrip to Hastings for my research geography paper, I actually knew a whole bunch of people for really the first time. These faces that I had sat in lectures with over the years, and only ever got to know a few of, suddenly had names and personalities. The only down side was that it seemed really frustrating that I had only got to know everyone now, when university was merely a few weeks away from finishing. I did finish my degree by doing a relatively easier workload of only three papers though, while Leila has to struggle through with four. However, there's a REALLY long holiday for her to look forward to at the end of it all.

I went to see Amalia last night, which was fun as per usual. It's really awesome now that she's developed her talking to such an extent that I can really have conversations with her. In the past a lot of the talking we had went along the lines of "what's that?".... "cat!", but now I can really ask her what she's been up to today, and we can play more complex games involving more talking than before. It's also really amazing to see her whole personality develop along with this all. I imagine that as her language is developing, this gives her the ability to arrange her thoughts in a more orderly fashion, and to therefore think through things more than she did before. I can sometimes see this where I'll ask her a question that she can't quite answer straight away, so she'll stop herself for a second, go "hmmm..." and then say something. I guess that because I see her all the time I don't notice the changes quite as drastically as other people, but she seems to be developing so fast I do notice it when I think back a few weeks. It's quite amazing really.

Sims 2
A lack of posting motivation... seems strange after all my enthusiasm of last week, but I guess it was pretty inevitable really as I managed to achieve my goal of updating each day of last week.

Yesterday I had a pretty quiet day. Leila had her first day off in months so we had a really good "blob" day. This largely consisted of building Sims houses, which has been a bit of an obsession lately. We work quite well playing the game together, as I enjoy making the houses and then playing them, but not decorating them whereas Leila enjoys decorating the houses most of all. This works out quite well as we each work on the new houses at various stages. It also means that we have a bit of a bad habit of creating far more houses than we actually need to play, because we do seem to enjoy making the houses more than actually playing them.

I'm always looking for a bit of inspiration for the design of the houses we make in the Sims. In the past I have looked up online house plans, and they've proved really useful creating something that works well. On Saturday I had the idea that we could use some of the nicer houses around Auckland as inspiration - taking photos of them to jog our memories when we got back to actually building the houses. So yesterday afternoon Leila and I had a quick drive around some of the nicer suburbs of Auckland taking a few photos. There were some really nice places in Ponsonby and Herne Bay that we photographed, and then yesterday evening we managed to quite accurately replicate a couple of the two-storey villas on John Street in Ponsonby. It was pretty cool to have my photo of the houses next to the Sims houses we had created - and seeing the similarities.

Today was a pretty normal day back at work. The morning went by quite quickly as I had a lot to do, but then the afternoon dragged on. Mondays.....

A Week Of Posts

Well I've finally managed it! Even though in the past I have generally been more productive with my posting on my blog than so far this year, up until now I don't think I had ever managed to do a whole week of posts with no gap (Sunday to Saturday that is). I guess it's a sign of my continued interest in this blog of late, which has not only resulted in a lot more posts, but also a lot more visits (honestly they're not all me). Obviously this is a good sign for the future of this site.

Anyway, today I had a pretty good day with Amalia. She was a little strange at first last night, actually not wanting to come over initially (which is very unlike her as she normally jumps at the first sign of coming over to "Nan's House". This was a little upsetting, although eventually she came around and after a little while here she was herself again. Strangely enough she was also not particularly keen to go back to her mum's today, so perhaps she's just going through a bit of a phase of not wanting change at the moment. It all reminds me of myself when I was younger actually, as I was never keen at all to go anywhere - whether it was a friend's place or just out - but once I was there I was never keen to leave and come home again. It always just seemed so inconvenient that whatever I was doing would get disrupted, whether it was the game I was playing at home before we had to leave, or it was the game that I had got going at my friend's place. Perhaps this has rubbed off on Amalia a bit, or maybe her not feeling 100% in the last few days has also meant that she hasn't been her normal bubbly self in every respect, although she did seem fine for most of today.

