Well we finally have a pet again (I don't think the snails that Amalia and I constructed a house for last week quite counted). Natalie's cat Cocoa (or however she spells it) had 5 kittens about 6 weeks ago now. On the trips over there they have been a great source of fun, with most of them being pretty playful and hilarious as only a kitten can really be. Fairly early on, Leila and I were both quite keen on the littlest one, and after a while one of the bigger ones also stole our hearts. Yeah, we can handle having two cats! However, while the bigger fluffy one has prospered, the little one has seemed to lose out when all the other kittens want to feed, and hasn't really grown anywhere near as much as them.

Last weekend I took it to the vet, somewhat fearing the worst as it had been shaking and also apparently having trouble breathing at times. Fortunately (I guess) the vet said that it only seemed under-nourished, and probably had worms. A bit of worming paste later, and hopefully more luck with the feeding and it should get better. Last night Leila and I picked up the kitten, as things had seemed to have gone downhill further. I felt so sorry for the little thing, such a cutie but so quiet and tiny compared with the others. We didn't even need a cage to transport him back home, as he fell asleep on Leila's knee. He did look in pretty bad shape, unwilling to feed from the kitten formula we had bought, unwilling to try any solid food, and looking like a pretty ragged little thing whenever his fur got wet. So we brought him home, for some pretty intensive care, using a syringe to get some kitten formula inside him, rubbing a bit of solid food around his mouth so he got used to the taste and smell. Initially things didn't seem to work that well, but we eventually got a pretty decent technique going, and he got quite a few syringe-loads of milk inside him.

Over night, we kept him in our bedroom, and fed him a few times when he woke us with his pathetic little meows. At one stage of the evening I'd been worried whether or not he'd make it to the morning, but at the end of the evening he was even a little playful. Today Leila, with some as-ever enthusiastic help from Amalia, has continued on his care. It really is too early to say whether or not he'll get through, we are managing to get milk inside him but I don't really think he'll put on much weight until he's eating solid food, which he's not particularly interested in quite yet. I do hope that he does get through, as he's such a gorgeous little thing and I know that he'll end up being an awesome cat, I just can't feel that optimistic about it at the moment, unfortunately.

Of course today has decided to not be anywhere near as warm as yesterday, just to reinforce that "well it's not quite summer yet buddy" ideology that seems to guide Auckland's weather, as much as anything else that makes the slightest bit of sense. Ah well, never mind. Warmer days don't feel too far away, end of year holidays don't feel too far away, Christmas doesn't feel too far away, it's all quite nice really. As though for some reason this summer appears enormously promising, in fairly opposite manner to last summer when it was "wow, would the last person I know leaving New Zealand to go overseas please turn out the lights!" With confirmation that Ella, Pete & little Jofuss (I mean Joseph, it's just so difficult to get away from Amalia's awesome name for him) will be returning to NZ at the end of January, things definitely look up. Everything else seems to be sorting itself out quite nicely as well, with my leave requests getting the go ahead, and nothing really now standing in the way of the Europe holiday next year, except for the need to save quite a few thousand more dollars.

Work has entered a more positive new pattern for me I think, with there being a number of jobs that need doing at the moment, and them being at stages interesting enough to actually feel like my head's not about to explode with "ooooh.... but I'm not sure if it'll comply with THIS part of the District Plan!" ideas. I sent off an important email this morning without its attachments, felt like a bit of a dork, but such is life I suppose. At an important (hmmm.... lots of important stuff) meeting yesterday, which was basically ironing out a few kinks in the design for the really big project we're working on at the moment, I managed to feel quite expertly, suggesting solutions to a few seemingly intractable problems, a bit of expert advice on height-to-boundary rules and so on. I guess it is interesting to see how far I've come this year, when I am confident enough to be dealing with clients in a confident manner, rather than just grinding out work separate from all the interaction, like I did for large parts of last year. On the other hand, this job was probably a bit more interesting last year, largely because it was new and different, partly because it was a tad more social having another person in the office and partly because we probably just did more, but it has been good to see how my confidence and my knowledge has continued to improve.

Wow what's this, two entries in two days? I must be on a roll! It has been a little disappointing to see my blog entries taper off in the last few months. I've thought about the millions of reasons for it, and I guess in the end it's really just not as much my thing at the moment. Perhaps it would take me updating close to daily for a couple of weeks to truly feel like I was "back in the groove", where I'd start thinking about what to blog about during the day, and then when it came to typing it out I would find myself wondering which entry idea I should write about, rather than wondering what on earth I'm going to say, like I must admit I was thinking 18 minutes ago when I started this particular entry. While my life is particularly pleasant at the moment, that doesn't necessarily mean that I find myself with millions of things to write about - in fact often I've found the opposite is true, and there are far more possibilities to blog about if one is going through a more negative stage of their life, although I have always run into the whole "non-private, non-anonymous" issue when that happens, which has meant that if I've written about "negative stuff" in past entries I've often had to do so in a fairly indirect manner.

