OK, so I managed to forget to update here for an entire week. Even my posts about not posting dried up. Oh well. Oddly enough throughout the last week I've had great ideas for blog posts rolling around in my head on quite a few occasions. I had a couple of awesomely complex and intricate dreams a few days back that I really wanted to write about, but which by now have sadly slipped my mind. Perhaps if I think about them enough for the next while something will come back... perhaps. 

 Anyway, one of the main reasons that I haven't updated this week is that I've become interested in drawing make-believe cities again. Just like my maze craze a few months back, this is something that I used to do a lot in my spare time. In some ways it's the thing that pointed out to me before all else that I wanted to end up being a city planner one day. Over the years I've filled a few exercise books up with cities, although frustratingly the best one I ever drew (all 77 pages of it) has now disappeared, and as I haven't seen it for a good number of years I doubt I'll ever be able to find it. But anyway, last week I started drawing a little more of my most recent city, which I started in May 2002, did a little more on last year, and have now done a little more on again. I messed around with the terrain that the city is to be built on, to make it a bit more interesting, and completed a few more pages of it.

Then I had the idea of scanning in a few of my old cities, the ones that I still have.  So for a part of this week I scanned in the first big city I ever drew, which has come out pretty interestingly. It was really difficult to match up the edges for it, so I've been redoing them, and also slowly redrawing other bits of the city too that I would like to improve upon. It's quite cool to be able to still have the original city in the book where it's always been, but to also now have this giant pasted together photoshop image showing the city in its entireity. Instead of having to turn to page 24 to see the map above, I just need to scroll up a little, and by zooming out I've had the first opportunity to see how the city really looks. 

So slowly I'm fixing up all its problems, adding in new bits here and there, patching up gaps and areas that didn't scan in well. Eventually I'll try to post it online as a PDF, although at the moment it's a 50mb photoshop file, which would take a fair amount of time to upload or download.

Oh... and we're finally going away this weekend to Mangawhai Heads. It's been a while since I was out of Auckland so it'll be great! 

September really should be a nice month, it's officially the start of spring - with warmer weather, less rain, more chance to actually get outside etc. However, while that's true in some respects (I was actually sweating the other night in bed for the first time in quite a few months) it often feels like a particularly "bleah" month. The gap between Queen's Birthday weekend at the start of June and Labour weekend at the end of October feels like an incredibly long wait between "un-normal" weekends. Coming towards the end of a fairly wet (although not particularly cold) winter it really feels like now should be a great time for a good 4 day weekend, a chance to get away from the city and really enjoy what should be the start of spring. Oh well, I guess in a week and a bit I'll have a mini-version of this, with plans to go up to Mangawhai Heads with Amalia, Leila and Bernice - even though it will only be for a couple of days. I think it is the general monotony of life lately that has aided with the whole "bleah" feeling I seem to be mentioning quite a lot in my more recent updates, and more to the point seems to prevent me from updating more - or about more interesting stuff.

I guess that's the curse about working in the suburbs, driving to work (no funny bus stories), having just your boss and yourself in the office (no funny stories about weird workmates), only occasionally getting out of the office to go to meetings and the like (wow, I went to see DoC on Tuesday and today I get to meet someone from a council about a school carpark, thrilling stories there!) It's not that work is bad, although the fractured nature of a lot of what I've been doing in recent months has driven me more than a little insane at times, it's just that it's so unkind to interesting stories emerging from it. Then outside of work things are fun and pleasant - normal life really - but once again not exactly super-kind to interesting blog updates. When I look back at past updates from years ago it's interesting to see how many of them were me moaning about how many essays I needed to get done at university, or moaning about how horrible my McDonald's boss was being at any particular stage. Without such easy update options it has become a bit more of a struggle to find something to write about, and as a result in the last year and a half my updates have generally either been less frequent than before (in the case of the last few months) or they've been about more broad thing than simply "what's going on in my life at the moment". This is simply because what's going on in my life isn't really something particularly interesting to write about "wow, I did the dishes last night... amazing!!!" or it's something that could be interesting, but I can't really write about it - like a detailed explanation of a resource consent application I'm working on at the moment.

Here I go again, writing yet another blog entry about why I'm finding it so difficult to update my blog. It's the ultimate self-perpetuation cycle of cumulative causation, I talk more and more about the reasons for not being able to update my blog, get less and less used to writing about anything else, so therefore keep giving myself more and more reasons to write blog entries about why it's so difficult to update. (damn I really needed an eyes rolling one there).

But anyway, to depart from simply writing more and more about why I'm not updating (which isn't really true as I am actually updating), I might as well try to write a little more about the Rugby World Cup - although the midweek games that have been going on recently haven't been particularly interesting, as I don't care too much whether Italy beats Portugal or not. The most interesting game is coming up this weekend, when Ireland play against France. With France having lost their opening match to Argentina, this game takes on enormous significance for them as they simply have to beat the Irish in order to stay in the tourament. Now if they do beat Ireland - which I think is most likely, then chances are they're going to end up 2nd in their group which means a quarter-final against the All Blacks in Cardiff. Now this may not happen if Ireland can somehow beat Argentina, in which case all three 'top' teams in that group would have each won one and lost one of the 'big' matches. In this case it'll come down to bonus points, and there France may come out tops as they got close to Argentina and hammered Namibia (and should beat Georgia pretty easily). Should this happen the All Blacks will end up playing against either Ireland or Argentina in the quarter final. Needless to say, I'd much prefer the All Blacks to play anyone other than France in a quarter-final. The memories of them beating us in the 1999 semi-final still haunt me, and unlike Ireland or Argentina, France have that ability to play a 'dream game' and beat anyone on their day. Having to beat France, then Australia and then South Africa to win a World Cup also seems a bit unfairly difficult. The other worry here is how utterly rubbish all New Zealand's pool opponents are, which will hardly be good practice for a potential quarter-final against France.

