Infrequent Insomnia Blog

Lately it seems that I only write my infrequent blog posts in the wee hours of the morning. Mind you it seems to be getting later each time so who knows, maybe I'll find myself, over time, posting during sensible hours again.

Last time I was up at all hours typing away I talked about awakeness. Well in the day that followed, I remember little of the LX plots - I think one was canceled. Don G was great despite having to leave the theatre just after the start of Act 1 because I was feeling faint. That night I made it home after stopping by the side of the freeway for a nap. The next day I decided to see a doctor. Tonsillitis. Never in my life have I had tonsillitis that made me feel quite so dead. Armed with antibiotics I headed home to sleep off the time that it would take the antibiotics to kick in. Two days apparently. Two days later I was in the doctor's office again. Apparently it had gotten worse and my throat was quite swollen and it was now affecting both sides of the throat which was making breathing, eating and drinking awfully more taxing than usual. Stronger antibiotics were ordered as well as something to help make them easier to stomach. The tech run felt like it went forever. Seems the medication that made the antibiotics easier to stomach were also making me feel cloudy as all hell but I was under the impression that was the tonsillitis. Oops. No more driving if I have that medication again.

Before I knew it the show was running and even sooner it was over. I finally took some time off like I'd been speaking about doing for quite some time. Three days into my break I was bored and looking for work again.

Mind you I've had a rather enjoyable time since then. I've since, many thanks to Tam, seen Alcina and Tales of Hoffman just to complete the season of operas. I've also seen more contemporary dance which was a little lost on me but the set and lighting was very sexy. Aside from that my hours have been spent sorting out paperwork and trying to work out a plan for the foreseeable future. I've also re-discovered reading as a pastime. Robert Charles Wilson's Spin was a fabulously engaging read, now I'm slowly whittling away at the books sitting next to my bed. Steve Martin's Shop Girl is currently battling several sci-fi fantasty novels for my attention. However I did find myself rather taken with the film so it's hard to say which will triumph. I suspect neither and I'll just flit between them.

Given that the sun is likely to appear in the sky shortly I should stop writing and attempt some sleep before it wakes me up. Oh well. I figure that this time on Tuesday I'll be on my way to work so it's probably not a bad thing to be a little nocturnal. Seems to be my natural state anyhow.

End ramble.

Failure to Write

In the wee small hours of the morning, when the whole wide world is fast asleep I'm lying awake wondering why it is I've got Carly Simon stuck in my head when I've been listening to Edith Piaf's rendition of L'accordéoniste on loop all day.

I'm frustratingly nocturnal at the moment. Frustrating because I have two LX plots to attend tomorrow and I'd like to be awake for them please. As well as tickets to see Don Giovanni. Again with the awakeness.

Since I wasn't sleeping anyway, I figured I might as well update my sorely neglected blog.

Let's see, last time I wrote I'd just planted a mini-herb garden for a show. Well, the season went really well. So well in fact that Kat & I don't own any plants (dead or alive) from the show. Since then I've moved onto another show and am in the process of looking for more work over the silly season. Mind you I think I could do with a couple of days off to sort out my body clock and get a little R&R but we'll see. Plenty of time for that when the theatres are dark again.

Other items of note in no particular order are:
- my shoulder (which I fell on about two weeks ago after a particularly sleepless night... futons should never be underestimated for danger, can anyone say trip hazard?) is feeling much better but is at the annoying stage where it feel good but as soon as I do anything more than hold a cup of coffee in my left arm it begins to complain. Not that I've been doing anything but resting it of course... ahem

- Mum's started her next course of chemo after a week's break last week. For some reason I kept thinking it was her last course last time... hopefully this is the one. She's getting great results from the treatment but I think she's looking forward to stopping the chemo.

- I've made it further on my NaNoWriMo novel this year than ever before, but I'm still many thousands of words behind where I should be. Perhaps I should attack that instead of this blog... I should probably also note that I'm only ahead of my previous attempts by about 1,000 words... oh well, only 48,000 more to go...

Anyhow, that's all that springs to mind at the moment. I think I'm approaching the "low" in my sleep/wake cycle, so I'm going to make another attempt to fall asleep. Wish me luck!