Hmmm... a few bullet points to end on I think:

• Went to Devonport with Leila on Sunday via the ferry. It was really nice. Checked out the 2nd hand bookshops, managed to keep myself down to 1 book.
• Leila and Amber took millions of photos around Sandringham yesterday, for some reason (I think because the light was particularly good). I'll try to upload them to here some time in the next few days.
• I'm sure there was a 3rd thing I wanted to mention.
• Maybe there wasn't...

Summer felt like it arrived in a hurry today. A bit early I suppose, as it can often feel cold enough to flick the heater on here in Auckland even in early December, and I was having to dig up my heater at work only last week to warm things up on the occasional cold morning. But that certainly wasn't the case today, as it was actually hot enough to push open the window and enjoy the sensation of actually wanting a cool breeze to gently make its way into my office. There is something about the onset of summer that feels like it almost wakes me up from months of 'half-sleep', like I simply 'get through' the winter months but don't actually truly 'live' until the summer months. In a way this perhaps isn't quite as silly as it sounds, as winter is dominated by being stuck inside, feeling cold, getting wet, lots of darkness and so on. In a way I think it's the daylight hours that possibly has the most under-rated effect on me. There's just something inherently depressing about it getting dark at 5.10pm at night, or it still being dark when you first wake up in the morning. By that same accord, there's something enormously uplifting when it's 8.30pm at night and it's still somewhat light, or even later but you're still able to see a little light in the western skies. Now that's what feels like "living" to me.

I had a really strange dream last night, like it came in lots of bits and pieces, but I was playing the narrator to it all, almost as though I was writing it down to be in some sort of book. I guess that came from reading about 80% of Looking for Alaska last night, and thinking how it had provided me with this weird inspiration to wish that I could write something anywhere near as good as that. But anyway, more on the weirdness of me wanting to write something later, in this dream there were lots of bits everywhere, fairly typical dream bits at times - like a new, relocated Queen Street McDonald's - but all these bits came together in some sort of coherent manner, and all the time it felt like I was the conductor behind this orchestra, I was the one who could decide upon the interesting and classy way to put together how things would happen next, or how to summarise what I had just been involve in, in a way that once again would work in some sort of a book-type format. By the time I woke up in the morning, I had somehow managed to piece together a fairly complex storyline for what could potentially be an interesting book, but one that I'll never get around to even starting to write, I guess mainly because I realise how many millions of miles behind where I'd need to be in order to write something decent, I actually am.

It's funny to think that back in Standard 4, when I was 10, I filled about 320 pages of exercise books with creative story writing. I guess this slightly overplays how much I wrote, as we were required to skip lines between what we wrote, presumably so it made things easier for the teacher to comment on, although possibly the teachers were encouraged by the exercise-book companies to try to make us finish as many books as possible. In any case, for the first couple of terms in particular I spend every moment I could writing creative stories. Our class had an awesome teacher, Mr Murphy, who treated us in a far more mature manner than any other teacher I've come across, although possibly a little too much so. At the start of every week, he would outline to us what we needed to get done during that week, a contract he called it. Some particular amount of handwriting, a few pages of maths from the book and so on. However, it didn't quite work out that way for me, and by the end of the first term I'd done about 3 pages of maths and had filled more than two 1B5 exercise books with stories. Two stories in particular "I Spy Who" and "Lost in Space" (which were actually quite similar, although Lost in Space was more wacky, influenced by Asterix and Tintin books) stretched out to phenomenal lengths, across books and so on. A few years later I started trying to type out I Spy Who, and I think it got renamed to "Mystery on Mars", as basically that's what it was. I got a reasonable chunk into it but never much more...

Yet after primary school, the opportunities for creative writing kind of died away. It just wasn't something that you seemed to do at intermediate, and by high school I'd kind of lost interest in English anyway - at least until 6th form by which stage everyone else who was interested seemed bloody awesome at it. Instead, I drew maps, made up cricket scores and so on. I guess drawing maps was the precursor to the job I have now (and hey, I'm still drawing them!) so I can't complain much. I also never quite had the same reading appetite as Ella (or Leila!) when it came to novels, so it seemed like a bit of a lost cause. Yet I think there's still something hiding away somewhere that wants me to write out a great idea. Perhaps one day I'll have the guts and confidence...

OK so another long gap. Oops! I guess I could go on for a paragraph about a big long explanation why I think I haven't updated, but I tend to do that every time I actually do update, so although it's possibly interesting writing about it, it's probably dead boring for anyone to read about it. So, what have I been doing?

• Work: getting busier, with quite a few jobs to get done before Christmas
• Map drawing is still my current "phase". I think I'm getting closer towards a "finished product", although undoubtedly I will expand it once I've filled in my current map.
• Weekend: had a pretty quiet weekend actually, Amalia twisted her neck playing in the backseat of the car on Saturday and was pretty unhappy about it, although she was better by Sunday. Had a pretty quiet Sunday, found some snails in the backyard which was cool.
• Holidays: well there's something worth writing about, let's get away from these bullet points...
• OK, no more bullet points. Bad Josh!