There are still so many possibilities though, which is great as I thought the pool stage of the tournament would be boring as hell! 

It's a funny feeling when you finally feel back to 100% after being somewhat sick for most of the last week. It's as though life went into this alternate place, this tangent completely off-track from what you had actually been working hard on for all the time before it happened. All of a sudden there are all these things to do that you weren't able to get done as you were saving your energy, all these things that you were meant to be doing, this whole pattern to life that you had been establishing but which was rudely interrupted. In many ways that's the biggest annoyance of feeling sick for a while, especially if it's something which has more of an annoyance factor an excrutiatingly uncomfortable aspect to it.

Many aspects of my life feel as though they were really working themselves out before I found myself nailed by my cold last week. I had put together a useful method at work to outline exactly what needed doing each day, so that I would be able to work through an obvious checklist each day, keeping track of what I had achieved and what still needed doing more clearly. Feeling better about myself and my performance at work had filtered through to the rest of my life, yet now it feels like I need to start again in many respects. It shouldn't be too problematic though, as there appears to be quite a lot of work going on at the moment (although it's in rather frustrating little chunks rather than a big project that I can truly focus on).

I'm training myself to think of a post-title after I have written my post - at the moment it's staying nicely blank. It's funny that writing about not writing on here has actually increased the amount that I'm updating in the last few days (wow that's confusing!) Yet if I look back at the history of this blog (and it is quite a significant history) it's quite frequent for me to go on about not updating enough, or how I don't feel as though my updates at the moment are as good as they were at some certain stage of the past, or in better times how I'm happy to be updating so regularly and that I'm pleased with the quality and length of the posts I'm writing. In some ways it's just an easy thing to write about, I don't need to worry about what aspect of my outside life I'm opening up to on here, as basically I'm just blogging about blogging, writing about nothing more than this page itself. As I wrote yesterday, finding that balance between writing something interesting, yet also keeping what I want personal as personal, is forever a struggle that I think sometimes overwhelms me when it comes to writing in here. I think perhaps I'm finding myself slowly dragging this blog towards one that operates a bit more anonymously, but in so many ways that is simply impossible because of the amount of stuff that I've mentioned in the past. Furthermore, it's often been half the attraction to me that the blog does so clearly link itself with "real me", and it's my voice to the world.

Something else that seems to have been putting me off writing in here lately as much as I've done so in the past has been my general loss of interest in blogs. Generally the more I read other people's blog the more I will write in my own. With my growing interest in forums, just about regardless of what they're about, I've found myself enjoying that sort of format a lot more than the "blogging" format. In a forum you feel like you're more in a discussion with a bunch of friends, rather than writing your diary or standing on a soap box yelling at the world. The one-way nature of how information generally flows in a blogging format: from me to you, with a very small amount of feedback through the odd comment, just doesn't seem to appeal to me as much as the format of a forum, which seems to sit about halfway between a chatroom - which has the positives of many other people being around, but the negatives of everythign you write being so transitory nobody bothers too much about saying anything interesting - and a blog, which as I said before, often feels to me as though I'm just randomly talking to myself. However, as my forum seems to be struggling to stay afloat at the moment, and my scambaiting one goes from crisis to crisis under repeated denial-of-service attacks, perhaps I might return to having more of an interest in the blogging side of the internet.

While recent upgrades to Angelfire do make the whole posting process "prettier", and easier to embed videos, audio, and just about anything else you can think of, it has an annoying habit of not working in Opera, and also often coming up with truly weird things like one line going on and on forever as if it was a bit long word. My page also seems to take an age to load up these days, which it really shouldn't as there aren't many graphics in it at all. Sometimes I do wish it would just go back to the old system, or at least have the option of doing so - so that I could post from my regular browser again (and as a result probably post more often) and so that I wouldn't be quite so paranoid about losing every second post. My Saturday post would have been post, if it hadn't have been for a clever select all/copy just before I hit the "post" button, while on various other occasions there have been pretty close shaves.

My other gripe, although this one can be worked around, and has existed ever since I switched to Angelfire's blogging tool back in early '05, is the need to title every post. OK, I know that it's optional, but once I've got into the habit of putting a title on all my posts, it would really seem quite weird to come across one without a title (hence today's title). I actually think this need for me to pre-define what I'm going to write about has put me off writing in here more frequently lately, or even back in the times when I was updating here more often, and in a more lengthy fashion, made me feel like I needed to stick to one topic, rather than my old system of usually chatting about two or three different things within the course of one update. I think that if I make a real effort to delay "titling" my post until after I've actually written it, or perhaps even start leaving off the title altogether, I may feel a little more free about what I write, and may end up writing longer, more interesting posts. On quite a few occasions I've ended up changing the title of a post after writing it, because I found that the title only really referred to the first paragraph, or feeling a bit dissatisfied because the title didn't really reflect what the post was about in a way I wanted it to, but I couldn't think of an alternative.