Greens

The show I'm working on at the moment calls for a herb garden. Given our rather tight budget, Kat (the set/costume designer) and I decided to donate a small herb garden. The best part was planting all of our random plants into our make-shift container.



Here we have the main container (the no-weeding required garden) which has basil, tomatoes, cos lettuce, parsley and some random flowers.



This is the second container (weed-me!) which contains baby corn, more tomatoes, more parsley and more lettuce as well as some weeds from outside the cafeteria.



We love our garden and hope that it's still alive in three weeks time when the season closes...

Distractions

Well it's back into the rehearsal room again tonight for the "Scottish Play" Rock Opera. It's my last rehearsal with the group I think as I'm only filling in for a couple of days this week. It's been good to be back in a rehearsal room although odd filling in for someone you don't know. Anyhow I've learned a bit about Sibellius so that's been good.

I noticed that I fell off the face of the blogging planet again but I've been distracted by no only the joy of having an oven again or my knitting (sock has been stalled at row 49) but my shiny new laptop.

It's a bit of a tradition to name your laptop/computer at my place so I thought long nd hard about it. After all my iPod is Deep Thought. I had many suggestions for more Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy names but as my first reaction to the laptop was "shiny!" Gene suggested that it would be better named Serenity.

That pretty much sums up what has been entertaining me for the last couple of days. Synchronising information across the laptops and setting it up just the way I like it. Important things like desktop pictures and backing up music. I love it. It's just like setting up an office but with less physical effort. Perfect for a lazy summer's day. :)

Yesterday I was happily distracted by Sim City 4 Rush Hour. Yes, I'm a control freak at heart but I love these simulation games. My city's doing quite well thank you for asking!

Today I've promised myself that I have to achieve some of my to-do list before I can continue to build my thriving metropolis.

I'm doing okay so far. Aside from procrastinating while writing my blog. I just need to get to the bank so I can change my date of birth. According to them I'm born in September. News to me... Mum & Dad might be surprised too...

The only other thing I really should do is get around to baking the banana cake that I bought buttermilk for yesterday... The bananas are, to quote Mum, a bit on the nose. Might make some more sweet potato and green bean salad too. It was my favourite dish from dinner on Sunday which involved AU$80 roast pumpkin soup (that's Dad's story to tell so you'll have to wait until he tells it then I'll make the link), a simple roast garlic, tomato and mushroom pasta and the aforementioned and below salad. Tasty :)



I think it must be dinner party time. Anyone for dinner?

Pleasant Day

I've been in home for almost a week now and it feels like I never left.

The job hunt has slowed down a bit but I'm happy just making my way through the laundry and unpacking. I've also started going through old clothes and my wardrobe is already looking much more reasonable.

Sleep patterns are better than normal (ie. I'm awake when most people are and haven't turned nocturnal yet). I think sleeping with the curtains open is helping. It's hard to sleep when the sun is streaming down on your face.

Today Gene's dad, John, came to visit and spent the afternoon chatting with us (Mum, Gene & I) before we headed into town to meet Cathy, Gene's mum, and Dad for dinner. I think we may have ordered a little much which is likely to be my fault as I was keen to catch up on favourite Chinese dishes but it was an excellent meal!

It's looking to be a pleasantly quiet weekend. I think I'll finish reading The Amber Spyglass tomorrow. I'm not particularly far into it but it's been an easy and engaging read for the last two books.

I think I'll spend most of the weekend trawling through the photos from the last six months and posting the ones that aren't too terrible on my Zoto site. When I get bored of that I'll return to my sock knitting which is currently driving me a little crazy. I seem to have lost the ability to count.

I'm actually looking forward to going to rehearsals on Sunday to help Naomi out with her show. It's a show that I wanted to see while I was up in Brisbane last year but failed miserably to make it. So it should be good. Always happy to help. Especially since I'm not doing much at the moment. It'll be good to be back in a rehearsal space. It's been a while!

In a big nutshell...

It feels like ages since I last posted. I'm having blog withdrawls! Sad I know. Anyhow we're still on the move but I thought I should do a quick update... On a side note the European keyboards are driving me crazy so bear with the erratic punctuation.