I also took Amalia out to see my Nana today. I always think it's pretty cool that Amalia has managed that whole "4th generation" thing, which was something I never got at all, because by the time I was born all my great-grandparents were well gone. It was good for me to see my Nana as well, although at the same time it's quite sad in a few ways because of how her health has declined in the past few years. My Nana is about the toughest person out there, she's battled through just about every cancer you could imagine and losing an eye many years ago. But in the past few years she's slowly lost sight in her other eye, and overall has just seemed less of 'herself', which is kind of sad and heart-breaking to see. The things that she used to be able to to so easily are now a struggle, but amazingly she does seem to get on with things, and appears to be in reasonably good spirits overall. Taking Amalia out to see her is great, as it hopefully lightens up her day quite significantly, and even though she can't really see Amalia particularly well, she still seems quite a lot happier. Amalia's enthusiasm rubs off on her and gives her something to talk about for the next while.

Friday Already!
Wow this week has truly just flown by. It doesn't seem very long at all that it was last weekend up at Mangawhai Heads, but somehow it's already managed to be Friday. That's a very good thing though.

I have had a fairly interesting and varied week at work, shifting into a new project involving the analysis of recent subdivisions in the Auckland Region, as well as the variety of other projects that are ongoing. One thing I really do like about my job is that I'm continually feeling like I'm getting to know Auckland better and better. I've always had quite an interest in "what's going on" in Auckland, with regards to infrastructure developments and new areas of the city popping up, but for a long time I wasn't really able to fulfil my interest for this information. However, working as a planning consultant means that we're always 'at the coalface' of anything new that's happening around the city - whether it's a roading project or some subdivision, and it's quite amazing to see how fast things are changing in some areas (like Flat Bush). I guess a lot of the information has always been out there, and of course the evidence of change exists on the ground, but now I know where to look for information on what's happening, and I also have an excuse to travel to the new and growing parts of Auckland. I can't exactly see myself needing to head out to the back of Botany Downs for any other reason.

On a semi-related note I had a rather interesting afternoon. I was travelling to Manukau City with my boss Duncan, as we had a meeting there regarding one of the large projects we're working on at the moment, when his car started playing up along Wiri Station Road, a VERY busy arterial road in the area. Although his car was in drive, it seemed like it had clicked out into neutral as we were driving along, and had absolutely no power. So we limped along a bit longer, trying to get the thing to click back, but to no avail. The car eventually came to a stop in a rather nasty location, although we 'sort of' managed to pull it off to the side of the road. After a couple more attempts to kick it back into action we pushed it off the road completely and called the AA. Duncan had to go to the meeting to I waited around for the AA guy, which took about 45 minutes, and then the tow truck once he had established it was probably not a good idea to try to move it anywhere. All in all it was a bit of a frustrating afternoon, as I had been looking forward to the meetings, as they were fairly important in ensuring that we're all on the same wavelength before the project heads into a critical stage. But such is life I suppose, and at least it meant I had a fairly relaxing time dozing in the car until the AA guy and the tow truck arrived.

Post Number 629
I know there's nothing really remarkable in this being the 629th post (well, since January 2002). I think it's just pretty crazy that I've managed to stick at something for quite this long. When I was younger I always thought that it might be pretty cool to keep some sort of a diary, to keep track of what was going on in my life and to let out all my frustrations. I think a couple of times I wrote something on about January 1st, January 2nd.... and that was it. There must be countless empty old diaries and notebooks hidden away somewhere in the darkest depths of my bedroom. But for some reason this blog has been different. I've managed to maintain interest in it for five and a half years (with some breaks), and managed to make ... well.... I would guess about 750 posts at least if you include 2001. A pretty amazing feat really.

I think I mention this because I see around me new blogs popping up left, right and centre. As I mentioned a few posts back a whole pile of people I know, or very indirectly know, have begun blogs recently. Fortunately for now they all seem to have tonnes of stuff to write about, and are actually writing lengthy posts that I could only really dream about. I do hope that this initial enthusiasm doesn't disappear, that three or four years down the track they'll still be going strong and have this incredibly impressive archive to look back on. The fantastically interesting blog that hasn't been updated for three years is a commonly sad story - which has afflicted quite a few people I know. However, I have great optimism that Leila will keep hers going - even though she has started and abandoned a few blogs in the past - partly because I'll be there to bug her to update, and partly because I think she'll find that it's a great way to link her writing and her life. Furthermore, as a blog gets larger you start to feel that you need to update it for its own sake, for the fact that you've put so much into it that you can't abandon it now. That might eventually kick in for her if I can get her through the first few months.