I have begun to feel that desire to update here more often return to me in the last few days. It hasn't felt as much like a chore that needs doing, something that I should make sure gets done, even though I'm reluctant about it. As I've said a million times before, I've always had ups and downs with my blog, and apart from a 9 month gap in '04 I've generally made my way through the downs and at least kept up some sort of record of things.  It still feels like my life is pretty repetitive at the moment, with the exception of various sporting events that are going on around the world. In other words, not an enormous amount to report back on, although as always if I was really into updating on here I would find things to write about, as I've done so in the past during my more productive update periods.

I think in some ways my scambaiting has made me a little more careful about how personal I get on the internet, and how much can be traced back to me. Future employers, distant family members or anyone could look back through this blog and read whatever they want about me, and get a pretty damn detailed history of my last six years. While this hasn't bothered me to the extent of putting some sort of privacy block on this blog, or alternatively somehow managing to operate this in in a more "anonymous" fashion, I think it has made me think more about reporting on personal stuff that's going on, or reporting too much about the different people in my life. While perhaps it's being a little paranoid, and definitely takes a lot away from what I 'could' be writing about, perhaps what used to feel OK coming out no longer does so. Maybe in the future I will change things around, although somehow do it in a way that still enables a wide range of people to read and come across this website, or perhaps I'll get over my current slight paranoia and return to how things were previously, I'm really not sure.

So I shrugged off my general apathy and we went "out" on Saturday night. It was a chance for us to take Leila's sister, Bernice, out for what I think was the first time since she turned 18 here in New Zealand. The All Blacks were playing Italy in their first match of the World Cup, so it would be a good chance to see that match in the pretty fun atmosphere of a bar, rather than just at home in front of the TV. However, after a pretty full on day throughout Saturday with Amalia (lots of time at various playgrounds) I felt pretty wiped out by the time the evening rolled around, although after a bit of a lie down I had recovered enough to not be completely wasted the whole time we were out. In fact, Leila was probably more tired than I was, although that has turned out to be largely the result of her coming down with another cold type thing.

So anyway, we made our way into town and milled around for a while waiting for the game to start. We showed Bernice our favourite "Lenin Bar", had one of our favourite cocktails there (Absolut Passion if you're curious) before heading to a bar nearby with a big screen outside. There were tonnes of people getting ready to watch the match at this bar (Provedor, if you're curious), although bizarrely even when the match had started the bar didn't turn off their music and turn on the commentary for the match, which created the bizarre situation of listening to utterly cheesy bar songs when we should have been hearing the haka. Fortunately some over-enthusiastic patrons gave their own rendition of the haka in front of the big screen, hurled some abuse at the bar staff for not turning off their shit music, before settling into watching the match - accompanied by Village People and Cyndi Lauper.

I wasn't having that rubbish, so we headed off to find a bar that would be smart enough to actually let us watch the match properly. After passing another bar playing Cyndi Lauper (can our whole 80s revival please finish now!) we came across Degree, which thankfully had the big screen playing the rugby, the commentary on, and no cheesy 80s music playing anymore. It was a bit of a mission finding a good spot to sit, without blocking other peoples' views, but we eventually managed it. All our shuffling around trying to find a good place to watch the game, and then trying to find a seat within the bar, meant that by the time we'd settled down the All Blacks' opening stampede had put them well into the lead. After merely 20 minutes it was 38-0 and I wondered what on earth the final score would end up being. They inevitably slowed down a bit eventually, with the final score being 76-14 I think. The bar was an OK place to watch the match, although at times I found it a little bit difficult to follow as we were quite a long way from any easily viewable TV screen. In the second half we managed to move to somewhere with a better view of the screen, to watch the rest of the match.

So I guess it was a pretty good start to the World Cup by the All Blacks. With all the hype and anticipation about the tournament I can imagine them literally jumping out of their skins at the opportunity to finally get away from all the predictions and preparation, and finally actually play a game for the first time since July for many of the players. While it's true that Italy are hardly one of the power-houses of world rugby, they did manage to beat both Scotland and Wales in this year's Six Nations Championship, and also ran Ireland pretty close too. For the first quarter of the game it was just "wow... another try.... and another", but eventually I think the Italians either improved or the All Blacks suffered a little in the heat, and the game slowed down a bit (which was a shame as it would have been cool to crack 100 points). Also, towards the end of the game, some of the players started doing a few silly things that you can never really imagine them doing in a more important match, and a few more mistakes came in. But generally it was a pretty impressive display.

Before the World Cup started I had been a bit worried that the early stages of the tournament would be incredibly boring. It was generally pretty easy to pick on the semi-finalists, let alone the quarter-finalists, which made it seem as though the real tournament was all about what happened in a couple of games, with five weeks of somewhat boring stuff coming before those couple of important games. However, with Argentina beating France in the very first match of the tournament, that has really thrown those theories out the window - with France now likely to either struggle to make the quarter finals if they can't beat Ireland, or ending in in a quarter final against New Zealand, which is a bit of a pain in the ass for us if the French to manage to get their act together. So in a way this result wasn't particularly great - at least from a NZ perspective - but on the other hand it's great for Argentina, great for the tournament in that everything is now very different from what was expected, with Argentina having a shot at getting through to the semi-finals if they top their group. Even the USA, hardly heavyweights of rugby, managed to push England fairly strongly in their game, which means that Samoa might have a reasonable shot at beating the English and making it through to the quarter finals later in the tournament.