We're currently in Tromsø, Norway. I've been lead to believe that this is within the Artic. We're most excited! It's only -6 degrees celcius so it's not too crazy yet. Much warmer than we were expecting so we're happy. We're up here to check out the Northen Lights (coinciding with the festival that's about to start up here).

In short since I last posted...

We made it back to London a few times and visited the Museum of Natural History which was not only an impressive museum collection wise but the building was also pretty spectacular. While we were there Gene & Nick found what they believe to be the only decent cup of coffee in England in a little Italian cafe near the museum. The barista was pretty cute too :)

Other exciting things we did in London included taking Gene's cousin Will and his wife Harika to see their first show in the theatre, The Phantom of the Opera. Nick & I were particularly excited as it was our first theatre show that we'd seen as kids too. Gene got us amazing seats in the Royal Circle and it was every bit as cheesy and wonderful as we remembered although they did change some of the lyrics. Some of the acting choices were interesting too but we still enjoyed it.

After Phantom we headed to the pub where I caught up with Dave briefly before we headed back to Guildford.

Some time after all this we headed back over to France. I had finally let my post-show cold get the better of me and spent three of the four days in France in bed. We went to St Brevin des Pins, to stay with Gene's French family, which is a gorgeous little town on the south west coast of France. It has many bakeries and a yarn shop. I could live in a place like that :)

It was interesting having a fever and having to speak in another language. I found that all my dreams were in French which is really hard work when your entire knowledge of French is based on Year 8 French. I found myself waking up exhausted thinking of sentence structures. When my fever broke my dreams were in English again and the first and only word that I thought of was "ameliorate". Appropriate but more complex than necessary.

After St Brevin we made a last minute decision to head to Barcelona. We took an overnight train there and stayed for one night to see Tap Dogs and catch up with Dave again. There's something surreal about sitting in a theatre and listening to Midnight Oil in the middle of Barcelona. We liked it a lot.

We also discovered that making Gene say "Barcelona" makes him smile for photos. Yay!

Barcelona was amazing. We saw Sagrada Famillia (ignore my spelling) which you simply have to do. It's the cathedral designed by Gaudi that they started building about two hundred years ago... they're still going. The postcards say something about 2010 for finishing... Aside from my wallet getting pinched (it's all good folks, cards are cancelled not much cash lost and my passport is with me). It was a fabulous trip.

We had a little time in Paris where we caught up with Lisa again and finally got to see the Eiffel Tower. Queues to go up were too long so we didn't.

We returned briefly to England where we regrouped, jettisoned excess baggage and saw Wicked. Again with the amazing shows... It just blew me away. Love the music and the set and costumes were visually stunning. I just can't say how much I loved the show.

Then we headed off to Brussels for a few hours where we drank good beer, visited the "world's greatest stage" at the Grand Place (which was pretty special), the boys ate mussels and chips while I had sausages and strøemp. Then it was back on a train to Hamburg.

It rained in Hamburg. It rained a lot. We were soaked but we chose to walk all around the city anyway. Pictures of grey Hamburg and a tour of a couple of churches (one was intact the other destroyed in WWII and left as an anti-war memorial) then it was onto another train to Denmark.

We spent two nights in Copenhagen. During the day we walked from the city hall to the Little Mermaid who was indeed little. It was a lovely walk which took us past the palace. Didn't sight Princess Mary although we were willing to converse about drop bears and Boags draft if it happened. Pity the Tivoli Gardens were closed when we were there. They looked pretty special.

After Copenhagen we headed on a train to Oslo where we spent a night and a couple of hours wandering the city enjoying the snow. After a quick photo taking walk to the Palace and National theatre in Oslo we boarded a plane and here we are now!

In a nutshell that's what we've been doing for the last 18 days. Tomorrow night we're going dog sledding and the night after that we're going on a horse sleigh ride to see the Northern Lights. It's been a big trip and we're starting to feel a little worn out but what a holiday!

Keyboard's driving me nuts so I'll finish here.

Another speed post

Apparently I like to post in a hurry at the moment... If my laptop had better battery life I would have more time... 33% left... I should get on with it.