On Sunday last week (perhaps even the week before last now, but - embarrassingly - not since my last update), Leila and I went to the Flight Centre in St Lukes to make some preliminary investigations about our trip to Europe next year. Hmmm.... I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that on here at some stage before, but yeah if not we're planning to head to Europe in May/June next year for 3-4 weeks (probably 4 if I can sort out the work leave). A bit of plane hopping around the best spots (London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Florence and perhaps Barcelona) and a good chance to finally see a part of the world that seemingly everyone else has been to. Although it's still 6 months away, this is a pretty good time to start looking into flights so that you can get the 'earlybird specials'. Sorting out plane trips is actually quite a mission in itself, with all the options of where you want to stop-over, how many stops, which airline, who has the cheapest deals, how often do they fly, and all these other questions. With Air New Zealand, Emirates and Singapore Airlines all having reasonably good deals, there was quite a bit to figure out.

Air New Zealand were the most expensive of the three, although they did have a pretty good package thrown in with their offer, including a return trip on the Eurostar to Paris - half of which is within our very very preliminary itinerary anyway. Emirates had an extra stop in Australia - possibly a negative as it makes the flight longer - but then also stop in Dubai, a positive as I would really like to go to this place and see all the amazing things that are being built there at the moment. Then there's the Singapore Airlines deal, the cheapest, and also with 2 nights accommodation in London thrown in, as well as 5000 bonus air miles points. These bonus air miles would actually be enough for a free trip to Australia or the South Pacific, which is pretty sweet! So it looks like we'll probably go with the Singapore Airlines deal. Now it's just about sorting out the dates for going and coming back, making sure I can organise my annual leave in a way that makes sense and doesn't annoy my bosses too much. Oh, yeah and then I guess we'd probably better start thinking about what we're actually going to do over there!

Exciting!

I knew today was going to be a good day, right from the start really. Normally I don't remember my dreams particularly well, but perhaps it was the chance to sleep in for that extra hour, or perhaps it was just a freak occurrence. But anyway, I managed to remember my dream quite clearly. In it, Ella and Pete had returned from England (fairly recently I think) with their little baby Joseph. Everyone was really excited to see them, of course, and I think they were either living in the same house as us, or somewhere incredibly close like next door (it wasn't anything like the actual house we live in, but rather some strange recurrent dream house that pops up my dreams seemingly all the time. In my dream I had this utterly euphoric feeling that they were all back in New Zealand, which is interesting as I'm not the kind of person who generally actively misses people, but rather just occasionally think to myself how much better life would be with them here (which has happened a lot this year). So it was interesting having this truly euphoric feeling that they were back, and also that they were living so close. I think I remember saying to Ella something along the lines of "wow after having you on the other side of the world for so long it is unbelievably good to have you so close now!"

Yet things were not quite so simple, as is always the case with my dreams. Things are always mixed up in a weird jumbled way, or with something totally random happening. So I probably wasn't surprised when little 3 month old Joseph (I think he was about that age in my dream) started talking to us. Not like the odd "Mama" that 8 month old Aston murmurs, but full sentences along the lines of "hey hold on what's going on here?" and the like. Oddly enough I think I had a pretty similar dream not long as Aston was born, where he randomly started talking to us in fully complete sentences. Perhaps I have this weird fear, or maybe a funny desire, to see a little baby talk really well in an obviously impossible way. Or perhaps it's just a way that this new person gets fully introduced to my subconscious within the realms of my dreams. In any case, it was kind of weird, but at the same time pretty cool. In somewhat contrast to my dream about Aston a few months ago, I don't think this time I was quite so shocked and amazed by what had happened. Instead, perhaps because a similar thing had taken place before in my dream world, I was quite happy to accept this as at least partially believable, and move on with the rest of my dream.

It was quite ironic when I woke up, to the sound of Amalia running into the room of course, that before I could exclaim to Leila that I'd had a really interesting dream, she'd already said the same thing to me and was explaining about how in her dream I had had a really bad ear infection, for Amalia to then chime in telling us about how in her dream Leila had been locked in a tower - Princess Fiona from Shrek style - and Amalia had rescued her. Then while we were having breakfast, Amber said that she'd also had an incredibly vivid dream, which included a very accurate memory of how a couple of pieces of art looked. It seemed like a pretty strange coincidence that all four of us would have memorable dreams on the same night. Perhaps we just had a better chance to remember them, and also the time to mention them to everyone else, perhaps Amalia didn't really have an amazing dream but thought that she didn't really want to be left out, or perhaps last night was just incredibly conducive to good dream making... who knows?