I had Amalia stay last night, which was rather different as it was a Wednesday night. While it was a bit annoying having to leave her this morning to head off to work, it was still really cool having her overnight yet again as we could do the whole morning cuddles thing. It's now almost two weeks into the 'new arrangement' with regards to how often I'm seeing Amalia, and so far it's actually been really cool. Sure, it's a bit hard getting through three day gaps when in the past there had never been more than a two day gap without seeing her, but being able to take her away for the weekend and seeing her for longer when I do have her is making up for it. I think that we're able to have more quality time together, which is really fantastic. It also feels like such a crucial time to have a lot of contact (although when has it not felt like that?) as Amalia's sentences and language skills are just developing at the speed of light at the moment.

502 Proxy Errors
Yes... I know about them. I guess if you have come far enough to read this post then either you were lucky not to be nailed by Mr 502, or you were smart enough to click on refresh once or twice. They're annoying me too, and as far as I know they're nothing to do with me (I'm not even sure I know exactly what a proxy is). Angelfire's support, which used to be e-mail based, is now in some sort of forum that doesn't seem to be working, so I'm not quite sure what steps I need to take to get the 502 proxy errors sorted out. Hopefully they don't hang around for too long.

I have had a pretty interesting day at work so far, actually. A new project that we're involved in required, as its first step, a good drive around most of South Auckland's recent subdivisions, to see what kind of housing has been built in particular areas and at what stage the developments are. It was really interesting going to parts of Auckland I'd never ever been to before, and also seeing how "modern" developments progress. Individually, most of the new houses we looked at seem really nice places to live, well built and largely brick-and-tile (the whole leaky building crisis has put people off stucco I think). The outside living areas at first seem shockingly small, but then I guess that's just something everyone's getting used to as the 'good old quater acre section' is basically now just nostalgia, with new sections generally only being 40% of that size. However, it all becomes a bit scary when you start to appreciate the scale of it all, the hundreds and hundreds of houses in some of these subdivisions without any close shops, schools, parks or anything. My new urbanist thinking starts to cry out "but they'll have to drive EVERYWHERE!", which I guess doesn't concern the developers too much but should have prompted the council to at least allow a few shops in the middle of these areas.

Anyway, it was nice to get out of the office for most of the morning and to see parts of Auckland that I have never been to before. There are now very few major parts of the city I've never been to before, as today I ticked off Weymouth - a rather obscure corner of South Auckland. I do find myself most interested by jobs that get me out of the office, that get me meeting clients or doing site visits etc. I guess there's only so much sitting in front of a computer that anyone can do before they start dreaming of a bit of fresh air.

Yesterday I managed to finish off my long-running project of switching around my archived blog entries to the new format. The whole thing isn't possible, as Angelfire's Blog Builder can't post before 2002, but everything back to January 2002 is now on the new format. At a guess this is probably about 85% of this blog. The process of switching things over has meant I've really had a good read through a lot of my old posts for the first time in ages. It's interesting to see how my life has developed in the past four years - all the highs and lows it's gone through in order to reach the point it is now. It's always interesting to think that if every last little step that was taken in the past four years (well, forever really) hadn't been exactly as it was, then theoretically life could be totally different to how it is now. I remember someone once telling me that there are about five really key moments in everyone's life, that change everything and really define your life. I suppose that's true in some respects, although my thinking is more along the lines of every little thing has the potential to define your life. If you hadn't done this little thing, then that little thing and that other thing (and so on forever) wouldn't have happened.