We finally made it up to London yesterday and we spent the first couple of hours marvelling at how close everything was.

Our first stop after Waterloo was to walk to South Bank where we were immediately side-tracked by the National Theatre. Wow. I ended up in the bookshop within about 10 minutes of arriving and 20 minutes later exited the proud owner of Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett and Darkness Illuminated by Robert Butler about the staging of His Dark Materials at the Olivier Theatre through the production process. It sounds like an amazing show. I wish I'd gotten to see it. I must read the books now. They sound pretty amazing too.

After that we explored two exhibitions at the Tate Modern until our brains hurt and we needed some water and a quiet debrief about the art on display.

The evening was passed watching our first show on the West End, Chicago. We'd originally planned to see Spamalot or Wicked but they'd sold out. It was entertaining as expected and an easy way to ease ourselves into theatre again.

I love the greyness of England. I woke up this morning and spent the first 5 hours of my day on the window sill of the flat writing in my journal (almost finished it...) and sketching the upper part of the street with my fountain pen. It was very restful and a wonderful chance for me to just daydream and well, be.

We had lunch with Aunt Jackie at the Guildford Institute which was a quaint little tea room. I had the mushroom lasagne which was delicious. Gene's feeling somewhat under the weather after the big nights out of late and is still a bit feverish. So we've tucked him up in bed.

Tomorrow I'll be catching up with some friends in London which I'm really looking forward to. We might even fit in the British Museum with any luck...

19% battery left so I should go!

An Afternoon of Circus

Today we were treated to the fabulous Cirque Éloize at the Lyric Theatre in QPAC. It was so pretty! Really simple design in terms of lights and set. It had all my favourite elements (well used gauze and things to fly people) and then it rained on stage. Being aware of the logistical nightmare that it is to make rain happen on stage I loved every minute of it anyway. I believe it's playing in Melbourne or may have already played. If it's headed down there though I recommend seeing it even if it is playing at the Palms at Crown because it was a fantastic performance. I'm still a little lost for words. Pretty. Very pretty. Also a spunky guy with a French-Canadian accent. He was cute before the accent... it was a bonus :)

Moving onto another one of my favourite things, boots. I did a quick "boot count" after Naomi's post and realised that the number of boots I own is perhaps a little excessive.

Boot List
- steel caps (necessary for work... even if I'm in an office)
- black knee highs from a few years ago (an old favourite despite the unpleasant circumstances around getting them altered. Sadly the leather's dying and the zip is making a break from the leather so it may be retirement time soon)
- black three quarter boots with a buckle (time to let these ones go... as they're falling apart...
- black three quarter boots with no buckle (I retired those to the skip yesterday as they had a 3 inch hole in them. I'm sensing a trend... stupid Kmart/Target kids boots)
- hiking boots (haven't worn them since 2001 but I've moved them from house to house... might go hiking some time soon...)
- new black three quarter boots (currently wearing them now and they rock)
- new black knee highs (replacement for the other dying pair, Gene's going to escort me to the cobblers to get it altered to protect me from potential nasty men)

Something tells me I might have a bit of a thing about boots... Don't even start me on a coat count... (don't start Gene either, I'll get in trouble)

On a different note, Nick's joining us in sunny Brisbane tomorrow! We're very excited and are making preparations for the trip next week already. It'll be great to see another familiar face. I guess that's the thing about festivals, they're like a family thing for us... a tech family so it's always good to see each other.

Day 4

Detox is going well. I'm actually feeling less tired which I think has more to do with the nearly constant grazing on food (I don't find veggies quite as filling as a solid steak sandwich...) and lighter meals.

The return season of I Forgive Catriona Rowntree is doing well. Two shows down and only three more to go. We've had good audiences both nights so far and we're expecting a pretty good audience tonight too! It's kind of exciting because I've known someone in the audience both nights.

Sadly my cold seems to be doing a return season of its own so I'm on to round two of antibiotics (no drinkies for me on Cup Day anyway because of detox). My hayfever has definitely come back and I'm now on the good ol' antihistamines as well. I'm beginning to be grateful for my healthier diet at present because I feel so medicated!