An interesting start to the World Cup, that's for sure. 

So here we go most of the way through another week. I think it is this time of the year when the weeks all seem to pass by in a flash, before you've even really noticed. Perhaps it's the lack of anything unusual that makes it like that: no public holidays between June and October, the weather not being dramatically cold, wet, sunny or hot - but rather just being a typical Auckland mixture of the first three. When one senses that Spring is around the corner there's a really wet day, or a really cold day, or both.

I do feel that the last few months have been rather bizarre in many ways. Often throughout that time work has found itself in situations where there's either not that much to do, or more typically, what there is to do requires me to wait for someone else to do something first. It's frustrating, that so often I just can't get stuck in and find myself with far too many distractions (like... well... updating this blog!) I think my apathy which has spawned during my work hours has sometimes spread to everything else, that it's just too easy to  just sit back for a while, even though I end up feeling bad about it in the end. More recently things have improved, although it's now getting myself out of the bad habits which is the tricky bit. I guess finding myself in habits like these has been an annoyance for me in the past, but it's something I know I can get through as I have done it before.

There are some interesting events coming up soon which should liven up my life. The Rugby World Cup kicks off this weekend, which should hopefully be a chance for the All Blacks to redeem their screwups throughout the past four tournaments and finally win the damn thing again like they deserve to. The country has become overly obsessed with the subject, that's for sure, but especially since 1999 when the ABs had their famous shock-loss to France, the All Blacks not having the World Cup has always felt like this great injustice that needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Perhaps once we do finally win the tournament again people will become less obsessed with it, and non World Cup rugby will start to get the attention that it truly deserves once again.

The other major event happening within the next month and a bit (wow scary it's that close) is that I shall become an uncle. With Ella on the other side of the world the whole process has been a bit unreal, but as her due date grows closer the reality that it is actually happening grows every larger. Although we won't actually see her and the baby for a few more months in person, it's pretty exciting what is going to happen, and of course we will look forward to 10 million pictures being sent via email.

So life is definitely heading towards a more interesting phase in the next while. Cool. 

So August has finished, and we're now officially into spring. This is exciting you know, especially for me as winter tends to get me down quite a lot. The idea of not being cold, wet and stuck indoors far too often is very appealing, and knowing that summer is only a few months away now gives me a nice warm feeling inside - that things will be pretty cool soon.

Compared to past winters, the last three months have been pretty good I suppose. I have managed to avoid getting particularly ill - although I have had a bit of a cold throughout the last week, and I've managed to avoid any particularly nasty life disasters. It's been more of a struggle to get through than most previous seasons, but that's fairly typical of this time of the year. In general it hasn't really been that cold, at least not since June which felt freezing (the start of winter always does feel particularly cold though). August turned out to be not quite as wet as July, which was great, and actually had a few weekends of nice or at least reasonably nice weather. My photo a couple of posts down the page shows pretty clearly that we have had some pretty nice weather lately.

I guess I'm looking positively forward to the next few months. Usually September has surprisingly nice weather and then October is horribly wet - just to annoy you - but at least it's getting a lot warmer here. Our flat now really has started to feel like home, not just this new place that we're staying in for a little while. It still feels strange going back to my parents' place, as that has always felt so much like home due to me spending so much of my life there, but yet that not actually being home. I think Leila has found it even weirder, having never lived anywhere other than home. It takes a bit of getting used to, sorting out what is home and what isn't in your subconscious.

Bring on summer... 

Rather frustratingly, my forum has been down all day. I know that it's not me because when i go to www.ifastnet.com , the people who host the forum, their entire site is down too. Ugh how annoying, I guess I should look into moving it somewhere a little more securely up in the future.

I should back it up too. So yeah, if you're wondering why it won't load, it's not you, it's not me, it's just out of our hands. Which sucks. 

In the last few days I have found myself with some renewed interest in writing about more random things happening in my life, having a bit more interest in doing a little more with the blog than simply keeping it up to date for the sake of keeping it up to date. Ironically that seems to have some at a time when I haven't actually updated for a few days (although my "Saturday" update was actually written a couple of days later, I just didn't want to leave last week too barren). Perhaps it was downloading a few more old-school songs that reminded me of times past and the need to keep track of my life so that I can easily refer to what's going on now in the future, or perhaps it was something else, but the idea of writing in here actually began to excite me once again, rather than just bug me like this chore that I need to do, but normally can't be bothered doing.

I do find myself generally caught up in other internet "things" such as trying to turn my forum into something more than just a weird rant between Leila and myself (although that aspect of it is pretty fun), catching up on the world of scambaiting, or my latest forum interest: skyscrapers. I think I have been just much more into the whole forums thing lately, rather than the whole blogging thing. Yet this blog can actually probably be quite complementary to those other interests, to commenting on those other things I do on the internet as well as my general life (because it's all really mixed together in the end isn't it?)