After we dropped Leila at work, Amber, Bernice, Stuart (Leila's sister and brother), Amalia and I headed out to complete another leaflet drop that Leila and Amber had started on Thursday. I've done quite a few of these around Greenlane now, informing locals of the progress of roadworks in the area, and inviting them to meetings between council, the contractors and any local residents who want to turn up. Last year we were a little more involved in everything, but it's slowly evolved into a leaflet delivery every couple of months, which actually works quite well giving everyone the opportunity to earn a few extra dollars. Plus Amalia seems to absolutely love posting all the leaflets in everyone's letterbox. The weather today made the whole job impossibly better too, with it really feeling like summer for the first time. It was my first opportunity to wear a T shirt with no huge jersey on top of it and not feel utterly freezing since about March this year, to slap on sunscreen and enjoy the smell of summer. Amalia and I took a big break in the middle of the day to visit my parents, which was probably a good idea as it was damn hot out there. There's something weirdly satisfying about delivering leaflets, I think it's the simplification of it and how you feel like you're really achieving something by slowly working your way through the pile in front of you, how it's something easily achieved and how you don't really have to think about it, yet can still enjoy wandering around outside while earning a decent amount of money.

Later on, after giving Amalia a bath and taking her back to Natalie's, Leila and I debated what we were going to do, drove off in a reasonably random direction, and eventually ended up in Brown's Bay, on Auckland's North Shore. It's a place that I haven't really been to particularly often, largely due to it being a bloody long way away, although I have been there a couple of times fairly recently - once last year I think with my parents and Amalia when I remember playing a decent game of beach cricket with my Dad, and once with Leila and her friend Imogen, earlier this year when we found ourselves wandering around the shops when they were mostly closed. But this time, it just seemed like the perfect time to be going there. With the sun not far away from setting, it was still warm enough and light enough for everyone to be out and enjoying the beach. At one point I counted 16 dogs down on the beach, and Leila and I sat there watching the dogs chase each other, the kids play on the playground next to us, and generally just how the place felt like it had a really nice atmosphere. My planning brain kicked into action, about how effectively the restaurants interacted with the grassy area, and then further down onto the beach. There was a footpath upgrade going on, involving lots of large fences, and I imagine once that's complete the linkage will be even better. It just felt like a super nice place to be.

We then went for a bit of a wander around, looking for somewhere to eat. We eventually found a really nice Kebab, and headed back to the beach to eat our food. By this stage it was starting to get dark, and being fairly close to Guy Fawkes day, there were a few kids setting off fireworks on the beach. This was only mildly amusing at first, but eventually as it got darker and darker more fireworks started to be set off all around us. It was like being in the middle of this huge fireworks exhibition, with at least somewhere along the beach some fireworks being set off at some stage all the time. It was a really pleasant way to spend the evening, and without the annoying expense of having to purchase the fireworks ourselves. Eventually we started getting a little cold, and headed back to the car. After that, it was a really nice drive back to home, as the scenery (Auckland's CBD at night) some nice music (Chemical Brothers and Evermore) and everything combined to make it truly a nice moment. I said to Leila as we drove along "this is how life should be".

Indeed it is.

I think one of the best things about blogs are their capacity to suck up your moaning. I don't think I moan enough on here actually. So here's for a little bit of moaning:

1. Firstly, let's moan about angelfire. The people who host this blog. Until a few months ago the angelfire blog builder hadn't changed for ages, a couple of years I think. It worked, nothing too flash but it worked! Then a few months ago they decided to 'upgrade' their system, which is all good in theory. You can now put HTML and images within your post, which looks all pretty is quite helpful. There are also way more options for posting. However, ever since the change was made I can't log in to angelfire (let alone do anything else) from my normal Opera browser. Half the time I can't log in via Internet Explorer either, then when I can long in sometimes it gets through to the posting stage, but all of a sudden doesn't work. Other times I can't even post from Qumana, the useful little tool that enables me to post without the tediousness of logging in through my browser. It's annoying, it's putting me off updating here (when it's hard enough in the first place). Ugh!
2. A certain client of ours at work is another good one to moan about. Actually, most clients can be moaned about at some stage or another. And councils... We always seem to find ourselves stuck in the middle: the client wants to do this, the council wants them to do that, District Plan says this, council thinks District Plan says that and so on. But yeah, clients that try to do the whole job themselves, that's a bit annoying.
3. Getting dates wrong. Thought I had an important meeting on Monday that I was stressing out about, refer to above and below for ultimate annoyances, but yeah - it's next Monday.
4. On the subject of work annoyances, add in jobs that take forever. Ones that you really should have finished months ago but for one reason or another you wish would just go away and get themselves finished. Ugh!
5. Dishes. Enough said.

Life isn't really that bad. It's just nice to moan about things occasionally.

Ok, well I had hoped that last week's frequent updates hadn't been a false dawn, but perhaps the fact that it's now been almost a week since the last of them perhaps proves that it was. I still feel like I want to focus more on this blog, I have cut down on other internet things that I find myself getting up to (such as the myriad of forums that I'm a member of) hopefully in order to concentrate on this a bit more, but I find myself once again distracted by other things, like real life (how shocking), work (even more so) and just my general habit of not updating (after a few days I go "oh yeah, that's right I do have a blog).