My overall point (there is one... I'm sure), is that because I'm happy with how my life is at the moment (really happy actually) I can't feel bad about anything which has happened in the past because if that hadn't happened then I probably wouldn't be where I am now. Even the really nasty things that happened to me in the past few months have actually turned out to be positives in the long run. I wouldn't have found an even better girlfriend in Leila if Jess hadn't broke up with me; I wouldn't have got a much better car (this quickly) if I hadn't crashed my old one; I wouldn't have a really fast new laptop if my old one hadn't been stolen and so on.

Ugh that almost seems so overly positive that it's like a Disney Movie. Bring on the cheesy music.

Wikijarbury
I've always been the kind of person who wants to find out "more" about everything. I spent an awful lot of my childhood reading through atlases and encyclopedias (yeah nerdy I know) just because it was all fantastic information that I felt like I just had to know. Of course, encyclopedias of the 'big book' kind are now just so last century, as a larger encyclopedia than could have ever been published has appeared on the net, in the form of Wikipedia. I can't quite remember when I first started using Wikipedia, but I know it was relatively recently, possibly last year. The thought of random people actually writing an encyclopedia got me rather suspicious at first, because of the whole "but who's going to edit it and make sure it isn't full of crap?" theory. However, it did seem to be awfully informative and provided exactly what I really felt like I wanted to know without all the unnecessary stuff that encyclopedias often fill themselves with. Furthermore, it was REALLY up to date, something encyclopedias NEVER are. Information on San Francisco let me know exactly how progress was going on the new San Francisco Bay Bridge, which I had seen the reconstruction of (the eastern part of it), while in San Francisco.

However, it took until quite recently for me to actually realise that I might have a role to play in actually editing Wikipedia entries myself, that have a reasonable amount of knowledge myself that could be useful in adding to subjects like Auckland's History, transportation stuff, and so on. I even added a few tracts of my thesis to the Auckland page, which felt pretty cool. It's all pretty addictive, as through a few clicks there emerges almost limitless information whatever I might be slightly interested in at any one time, while making a couple of changes, or suggesting changes that could be made through the talk pages is also a never ending process of adding more and more information. I guess it's just another way for me to stamp my mark on the internet... as long as what I write isn't crap and someone reverts my changes straight away.

The Blog Train
I'm not quite sure what I've started here, but lately it seems like a tonne of people have started new blogs. I don't really want to feel like it's all due to me, because that would seem vain and self-promoting - but strangely enough in this situation it does seem to have started with me.

Of course there's nothing new about this blog, as it's been going for over five and a half years now, although admittedly with a pretty long break back in 2004. However, in the last couple of weeks Leila has started a blog of her own, which I've already commented on a few times, and strongly recommend, not only because she's my girlfriend but also because her entries are generally so much better written and more interesting than anything I could ever come up with. Leila e-mailed some of her friends and family to let them know that she'd started a blog, and for them to drop by for a read if they wanted to. So her sister Bernice and her friend Imogen have both started blogs, while the train continued as it seems Imogen's friend Vanessa started another blog of her own. Confused yet?

What makes this slightly strange is that I've never met either Imogen or Vanessa, I don't even know whether Leila knows Vanessa, but through a strange set of circumstances I seem to have indirectly inspired four people to start new blogs in the last couple of weeks. Furthermore, through Vanessa's site I found out that she knows Teri, who I also know independent of all that - talk about a bloody small world! As long as everyone maintains interest this should provide me with quite a lot of fairly interesting reading in the future, as I always find the blogs of people I know (however indirectly) more interesting than those of complete random strangers living on the other side of the world.

It's also quite amusing to see how this whole indirect 'blog-train' has happened. I know that reading Leila's blog and knowing that she's reading mine gives me more interest in it, and more motivation to improve what I'm writing about. In the past I've often sat in front of the computer for ages wondering what I was going to write my post about, yet now I almost feel that I have post topics overload. There are a couple I will get around to writing about, but every time it just seems there's something much more interesting to write about, or something that just needs to be written about there and then, otherwise it will have lost its point.

Yay, been going out with Leila for one month as of today. In some ways it seems like the time has flown, yet in others it seems like we've been together for ages.