I had an interesting discussion with Leila yesterday about what makes a good forum. There are various bits of each forum that I visit which I find enjoyable, and the interesting thing is that the dynamic of each is so different. The original forum I spent time in, The Numbers had the dynamic of a fairly limited number of people posting on it, but posting pretty damn frequently. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago those few people who were relied upon for the majority of the posts in the forum all left, and now it's a pretty empty shell that is dominated by spam. I found myself ending up as a moderator on it, which would be really cool if it returned to how it used to be, but at the moment the job basically entails a lot of deleting spam threads, which isn't particularly exciting. In some ways, I guess at its peak that forum was probably my favourite of the lot: everyone got to know each other to a reasonable extent, it always felt friendly and free enough to not have to worry too much about what you were posting, and we were all talking about movies and box office data which meant that there was always something happening for us to comment on and discuss. Other movie forums that I've come across have ended up being absolutely enormous and popular, and therefore a bit scary to ever really get involved in.

The scambaiting forum I frequent is really different from The Numbers one in so many ways. The place doesn't rely upon a limited number of people posting, and in fact has hundreds of different regular posters. Normally there are at least 20 people online, and the place updates quick enough for there always to be something for you to comment on if you really want, but not at such a pace that makes it impossible to keep up with anything. Whereas the movie forum is people discussing, predicting and analysing something going on outside the forum, the scambaiting one is effectively a giant "help" forum, where people share tips on how to be better at scambaiting, and also share their great stories with each other. Of course there's a general chat area, but often the topics seem to relate back to baiting in one way or another. Because of the potentially dangerous nature of scambaiting if you don't know what you're doing properly (like making sure you're being all anonymous) the place is pretty heavily moderated, to make sure that people don't say something that could be dangerous, and also to make sure the whole thing doesn't end up with a racist undertone. It feels like a pretty big community, with most usernames becoming familiar after a while, but at the same time in a more strained sense than other forums, as people seem to be forever competing with each other to pull off the best baits ever, and have the prestige that comes with that. Sometimes it hasn't really seemed that friendly overall, even though a good number of people on there are friendly.

The skyscraper forum is my latest interest. This one is utterly huge, with sometimes a few thousand people being online. However, because of its size it's really broken down into different aspects of it, with there even being a small New Zealand community. This whole "forum in a forum" has meant that the part I actually look at on the skyscraper forum actually feels pretty small. It feels a lot more relaxed than the scambaiting forum, which is good, but often I find myself with little to reply to throughout a day as there aren't that many active users within the New Zealand section. I have briefly ventured into other more general areas, but it then leaps to the other extreme with pages of posts added impossibly quickly, and this whole feeling that everyone else has been there forever compared to me. All the threads are really long too in general, updates on how the progress of a skyscraper is going or discussion on a more general urban theme - which is interesting but enormously time-consuming for me to feel as though I'm up to date with what's been said on the forum.

So in the middle of that sits my own forum. I started it off really to just learn more about how php works and to discover what the admin options were. However, it's actually turned out to be something quite fun and interesting to have. Frustratingly, finding users who regularly post has been a bit of a mission, and I think that between Leila and myself we would have made about 95% of the posts on it. However, I guess that everything takes a bit of time, and as well as friends and family there have been a few random people who have joined up and got chatting. It doesn't really have much of a niche either, with a little bit of everything, but hopefully that eventually turns out to be a positive rather than a negative. I don't expect it to end up like other big forums, but it could be something really cool once a few people are regularly posting on it. The whole forum layout seems to be a really effective way to discuss a topic, midway between a long blog post about something and a short instant message - giving the person some time to think about what they say, but also the freedom to post again and again in a sort of conversation style.

So perhaps there's a future for my forum. I hope so. 

On Thursday I had a nicely different day at work. One of our recent new jobs involves a proposed house on Waiheke Island. Of course, to do an Assessment of Environmental Effects properly it's necessary to visit the site, and so I headed over to Waiheke Island to check it out. I haven't been to Waiheke for probably 10 years, but it holds a fair number of my earlier childhood memories, so I was quite excited to be travelling there again. It's funny for a part of Auckland such as Waiheke to be fairly well built-up and large, and yet so easy to never end up there. I was very fortunate that the day was turning into the best Auckland's had for a while, as I boarded the ferry to head over.

In some ways the ferry trip was probably as nice as the island itself. There is something particularly nice about heading out across Auckland's Waitemata Harbour, looking one way at the city, the other over to Devonport, then back to the various bays along Tamaki Drive, then to Musick Point near Howick, and eventually losing the city behind the various Gulf islands around you. I took a real nice photo of Auckland's CBD as well:

Well I went to see my first Theatre performance on Tuesday. It was a good one to start with, the Royal Shakespeare Company probably being some of the best actors in the world and being pretty damn amazingly good at what they do. It was quite odd actually going to the theatre, with all these well dressed up people looking all proper! 

At first the play was quite difficult to understand, trying to make sense out of all the Shakespearian language and follow the story. Eventually, with a bit of help from Leila who explained who everyone was to me, I managed to get enough of an idea of what was going on to eventually follow it on my own. Ian McKellen as King Lear was awesome, and so were all the actors really. The sounds and light effects were really amazing too. But the best part of it all were the sword fights, which were simply incredible, with everyone totally ripping into it in a way that was unbelievably impressive. Normally when I have seen theatre performances in the past any sword fight scenes have been done with wooden swords, or they've just looked really fake and tame. This was nothing like that, with metal swords and you could tell that although it was carefully choreographed, the actors were really ripping into it. In fact, it really felt like a fight scene from a movie rather than something that was actually happening in front of you. 