But anyway, about this time last year I decided that I would try to write more about less on here. So often it seemed as though I just scraped the surface on things that I really wanted to write more in detail about. Leila's long abandoned blog (I'm sure one day she'll update it as a surprise and I'll not read it for a couple of months) had inspired me to such an approach, and for a long time it did work, and I still want it to work. However, today I'm going to go the opposite way. Short and sharp, a few observations and tidings from the Life of Josh.

• Being sick again really sucks. It seems like I've had a constant 'half cold' for the last six months.
• Why can't I read just one book at a time? Let's think about how many I've got going at the moment (excluding long abandoned ones): An Abundance of Katherines (although to my credit I have finished it, I'm just reading the appendix, still,) The End of Oil, The Ancestor's Tale, The God Delusion and The Weather Makers (yeah I know I'm really into my "big issues" books at the moment).
• It feels like summer is finally deciding to arrive... a good way to lift the spirits.
• I can't believe we spent that much on a supermarket shop!
• Yay for Leila finishing her university for the year.
• My giant city map seems like a never-ending project, a cool project but still never-ending.
• That version of the map is quite out of date now. It's much bigger these days!

It feels strange writing such short one liners. When I originally conceived it in my head I was sure there'd be a great, exciting and funny way to put it together. I was going to have an "isn't it strange?" section... as isn't it strange questions are always quite interesting. I'm sure I'll think of some eventually, perhaps for tomorrow's blog update.

It's often interesting to use my blog as a pointer towards what was happening this time last year, this time 2 years ago, 3 years ago and so on. If I was being particularly productive in my blogging there's often an exact entry for previous years (here we go for last year, and a day off two years ago). When I look back on those entries, I obviously get some sort of sense about how far things have come in that particular year - how my life is different or the same, especially if I read around the particular entry. Looking back to this time last year, I find myself almost amazed that it's been a year. I guess at that stage Leila and I were still fairly newly together, Amalia was a whole year younger and obviously quite a bit different to how she is now, work was a little different and so on. But overall, if someone said to me that it was only 6 months ago I'd probably believe it. I guess it's because my life has remained fairly similar over that time, it doesn't seem as long as - for example - the year before that. If I look back at where I was in October 2005 in some ways it feels strange that was only two years ago - in some respects it feels like another lifetime.

Long time readers of this blog are probably rolling their eyes going "wow, here goes Josh again about how time is sometimes funny and doesn't seem to stick in our mind like the constant continuous thing that it actually is.... big deal!" I guess that is a pretty good point, but I still find it interesting how we remember our lives, how in our minds it's pieced together in ways that sometimes end up surprising us. I think the fact that a year ago feels like it could be only 6 months ago is because I've had a pretty stable last year, by my standards. As yesterday's update about "phases" alluded to, the overall 'phase' of my life has had just a couple of big changes in the last year or so, compared with what seemed to be one of the most changeable years I think I've ever had, in the time before that. Anyway, I should stop with all this theoretical nonsense and give some idea about what I've been up to lately. After all, when I am searching back through past blog updates it is the entries that specifically describe what I've been up to, rather than the myriad of "blogging about blogging" entries, that are the ones I'm particularly interested in.

Obviously the big news for the last few days has been Ella giving birth to her gorgeous little boy, Joseph. I saw some pictures for the first time today of him on Ella's Facebook profile, and he's such a cute little thing. It all seems very unfair that they're on the other side of the world at the moment, as I really really want to give him a good cuddle. It hasn't really sunk in that I'm an Uncle yet, or really that the whole thing has happened. I guess because everyone's been on the other side of the world, all Ella's pregnancy and birth has really seemed to be to me, has been the phone calls, photos and occasional Skype conversation. I guess that it will probably only truly seem real and truly sink in that my little sister has had a baby once I see them all back in New Zealand next February. It is quite a strange sensation really, knowing that a huge event has happened, your brain trying to process that it has truly occurred, while at the same time it just doesn't feel as though anything really has changed. Perhaps even if everyone had been in New Zealand it would still feel a little unreal, as such things usually do. It's still strange to think of her as married.

As was the case last year, the end is very nigh for Leila's university year. She's had an absolutely insane last few weeks, writing giant essays seemingly continuously. Fortunately, there's not too long for her to go with everything, and once she's finished the last two essays that she's working on at the moment, her Honours Degree will be complete. As she's taking a break from university next year, to recharge the batteries and allow us to travel overseas for a few weeks, this is in some ways more of "the end of an era" than last year was, when she completed her undergraduate degree. I remember when I got to the end of my degree in October 2002 the idea that I wouldn't be going back to university the next year seemed almost as momentous as finishing this three-year project. It'll be the first time in about 17 years that she hasn't been at either university or school.

Wow three updates in three days, that's pretty impressive for me considering how things have gone lately. I still have a few more things to eventually write about - like the long weekend just passed, a couple of books that I'm reading at the moment or have recently finished (I think I have about 5 books on the go at the moment... sigh), plus a few more things that I'm sure will eventually pop into my mind. It feels good to be back blogging regularly, doing a bit more than just the weekly update, which only ever half-manages to retell what's gone on in the previous week. Hopefully, if I can keep up with more regular postings, I'll start to get back to the point where I feel like I'm being proactive and not just reactive with this blog.