Despite the fact I should be saving money (especially after my dental bills) I treated myself to a glass nail file (it's the girl in me trying to get out). It's really cool. It's white-ish with a purple handle and files soooooooo nicely. Got to put it to good use today when I broke my nail while balancing the petty cash at work (don't ask).

Okay, time to change into my blacks and head off to the theatre. The great thing about working at the Storeroom is it takes less than 10 minutes to get there at a leisurely pace on my bike.

Day 1

Today is the first day of my 10 day Detox (yes, I'm on that band wagon in the small hope that this will avoid future gastric complications). It's actually been pretty good today. I am fully aware that I'm still rather early in this new experience, but I'm quietly optimistic about the whole thing.

I was up early this morning to make lunch - Thai chicken red curry with brown rice - and to pack snacks for the day. I ended up not snacking at work but drinking lots of water instead. So far the only distasteful thing I've encountered has been the "digestive bitters" which honestly don't taste so good even if it is meant to help with my digestion. I had my first breakfast in several months - fruit & vegie juice, I didn't get around to making anything more substantial than that - before heading off to the orthodontist.

Thanks for the health insurance advise there Nomi, I've actually got that whole life time limit thing happening but was happy to discover that I could still claim a just under fifty percent of my claim today (I should have looked for a Members Choice provider, but I was lazy). It feels really weird not having the plate in any more. There's a slight gap between my back teeth where the plate used to be and my gum's actually grown into the shape of the plate behind my lower teeth so it almost feels like the wire's still in there. I figured that while I was fixing up my teeth I should go all out and listen to the orthodontist's advice... So tomorrow afternoon before I head to my show call I'm going to see the dental hygenist for a full clean and inspection. I'm also in need of some fillings (yay) but that's going to wait for another visit *sigh*. Oh but I am excited because today is the first trip to the dentist that they haven't given me a brushing/flossing lesson so I must be getting better at it... I also learnt that a "dental calculus" is just their way of saying "tartar". I was somewhat concerned when I saw on the quote (oh yeah it's not going to be cheap) something about a removal of calculus and had a minor panic attack. I know I need to get two wisdom teeth out but I was hoping not to do that quite yet... happily I now know that they'll just be doing the good ol' scraping of my teeth.

It's funny how you retain knowledge of products and industries that you've left behind... I actually checked to see if the dental practice had HICAPS (and they did, they had the black ICE terminal in case you care John). Not that it would have mattered greatly to me even when I was at HICAPS because I wasn't in sales... but I still look. I'm glad I learnt about health insurance and know what to look for now too. Besides, I'm making the most of my claiming of stuff. I'm going for a massage as soon as I remember to find a registered masseur nearby.

Work was good today, I caught up on some work from last week when I was away. Tomorrow's an early start though... I get to take minutes for a meeting so I really should make sure I get a good breakfast so that I'm awake! Well, that and I'm driving into work tomorrow... so I should probably be awake for that too.

I caught up with Tracee at the Storeroom where she's doing a return season of her sellout Fringe show, "I Forgive Catriona Rowntree". I'm really looking forward to working with her again. It really is a great show and I think she tells her stories really well.

Mmmm I can smell the roast turkey that we're having for dinner tonight... I think I might go and take a peek at it... mmm hungry....

A Nutshell

Wow did I fall off the writing band wagon or what?! This is definitely not boding well for NaNoWriMo... oh well, if you never try then you'll never know right? It's less than a month away now and still no inspiration for any story let alone a novel... I figure it'll probably be a terrible novel, but it will be MY terrible novel and that's what matters. Well, to me any how. It doesn't matter if it sits on my laptop as an invisible file that shall never be seen or heard of at the end of Novemeber. That it gets written is the aim of the exercise. Yes.