My blog has been having a strange life as of late. While my posts have kept coming, in a bit more of a trickle rather than the torrent of old, they haven't dried up, which is surprising considering the general lack of motivation I've had for writing in here. I guess that at the moment I'm keeping things going largely because of the history this site has, all those previous six and a half years of blogging deserves for it not to be abandoned, and at the same time I do occasionally have times when I'm thinking "wow.... I really feel like writing a bit more about that". I guess the public nature of this blog has always been a bit of a restriction upon what I could write about, not so much because it's not a hidden blog (I mean what would really be the point unless you wanted to moan to yourself all the time), but because it's so clearly linked to who I am in real life, and so widely available for all the people who know me in real life to read. Obviously there are things that one would write about more openly in another situation, although oddly enough I think that if I did have a blog that was more anonymous I wouldn't necessarily write more entries - better ones perhaps I suppose though. In any case, I'm rather stuck with what I have here now, and it has worked out pretty well in the past. I am sure that eventually my internet habits will once again migrate back towards reading other people's blogs more often, and then eventually that will give me more and more motivation to write in mine. But for now, at least there aren't enormous gaps.

Work has become more interesting and busy again. We have a nice wide variety of jobs on the go - mixing between having meetings at Auckland City, site visits out to Waiheke Island later in the week, and more mundane bits of it such as the data entry I was doing for large chunks of last week. It is good to be getting back into the nitty gritty of planning though, preparing resource consent applications. I have also found myself somewhat surprised in the last couple of weeks by how much I really have learned about this whole process now. I don't have to really work off much of a template any more, I know what's missing where and what needs to be added in somewhere else. I can put together an email to our client asking for more information and feel confident about it, I can trust my judgement that something in particular will or won't cut it with the council when we get around to dealing with them.

I'm going to see a Shakespeare production tomorrow evening (I know... how cultured). Should be pretty interesting I suppose, and I can get see Ian McKellen in the flesh! Go Gandalf! 

So I find myself lying in bed as the rain hammers away on the roof outside. I guess there's something peaceful in listening to that sound - realising the chaos of what's happening outside but knowing that you're sheltered from it quite nicely. Our house has got through a giant storm back in early July so I am not too worried about leaks or anything like that. The wind blows, the house rattles, but in a kinda of cool way - perhaps how an earthquake would feel if I finally noticed one of them. Up until today it had felt like Auckland's weather was getting better - there was even a few days in which it didn't rain earlier in the week (the first time since June I suspect). But today served as an annoying reminder that winter isn't done with us yet, that there will still be quite a few more cold, dark, wet and blustery days. Oh yay!

I spent quite a bit of time last night fiddling around with the layout for my forum (see link on left hand side of screen). I had changed around one of the images quite easily, and then figured out how to dig deeper into the HTML to really change around a few more things. It was pretty damn difficult actually, finding out what bit of HTML matched up with where on the published page, and then also how I could change it to what I wanted without messing everything up. Eventually I just about managed to achieve what I was after, and the one small thing that I couldn't get quite right, is not pretty adequate and was damn right impossible to change without to serious programming knowledge that I simply don't have.

Anyone is welcome to join the forum. In fact it's a bit silly at times in there at the moment with just Leila and I chatting away to each other, like a strange public msn conversation. It would be good to have a few more people joining in, sharing their insights into various things that generally making it an interesting place. My first aim of creating the forum was to learn about how phpBB works, and I think I now have a reasonable idea. Now the second aim is to get the forum into something that will sustain itself in the long-term. Now that's a slightly trickier ask. 

As well as building myself a forum over the weekend I actually had a pretty fun time. Leila, Amalia and I had gone over to my parents' place on Friday night, and as Leila had work and Amber was at her family's place throughout Saturday, it was just me and Amalia at home by ourselves for pretty much the whole day, which turned out to be really fun. It is awesome having all friends and family around when I have her, but at the same time some of the best times we have together are when it's just her and me by ourselves. I guess it's the main time that I manage to feel like a real parent, like I'm her proper Dad, instead of just some part-time thing. 

After dropping Leila at work we headed to Western Springs Park. We hadn't been organised enough to bring some stale bread, which was a little annoying, but we still had a great time wandering around the whole lake. We chatted away about all sorts of things, pointing out interesting birds and dogs along the way. Eventually we had made it the whole way around the lake, and found ourselves back at the playground. She played there for a while longer, making good friends with a little boy about her age. There are tandem slides at Western Springs Park, so her and this little boy took great delight in climbing up the ladder to the slides, and then timing it so they went down the slides at the same time. Well...... that was what was meant to happen, until Amalia thought that it would be simply hilarious to pretend to go down the slide, but instead just stay sitting at the top, and wait for the boy to climb back up the ladder.

After we got home she watched a movie while I did the dishes. We checked the mail to find out that we're due a property inspection (yay!) A bit more cleaning up, then we had lunch together in her room. It was really cool eating fish and nuggets in her room while reading all her library books. She just loves books at the moment, which is great, as the library is pretty close to home. Having so many picture books at Leila's work is so sorely tempting though, and I'm sure that our collection will build up immensely in the next few years. I'm looking forward to the times when I can share Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Peter Pan with her, two of my favourite ever books when I was younger. It's fun enough reading Where the Wild Things Are, or The Very Hungry Caterpillar - which I vaguely remember from my early childhood. Eventually we picked up Leila, then played a few more games before it was time to take Amalia home. I think I did feel a little more sad than usual taking her home, as we had had such a fun day together. 