As it's getting somewhat towards the end of the year - unbelievably in some ways, thankfully in others and I guess unfortunately in some sort of way or two - I have been thinking about how I will look back at 2007 at some stage in the future. By my standards it has been a reasonably uneventful year, although considering that "eventfulness" is often coupled with "unpleasantness" that hasn't exactly been a bad thing in any particular way. It's been a funny year in the way I've found myself going through a series of "phases", thing that I become interested in for a while, get really into, slowly lose interest and then eventually give up on. There's been the "Sims" phase, the "Sim City 4" phase, the "Cricket" phase - and that's just when it comes to computer games. More generally, there have been phases related to maze drawing, scambaiting, the scambaiting forum, the skyscraper forum, trying to resurrect the movie forum, creating my own forum, city drawing and so on. Perhaps in the future I will be thinking of 2007 as my "phases" year, although obviously there have also been important events such as shifting into the house where we are now, the holiday up north with Leila in February and all these babies that everyone we know seem to keep to keep having.

I was talking with Leila last night about how it must be this really common human trait to have such "phases". A whole pile of things seem to go through the stages of being new and exciting, eventually becoming normal and a habit, and then after some more time becoming something that you're still doing out of habit, but in a strange way not really because you find yourself actively interested in it anymore. She used the metaphor of a piece of chewing gum to explain it, which makes quite a lot of sense. When you first start chewing on the piece of gum it's really tasty, new and interesting. However, after a while the taste begins to drain away. You keep on chewing, more out of habit than because you're actually getting much taste out of it, because you can't be bothered finding another piece of chewing gum, or because you find that you've actually become quite attached to this piece of chewing gum, even though it's not tasty anymore. Yet all these things can only mask the fact that it doesn't have much taste anymore, so you find yourself chewing less and less often, and then eventually either forgetting that it's in your mouth or swallowing it seemingly unaware that you've done so.

Obviously not everything works this way. Or it has the ability to recapture one's interest. I've had a couple of phases of being really into most of my computer games, I've managed to keep various other things "fresh", and I've managed to keep this blog going for six and a half years now! Nevertheless, I think that blogging is a great example of how something can feel fresh and exciting for a while, then slowly lose its flavour, leaving you updating it out of some sort of habit, or more in my case a desire to ensure that all my hard work keeping this blog going for most of the last six and a half years doesn't go to waste. I look back at my one big gap, between May 2004 and March 2005, and find it frustrating that I don't have a record of that time as much as I do of the rest of my life since January 2001. However, I still definitely go through phases of finding myself very interested in updating this blog, and then after a while less interested. It definitely goes hand-in-hand with what my other internet interests are at the time: if I'm into other people's blogs like I was for quite a few months at the start of this year and the end of last year, then I'm likely to feel inspired to update myself quite regularly. If I'm interested in something more unrelated to blogging, such as chat rooms or forums, then the link is less clear and I just don't 'naturally' find myself particularly interested in updating all that often.

Perhaps I am more of a 'phases' person that most other people. Perhaps I will become interested in scambaiting again, perhaps I will eventually come to the end of my interest in drawing city maps (hopefully not until I've finished the one I'm working on at the moment!) Perhaps something will spark me into getting back into the habit of updating here more often. I'm trying a couple of things at the moment to hopefully make that happen, so that I can put together a better record of my life at the moment.

I have a few things to write about, but this is a good place to start. And I'll backdate it a day so the days actually match up.

But anyway, Ella's little baby boy Joseph (I think she's settled on the name, will edit this in the future if that's not the case) has arrived! Things went reasonably well, although unfortunately for her she had to transfer to the hospital though she had been planning for a home birth, but he's all well and so is Ella. It still feels rather unreal, as they're all the way on the other side of the world, I never saw her pregnant and the whole thing has happened via internet photos and phone calls from my perspective, but it is still very exciting. It'll be great when they all come back to New Zealand in February next year.

Uncle Josh... wow that'll take a bit of getting used to. Congratulations Ella & Pete!

Oh yes, it's Monday so I'd better update. I get the feeling if I get beyond a week between posts it'll be the death knell for this blog, so at least I'm keeping things at a minimum level. It's been a tough week, with the whole country seeming to be in mourning after the All Blacks' loss. Never under-estimate how much rugby means to people here I suppose. On the good side, it seems like people aren't "hating" the team and coaches as much as they have during previous World Cups, in fact we're taking our annoyance out on the rules of the game, the referees, anything really - it's all quite healthy I think.