Fringe if finally over and a huge hurrah for Naomi who made it to three shows in one night. I'm glad you saw Waiting for Compo because I don't think enough people did. It was a great Fringe season for me this year. I got my own venue to call home for three weeks and it was gorgeous. The Meeting Room at the North Melbourne Town Hall is a great little venue that just transforms in a matter of days from an empty room to a 65 seat theatre. I was also fortunate to have some wonderful shows like Basic Training and Tickets to Ourselves along with Waiting for Compo in my room. All a pleasure to work with and my pet shows over the couple of weeks. I was also lucky enough to have an additional late show I Forgive Catriona Rowntree in my room after a sellout season in the Supper Room (also at the town hall). I'm sad that it's all over but certainly have come away with a whole new bunch of people to be nerdy with (one of the techs described the Hub crew as uber-nerds).

So now life's focussing more on the Comm Games (hereafter known as the CG because I'm lazy). I've only been there a week and a half and my head is already spinning at the scale of the event. It's really exciting to be working on it and even though I'm struggling with my sleep habits (having become nocturnal during Fringe) it's proving to be a fantastic experience.

Aside from that I'm crawling through Anansi Boys at the rate of a chapter per night. It's a great read and totally hilarious. It's strange that I don't hear my "book reading" inner voice when I read it but I hear Neil Gaiman reading it. I'm fairly sure it's because he read two chapters of it to us at Continuum. After that I'm hoping that the books I've ordered will have arrived (Dan Simmons' Olympos and Clive Barker's Days of Magic, Nights of War.

In a nutshell that's where I'm at really. I wish there was more to add but there's not! It's been a wonderfully busy few weeks and I look forward to it escallating to sheer madness in the months to come :)

Oh I'm also looking forward to a holiday in November with Gene but that's still being confirmed. :)

Also looking forward to seeing my friends again...

Add sleep to the list of things I'm looking forward to...

Speaking of which....

Bzzzzz

It feels like years since I've been online and posted and I love it. Not the lack of posting - that's just slackness on my part I'm sure - but I love how busy I've been lately. I'm thinking that I can only get busier.

I've started my new job and I'm still at the Fringe for one more week (hint hint to all who said they'd come and didn't). So sleep is a luxury being facilitated by my taking public transport to work again and hitching a lift home with other techs.

We went pretty hard last week. I can't even remember what I posted last. Just felt like giving a bit of a wave to the few people who read this because I miss them. So I guess the update will have to wait until Sunday when we're all Fringe partied out and recovering from an enormous Saturday.

Fringe

The Melbourne Fringe has truly taken over my life. In the last week I've gone from working twenty hours over two weeks to fifty hours in the last week with more set for this week. I love Fringe :)

I've got some great shows in my venue and two out of the four I currently have got excellent opening night reviews in The Age on Monday!

The festival club is much bigger than last year and plenty of fun... we've been there every night waiting for our non-Fringe-friends to show up (hint hint) to no avail so we've been doing our best to drink our way through the beer ourselves.

The first half of the season draws to a close on Friday night and there'll be some new shows starting as of Saturday which will be exciting. Speaking of which I've got to go to work "early" for a tech run for my new late show on Friday... more posting later... maybe...

Bumpin'

Fringe is on it's way to being up and running. We've been bumping-in the various venues in the Fringe Hub over the last two days and tomorrow sees the start of the tech runs for the Hub shows. It's been a really cruisy bump-in really with all the contractors doing most of the work, leaving us to play with the fiddly bits (mainly involving cable ties).

I love the transformation of my room. It goes from being an empty room to having black drapes added, lots of rostra for the seating bank (rather heavy and fiddly) and a lovely tri-truss rig with a few lights. It looks great and once I get all the cables tidy I'm going to be doubly proud of the room. We even coordinated the chairs into a purple-green-blue pattern!

So now I'm home after our post-safety brief drinks at the pub across the road and I'm feeling somewhat sore and keep discovering new bruises with every movement. Still, that's all part of the fun that is working on festivals/events/shows and I wouldn't give it up for the world. Gene's watching Peace Keeper Wars right now so I might join him for the last three hours of Farscape we'll be seeing in a while. It's not a bad series, it's just never really grabbed my attention much.

Study? I think not!

This studying thing is definitely not what I remember. Mainly because I didn't really do that much studying last time I gave this a shot... more procrastinating and drinking and hanging out in ex-toilet offices. As a result I'm madly trying to catch up on my history homework - the different spellings of names and places in Greek myths are driving me nuts. I'm still what feels like a week behind when I'm closer to a week and a half. The readings look deceptively short, however I've discovered that the paper of my textbook is rather thin.