Sandcastles

Well the weather gods were smiling on us for the weekend, and I got out of the city for the first time in a while, which was also nice. This was the second time I've taken Amalia up to Mangawhai Heads, something that will hopefully happen quite a bit more frequently as she had an absolute ball the whole weekend. The house next-door to our beach house has a Golden Retriever dog "Bozzie", who generally spends the whole weekend with us whenever we are there, and Amalia just had a great time playing with him and giving him cuddles. I'm really not a 'dog person', but if I was to ever have a dog it would probably be a Golden Retriever. Amalia was giving him cuddles, brushing his fur coat and even reading him books - at one stage she took a Spot book down to the floor next to him, pointed at the dog in the book and said to Bozzie ".... like you Bozzie".

Because of the nice weather we were also able to get down to the beach both yesterday and today. Amalia was really excited at the prospect of helping me build sandcastles, as the question "what do we do at the beach?" had repeatedly got the response "build sandcastles Daddy".So we got stuck into building sandcastles, which effectively means me digging the trenches, tunnels and piling up the sand into 'castles', while she did her best to destroy everything I had made through jumping on the castles, filling in the trenches and doing her best to jump on the tunnels to collapse then. Luckily I was a bit faster than her with the building, so we did actually get somewhere - eventually making a big long tunnel which hooked back on itself before diving into an even lower tunnel that went below the trench of the first one (it makes sense... honestly). My Dad also helped the sandcastle building extravaganza, building a sand road that went over a whole pile of rocks, until Amalia decided she'd try to follow the road and ended up pretty much destroying it in the process. But we couldn't really complain, as what's the point of a road if nobody's going to use it?

The really cool thing was that we managed to build our sandcastles above the high-tide level, which means that the bones of our structure was still there when we went back today. Sure the tunnels had both collapsed and the big long trench had been semi filled in, but it's better than the normal situation where everything disappears because of the tide. That was the one thing that always annoyed me over the years building amazing complexes in the sand, that whenever I went back the next day they were always gone. It seemed so sad putting so much effort into something with the full knowledge that there would be no lasting trace of it, no legacy of all my hard work. Today we probably were able to spend a little longer on the beach, and Amalia wasn't quite so destructive as she found out it was actually really cool sticking her hand down a tunnel and being able to touch my fingers. I found a massive piece of driftwood and turned in into a bridge, with properly dug footings and everything, before digging what was perhaps the biggest tunnel I've ever dug, it probably ended up almost big enough for Amalia to have crawled through, but that's not a particularly safe thing to do so I made sure she only stuck her hand down the hole. I felt a little bit silly continuing to dig away when Amalia went for a walk up the sand dunes with my parents, but hey I was having fun!

All this sandcastle building really brought back tonnes of my own childhood memories, as it feels like I spent about half my childhood on a beach, digging tunnels, trenches or moats, and building big sandcastles, cities or walls. I think some of my earliest sandcastle building memories come from Piha beach, where I spent a lot of time as a kid. I always got frustrated that I could only ever dig down a certain depth before reaching water, and then once water had been reached no matter how much more sand you dredged up you could never get any deeper as the walls of the hole would inevitably end up collapsing. The good side of reaching the really wet sand was that it set really hard, so you could make quite strong structures, and also if it was really wet you could let it dribble through your fingers into really fantastic towers as it set hard almost immediately. The best sandcastles I think I've ever built were on Great Barrier Island, where we visited at the start of 1997 (yeah I know I was 14 then... what on earth was I doing building sandcastles?) There, on Medlands Beach Ella and I had the whole massive beach to ourselves, so instead of building sandcastles I ended up building sandcities. Complete with roads, houses, motorways, shops and even parks, I even amazed myself at the scale of it all. Then one afternoon we dug the most giant hole ever, going down a pretty damn long way to hit water, and then extending the hole out wide enough to fit three people quite comfortably. All the dug out sand formed a big ring around the hole, which only made it seem even deeper. I'm sure people walking past wouldn't have been able to see us at all sitting at the bottom of that big hole. We then made big dribble-towers all over the edges of the ring to decorate this amazing structure.

One day I'm sure Amalia and I will build something even better together. In the meantime, I'll give my fingers some time to recover, as their tips feel quite sore at the moment after all today's digging. Maybe we should invest in better plastic spades.