Wow I had such a crazy day today. Auckland to Tauranga and back in the day. The day for me started early, way too early actually. Having so much to organise, to make sure I woke up on time, didn't forget anything important, made it out to the airport, organised rental car, went around Mt Maunganui and Te Puke taking necessary photos for work, made it to the two meetings I needed to on time and with sufficient brain cells intact to ensure I got useful information, then back to airport for flight home, my head was spinning at the thought of it. Clearly my subconscious felt the same thing, as I had my typical dream of not waking up on time and missing my flight, and of course feeling terrible about it. It reminded me a little of a time when I was in Sydney back in early 2001 and I needed to wake early to catch the train to Canberra with Jannatun. At that time I had a cellphone alarm, but I hadn't used it before so I didn't know for sure whether it would actually wake up me, so I spent the entire night freaking out that I'd miss the alarm, wake up to late, miss the train and bugger up the whole day. This time around I just had this horrible feeling in my subconscious that something would screw up.

Then, to make matters worse, once I had "awoken" from this original dream about missing my plane, I then had another dream about basically the same thing, although this time my head was saying "last time may have been a dream but this time it isn't", I woke up again - at least partially, before proceeding to have basically the same dream for the third time, this time going "the last two times may have been a dream but this time it's for real, see you can't even wake yourself up!" I think this continued about five times over, with me getting more and more stressed out as each time it felt more real. In about dream number 6 I had woken up on time, but then I couldn't find my car to drive to the airport, as for some bizarre reason it was in a random carpark.  Then in another dream I made it onto the plane, but it had to be a later flight which meant that I was likely to not make a meeting that I should have. I don't think I've ever managed quite so many layers of "dreams within dreams" before. And even after I awoke properly enough to actually look at the time, I still went back to having the same dream for yet another time.

By the time I actually awoke I think I was quite glad to be awake, which is definitely saying something when it's 5.45am in the morning. My darling Leila got up with me to make me a coffee, as I stressed about finding everything quickly, then couldn't find my car-keys, stressed more and thought about the worse case scenario of having to call my parents to get the spare car-key at 6am in the morning and having to say "no it's not Ella... nobody's had a baby". Fortunately Leila found my keys, and I stressfully headed off to the airport, now worrying that I couldn't find my e-ticket, or that I wouldn't be able to get a rental car as I hadn't booked one.

Of course it didn't matter about the e-ticket, as I checked in at the self-service kiosk. By this stage I was starting to calm down a little, although probably due to the stress of my "sleep" and the early wake up I felt like everything was quite surreal, almost like a dream itself. The flight was fairly non-eventful, and although I still enjoyed the acceleration of the take off I think that my number of flights in the last couple of years has taken away some of the excitement it used to hold for me. I got a reasonable view of Auckland before we hit the clouds, and then again of Tauranga before we landed. There was even a weird 'upside-down' rainbow that I spotted, although yet again I mildly freaked out on the landing as it seemed we were coming down far too quickly - I always manage to freak out on landings that we're either coming down too soon or not soon enough.

I picked up the rental car sweet as, and then went straight to Te Puke to take the first set of photos. This was a bit stressful in itself, having to take photos of people's houses, stopping on roads all the time, plus getting used to another car! But it turned out to be OK, even though a few people came up to me and asked what I was doing! After that I killed a bit of time, took a few of the photos I needed to take in Mt Maunganui and then went to the first meeting I had for the day. That meeting went OK, although I felt like I should have had more questions to ask, but as I'm not a stormwater expert I didn't really know what to say without looking like an idiot. From there I finished off the rest of the photos, and then went to the second meeting, which probably went a bit better, and then - to my great relief - I had finished everything that I'd needed to do for the day. After that I had a bit more of a drive around, before eventually making my way back to the airport.

The flight back was pretty freaky actually, as it was really windy and we were in quite a little plane that was getting bumped around a lot, especially when we were in the clouds. The pilots did pretty damn well to ensure our landing was smooth though, so after all the drama of the day it had a pretty low key ending.

Photos: http://jarbury.ifastnet.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=37&p=789#p789

Crap. The All Blacks managed to get themselves knocked out of the World Cup again under stupid circumstances. Just like 1991, 1995, 1999 and 2003 we managed to be probably the best team at the tournament, but then choke at the final point of the match. Yet I think this one is worse than all the others, at this tournament our team was better than it had been before, better prepared and everything seemed to be finally set to come together.

 But it didn't. I had been worried about the match against France, ever since France lost to Argentina in the opening match of the tournament I wondered whether this would set up a quarter-final that we would rather avoid. Having lost to France in 1999, I had a nasty feeling that although we should beat France 9 games out of 10, if ever that 1 game was going to happen it would happen during the World Cup. The All Blacks just have a nasty habit of bringing out their worst for the World Cup, choking, whatever you want to call it. However, logic dictated that I should be reasonably confident. After all, the average score between NZ and France throughout the past four years was something like 44-11. We had beaten them regularly in France, the French had looked pretty sloppy in losing to Argentina. Surely, a formality.

The match started off pretty well, with the ABs up 13-0 at one stage, and then 13-3 at half-time. The haka had been pretty intense, with the French taking it on in a way that was pretty exciting. However, as the 2nd half wore on it seemed like all the luck was against us, and the French clawed their way back to level, and then eventually go ahead. The last 10 minutes were torture to watch, as we kept on getting close, but not quite being able to score points. I couldn't watch the last minute, it was just too frustrating and upsetting. There were cries of pained anguish all over Auckland as the final whistle blew.