I felt bad about the lack of writing lately although in all honesty I didn't really have much to say over the last few days. The weekend was fairly uneventful. I tackled as much Greek myth as I could fit in my head until it hurt...

Oh hang on! On Sunday I went with Nick (not Naomi's Nick) to see the first piece of theatre that I've gotten to in ages at Red Stitch called Bug by Tracey Letts. It was good! I found the pacing of the play a bit strange though. The first half seemed to be a little slow and then it ended rather quickly. Great story though and great story telling and that's what counts for me. As a side note, Last Minute.com (who I just linked the title of the play to just in case someone wants to get tickets for it) have different prices to what Nick and I paid on Sunday... more expensive by two dollars... so maybe call Red Stitch to book...

Monday was a bit lacking really and it's all my fault. When I chat to Lisa we talk about "girly moments". Times when you know that you're being irrational or picky or simply not reacting to the situation like you usually would (ie. in a calm and sensible manner) but you can feel the hormones raging over and clouding your judgement and making you do things that you actively know at the time will make things worse - or if you're really lucky just make things not get any better at the time. Anyhow Monday was like that. So I wasted the better part of my one day this week with my darling man having a "girly moment". (Note to Naomi: I'm trying your theory on publicly acknowledging the situation that I appear to have unwittingly caused in assuaging guilt... would probably help if Gene saw this though!) In the end we went to the video store and hired eight movies and watched two. We watched King Arthur and Erik the Viking. I didn't hate King Arthur and I found it quite engaging although I would have liked to have seen a little more about where they got their references and all in all found the making of the film rather lacking. The costumes were cool though... and Clive Owen's pretty... Keira Knightly was pretty cool too (although rather under-dressed for the weather I would have thought). Definitely going to have to look into this Sarmation army thing though... Erik the Viking was great and I really enjoyed it. Tim Robbins is funny :)

I'm sensing this post is getting rather long... but I'm going to keep going anyway because I have a gripe to voice.

Yesterday was a beautiful day so Gene suggested we go for a bike ride. Just a short one. He was on his way home on the tram in a wonderfully good mood. By the time he got home though, he wasn't in such a good mood. He'd just had a ticket inspector call him a liar. The ticket machine didn't print on the back of his daily ticket (as I've recently noticed happening) and when the ticket inspector re-validated the ticket it printed "expired" on the back. As a result said inspector made a report (which is fine) but then refused to give Gene a replacement day pass for travel (as they are meant to do when you have a ticket confiscated for evidence) but only gave him two hours saying that Gene was using an expired ticket so why should he get a daily? What happened to the innocent until proven otherwise?! I've noticed on a few of my 2hr x 10 tickets that the machines skip lines or more annoyingly within the two hours that you've got before it is supposed to use another ticket it uses another ticket anyway. So all in all the fare evasion campaign that they have is currently pissing me off because their ticketing system is ridiculously unreliable - I've been told by a Metlink person at a premium train station that tickets supplied at newsagencies aren't that reliable so they weren't willing to give me the replacement tickets and that I'd have to pay out the old faulty metcard. Give me a decent ticketing system and tram inspectors who don't just give tickets but can answer questions - I couldn't even get an answer about concession cards from one of them. They didn't stop. They just hopped off the tram. Oh and Gene's infringement notice says "none-valid ticket" so it's good to know their spelling is up to scratch.

We're getting our bikes serviced tomorrow so hopefully we won't have to worry about stupid tickets for a while. It's part of our "get fit" plan as well.

Oooh.. now what I really wanted to achieve in today's post (aside from the rant) is to share my excitement of having my first shifts as a venue operations officer this week! Yay for having work! I'm working tonight and Friday night and tomorrow during the day. I'm actually really excited about tomorrow because it's the police brass band and they were awesome last time I saw them -which was admittedly when I was twelve but I'm sure they can only have gotten better!

So on that much brighter note, I'm going back to my study of Greek gods and their origins.