Once we were back home, we started to get ready to go out. One of Amber's friends was having a 21st and we were all invited. I had remembered this girl from our flat-warming party as she had had a pretty strong accent, and apparently was from Glasgow. I don't think I've ever met someone from Glasgow before. Anyway, after a seeming age we finally made it there. I had been feeling rather "meh" regarding going to a party, and didn't have particularly high expectations. In a situation like that there's always a huge risk you're going to end up with a bunch of strangers you have very little in common with, and end up spending the night feeling awkward, or sitting in a corner with Leila both of us feeling out of place and awkward.

However, fortunately this was not one of those times, as the people at the party turned out to be exactly the kind of people who I would enjoy spending time with half-drunk. There were heaps of great conversations, all in a really interesting manner which I guess wasn't surprising as most people there were uni students. Everyone seemed to have the right level of nerdiness, where you could chat to them about intelligent topics without completely losing them, but at the same time didn't end up being stuck in the middle of a highly animated conversation about action figures or Star Trek. Before we knew it, it had passed 2am - so we headed back on a wander into town to catch the 3am Night-Rider home. It had been a very pleasant evening.

Sunday was a good relax day. I slept in reasonably well, created the upgrade to my forum that I mentioned yesterday, we cleaned up the house some more to the level where it now feels enjoyable and not stressful to live in it, and generally had the kind of day that Sundays are meant to be. 

After a million (well OK... perhaps three or four) failed installations, because I kept on messing something up, I finally got the new forum installed properly. Then I had to relocate a lot of posts from the old forum, learn how to use the new administration controls (much much much more complex this time around) and so on. But anyway, it's up and it's working now. It has been quite educational for me to see how this all works. There still seem to be a couple of strange bugs in the system - like posts sometimes not working first time (select all and copy before you hit post for now!) But generally it's working out really well. Now I just need some people!

I'll do a proper weekend update tomorrow.

So the expansion of this site continues, with the addition of a new forum for this site. It really started out as a way for me to learn how phpBB operates, but I guess that I might as well give it a little plug and see if anything happens. Leila and I have done a bit of work on setting it up, with posting guidelines and the like, so it'll be interesting to see if it takes off. If I know you in real life just send me PM when you sign up to let me know who you are (you don't HAVE to sign up with your real name).

 Yay, Friday afternoon! 

The last few days at work I've, oddly enough, been doing exactly the stuff that I did when I first started working for my current company. Funny to think that's now over a year and a half ago - that I first started with the most simple entering of data into excel worksheets, matching up data from about 3 different places to provide a good snapshot of property information. It sounds like such a simple thing to do, which in some ways it is, but there is always that need to make sure that everything is done perfectly. One little mistake and the whole process is messed up, which adds in the challenge. 

Another week passes by fairly non-eventufully....

It's funny to think how much has happened in a year, or on the other hand how in some ways it really doesn't feel like that long ago I found myself, on a Saturday morning, having coffee with Leila. It was August 5th, 2006, and I now had a girlfriend once again. Those moments, the first day afterwards, felt so surreal at the time. I don't think the sleep-deprivation helped, it certainly didn't help my optometrist who started getting worried about my bloodshot eyes (I suppose I should have told him I'd got about 4 hours sleep max, and that I'd been freezing cold for about 90% of that time). In some ways it felt odd, like I still felt strange about everything that had happened - not because it didn't feel right, but simply because it had happened all so quickly, and had been so instigated by me. Yet it is that surreality that makes times like that stand out in memory, the funny conversations, with a mixture of tentative awkwardness as you realise that you don't actually know this person particularly much, but at the same time allowed closeness and openness because, after all, you're going out. Looking back on it now, those times are so exciting, the ability to have someone new to share so much with, to enter into someone else's life and discover them, just felt so exhilirating. Things had worked out, things had gone to plan, things just felt so right.

In terms of general life, it seems as though a lot of things are probably heading back towards the right direction for me. The weather is warmer, work is kicking back into action which means that my general "meh-ness" about a lot of things is likely to disappear as I get a better feeling that I am doing something worthwhile with a decent chunk of my life, that I am getting somewhere and being productive. Sure, it'll be tricky to kick the various internet addictions that I've created to help fill in the empty hours, but I don't mind doing that. Leila's sister Bernice comes back to New Zealand in a couple of weeks, which has seemed to take on a greater significance to me than what would be possibly expected. I think this is largely because a huge number of people I know well have all disappeared overseas this year, and finally having one come back seems like it's the end of the exodus and the beginning of the return.

I guess it just feels like a turning point at the moment, that a lot of things that had been getting me down will hopefully start heading in the other direction. To be honest I wasn't surprised to find myself feeling rather less than usual during the winter months, as this seemingly always happens to me no matter what. The inability to do any outside activity for more than a few minutes, because there's a damn good chance it'll pour down with rain, takes away so many things in my life that provide me with enjoyment. While August is hardly the end of winter, perhaps it can be seen as the beginning of the end.

OK, I know that in yesterday's post I did write that I was going to talk about two different dreams, and then only ended up talking about that weird petrol one. In the end I ran out of time/energy/motivation to write much more, so I gave up.