After regathering myself slightly by having a nice breakfast at the local cafe, Leila and I headed out to Whatipu during the afternoon. I hadn't been out to Whatipu for ages and ages, so we wound our way out there. It's a pretty interesting road, narrow and really windy - with the end of it being unsealed (the first unsealed roads I've driven on since going up north). The beach is about as isolated as West Coast beaches get, as you would expect at the end of such a long road. We had a good read on the beach, a chance to draw my mind on to something other than rugby. It was just what was needed actually.

But yes, of course I could not forget how depressing the loss had been. Thinking back to partway through the match when I defeat had been an unthinkable event, and now realising it's a reality. In a few discussion forums and talks with knowledgable people I have eventually managed to piece together why I think the All Blacks lost, and once I'd figured that out I've actually managed to feel better about the whole thing. Ironically, as the coaching staff left every stone unturned in trying to prepare the team in the best way possible I actually think this obsession with focusing so much on the World Cup actually led to our downfall. By the way the All Blacks played it seemed like they were utterly terrified of losing, rather than actually wanting to win the match. It was as if the past memories of World Cup losses haunted them so much they just froze up as soon as the remote possibility of them losing arose.

So in the end it seems like what we really need to do is not give as much of a shit about the World Cup. Forget about it really, until 2010 at the earliest. Bring on the cricket season!

So I finally made it up to Mangawhai Heads last weekend. On Friday night Leila and I headed up north, planning on picking up Amalia en-route to Mangawhai, although via a rather interesting detour. It was nice to get out of the city again, and to manage a little more than just a day in Napier or Tauranga for meetings relating to work. I always enjoy driving on country roads, even if it is State Highway One which is rather busy most of the time. The freedom of an empty road ahead of you, a 100 kph speed limit and just the freedom to actually let the car stretch its legs always has such a liberating feeling to me. About halfway up there we stopped for dinner, and then had the plans changed which meant that we didn't need to do a massive detour, which was a rather pleasant surprise. Amalia was already asleep by the time she was dropped at Mangawhai, and I was pretty wasted myself after the drive up.

On Saturday morning the weather was definitely at its best. My parents stayed up there for half the day, to make the most of the sunshine and having Amalia up there for the first time since about this time last year. The tide was in, but we went down to the beach and made some sandcastles, which was pretty fun. At first, the sandcastle we were making was pretty typical - often I find myself at the initial stages of a sandcastle just randomly digging around wondering how it'll turn out. Amalia was really keen on carting water from the sea to dump into a makeshift lagoon for her to paddle in, so I ended up digging down far enough to reach the waterline. Then, after a while longer my Dad started carting in a few stones from nearby, further up the beach,  and putting them around the lagoon. After a while of that, our creation started turning into something more similar to a giant stadium, and we kept on finding bigger and bigger stones to dump around the edge of this lagoon - building up the 'grandstands' higher and higher.

In the afternoon we went back, and built a cool bridge at the front of the "stadium" (the bottom pic). All in all it was just a really nice day. The weather was great, and it just felt so nice to be back at the beach for the first time in quite a while.

That evening I found my old boardgame of "Risk", which had been hidden in the wardrobe up at the beach house for the last few years. It's a game that, like most of my boardgames, I've never played as much as I probably should have. It was at some sleepover birthday party in High School that I first game across this game, as a whole pile of us played a game the morning after not getting much sleep (as is always the case during sleepovers at High School). It was a really cool game, and although I got wasted by trying too hard to hang on to Europe, it was a pretty interesting game all the same, and I think I talked my parents into getting it for me for my next birthday. I played it a few times with Ella, although from memory we didn't fully read the rulebooks quite enough, and ended up playing a weird variation that actually meant the game wasn't as interesting as it should have been. Playing with only 2 people was also always less than ideal. But anyway, having had a proper read through the rulebook, Leila and I set up a 2 player game as it should be played, including a neutral "player" which kept us apart for a decent amount of time. It was a pretty interesting game, although we ended up having to go to sleep about halfway through it. However, by writing down the number of armies each of us had on every territory we were able to transfer the game back to Auckland.

Sunday wasn't nearly as good, weather-wise, as the rain which had meant to start on Saturday began to roll in. It felt like we spent most of the day cleaning, although with daylight savings kicking in and a few rugby games in the morning it was no surprise that the day seemed to disappear really quickly. Eventually we got on the road, although it was a pretty slow trip back to Auckland because of the traffic. I definitely can't wait until the Northern Motorway extension is finished, as hopefully that should prevent too much congestion in the future.

Yes my blogging habits seem particularly poor at the moment. I have felt as though there is plenty to write about at the moment, just I don't much have the motivation or I find myself too easily distracted by other things that I could do. I think the fact that I can't use Opera (my regular browser) to post in Angelfire, and have to open up a whole new browser often means that I just forget to do it. Oh well, I shall try harder :) 

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.