 Now I can't really remember much of it. Something to do with playing cricket in my grandmother's backyard in Thames, back when she was still alive. Most of the dreams I have of backyard cricket end up there, which I guess isn't too surprising as a good chunk of my time spent in Thames as a childhood involved playing cricket in that backyard. I don't remember much about the dream, but I can have a good reminisce I suppose.

Unless my cousins were around, it was generally just me and my dad playing. No running, just fours and sixes. The boundaries were pretty easily defined, except for a magical line that had to be drawn between the house and the carport at mid-on, and the potential to catch out the batsman from the top of some concrete planter boxes that annoying stood in the way of my perfect run up. Out of the property on the full was deemed to be six and out - a cruel but sometimes strangely satisfying way of getting dismissed. There was debate about whether this should apply to the off-side boundary as it really was a bit too easy to hit the ball out of the property that way, and after all it was only another lawn that we had to trek across to retrieve the ball. After all, a simple mis-timed cover-drive could quite easily balloon out for six, a bit unfair on the bowler but at the same time not really worthy of the batsman being given out. So we redefined that six-and-out boundary to be the next property boundary over, because to hit it that far you really had to be trying.

I could usually talk my dad into letting me bat first. We always used the same bat, a pretty simple cheap and cheerful pine one I think, that had Arbury written on it and had had its handle reglued back in place about 53 times. Inevitably, when jamming out another yorker at some stage the handle would snap out of place and we'd find ourselves going through the process again. But anyway, with temporarily glued bat in hand I would face up to my Dad. The first few balls were always the hardest - though I could generally once again talk my way out of things if he had somehow managed to get me out first ball (that was just practice!!!) Fresh with energy he'd run in from almost the front gate, right down the side of the house, before letting rip with a thunderbolt. If it was grapefruit season the ball might have magically been replaced by an over-ripe fruit, which on contact with the trusty (or not) old bat would immediately disintegrate into a million wet and sticky pieces, with a bit of luck some reaching back to where it came from. On the rare occasion it was the real ball my chances of hitting the first one were almost nil, it would rear up off a length, bounce a mile over the stumps, me, the fence, the next fence and so on. Sometimes I would have to climb over three fences to finally reach that snarly first ball. This was, of course, all part of the fun, until one year this enormous dog ended up living in the property two down. It was seriously the biggest dog I had ever seen, and not knowing its real name, my Dad and I alternated between calling it horse, for obvious reasons, and sir - because after all you didn't want to offend such a beast.

After the first few lightning bolts, my Dad would return to bowling a mixture of annoying leg-cutters, that randomly were actually either leg-cutters 50% of the time ("oh.... what a beauty" would be the cry) go straight through most of the rest of the time ("oh.... he throws in a straight one!!!") Or the elusive, impossible to produce naturally, off-cutter ("it went the other way... how cunning" was the cry). i would usually be hopeless for the first couple of games, getting stuck on 14 for about twenty balls in a row, before getting myself out, then having my Dad knock it around until he got to 78, before me getting trounced in another score of 16. But after a couple of games my touch would return, and depending on how dry the ground was, we'd either fight out tight low-scoring battles, or the game would go on all afternoon as we knocked up century after century. Often the result depended as much on the state of the tennis ball as it did on anything else. A hard ball would generally favour the bowlers, coming on to the bat quickly, bouncing more for the spinners and being more likely to bounce weirdly should it hit a crack, or a bump, or a random mandarin. A softer ball would be slower, so obviously allow the batsman more time to adjust his shot, cut down the bounciness and generally make life easier and easier. The clotheslines was a constant hazard, sometimes being the most useful fielder when a sweetly hit drive smacked directly into the pole, sometimes an annoyance as a skied shot would cause major panic as you judged whether you could go for the catch without decapitating yourself on the line, and sometimes an awesome piece of good (or bad if you were batting) luck, with a ball bouncing off the clothesline directly into the hands of the bowler.

As with any game of backyard cricket, there were always the lost-ball interruptions. The bizarrely overgrown property behind and to the left of the batsman sucked in many a skied pull-shot never to be seen again, while a generous number of skied straight drives landed on the roof of my grandmother's house (definitely out, although if you went and got it you had a good argument for staying in. The ultimate aim was to hit the ball over the house, landing it in the front garden, and as a result not breaking any of the "six and out" rules. Sadly, this achievement was incredibly rare, and usually ended up with a sever flinch as the ball cannoned into the laundry window.

In all those years my highest score ended up being 236 I think. I used to have a severe weakness on 88, which ended up being highly self-perpetuating as I'd fret whenever getting to that score. It's interesting to note that the one time I got to 88 in a proper game of cricket I was dropped twice by fielders, forever dispelling the argument that it was an unlucky number for me. Inevitably the game would be ended by a call for dinner, for pikelets or for going out somewhere. Occasionally, in summer, we'd play on until we could hardly see the ball. Famously, one time with quite a few cousins where we literally ended up playing by the sound of the bowler shuffling in, although in that case the hardest thing isn't hitting the ball, but finding the ball once it has been (very rarely) hit. They're all awesome memories for me, and perhaps why I associate any form of backyard cricket with that house so much. I guess it's my sub-conscious reminding me of what a big part of my childhood this was.