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.

New Levels of Geekiness

I was browsing through some software for my palm at Handango because Gene & I are looking for timesheet/billing software for our respective Palms and I came across Knitable which is a database designed for knitters who have PDAs. It's fantastic! (I am fully aware that I've risen to a new level of knitting geekiness). So as a result I've spent much of this morning adding my various yarn and needle details into the database and will be registering the program as soon as my credit card has money again (hopefully next Thursday). Aside from that I look at some "learn French" software which was cute. I've been getting into some sim games and a couple of puzzle games and word games. I've reached my game limit now. I've got plenty to entertain myself with. I did find several timesheet/billing programs and so far Time@Hand has been the one to catch our attention. For one it works on both Gene's Palm and mine, which not all programs do. Secondly it looks pretty, which shouldn't be important but for some reason it is. I just downloaded TimeClock and it's actually looking pretty good so far. It's got everything that we wanted... hmmm... except it can only be used like a punch card system, you can't seem to just enter your hours... hmm...

Given enough time there's so much you can find out there to take up your time. It almost makes you wonder what you might be missing. At the moment I'm missing the lovely weather outside... at least it looked lovely last time I peered out our window.

Time to get back into my knitting now!

Mainly Palms

Amazing how a couple of shifts at work can totally take over your life...

I've been working at my old-new job for a week now and the people are really wonderful there. They've all been showing me the ropes as the majority of the staff work part-time. Apparently I'm in the minority in this workplace as most of the staff members are mums and I think that's amazing. I can barely get my head around working and studying... these ladies are working and bringing up kids!

I spent the weekend trying to decide if I was going to make the marathon effort to study and work full time or go to part time study and full time work. Either way the work was going to be full time. So I've decided to be sensible and go to part time study. That way I can try to get good marks in one subject as opposed to just scraping through two subjects. It means I'd also get a little time to see my friends and family which is even better :)

Gene and I went down to Geelong on Sunday (after not making it to the house moving ) and visited his parents who are house-sitting his aunt's house. I love visiting different Aldis and Kmarts. It's amazing how different stocks can be between stores. We ended up buying miscellaneous things in Aldi - ranging from half a kilogram of wool (purple and bright red) to secure digital and memory stick reader/writers. Kmart saw us leaving with the Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobb and some lipstick.

I've been getting into lipstick again lately. I particularly like the long-lasting lipstick that virtually tattoos itself to your lips for many hours. I'm a terrible lip chewer when I have lipstick on. I tend to just eat it off apparently. With these "new" lipsticks I don't have to worry about it. I'm also finding that it makes me look slightly healthier after my latest trip to the hair dressers where I had the blue re-touched, a fringe cut and the rest of my hair dyed a jet black. Without a little colour I tend to look a little washed out. :)

Can't remember if I mentioned that Gene got a Palm too recently... but I have now. He got the PalmOne E2 and it's pretty cool. A newer model than mine but it's a little confusing for me because the buttons are in different places to mine. We've spent most of our spare time together playing with them to try and synchronise the two lots of information on our calendars - the whole point in both of us having Palms - and it's been harder than we expected. Definitely a niche market for programmers the whole "syncing two pdas for two people to share information on their diaries". I spent four hours trying to find a program to do it but we eventually just renamed the categories in Datebk5 and everything seems to have worked itself out. At least our icons and categories are right now. There's still the conflict thing to solve. Apparently if we can get the HotSync to sync off a shared database that would solve it but I'd need to edit the HotSync software and I'm not game to try that with my limited knowledge of programs.

Sorry for that rather boring last paragraph... I'm going to go and watch some Farscape with Gene and finish my dinner. We're having curry tonight. Then I think it's off to bed!

When you wish upon a star...

Today I got my dream job. I get to work on the Commonwealth Games next year and I couldn't be happier. My start date is to be confirmed as I've got some prior commitments like the Fringe Festival and my work at some community centres out east but I got the call today and I've only just stopped shaking.

Suddenly I'm feeling a little tired - it's amazing how 2.75 hours worth of the shakes can make you - and I'm still grinning like a cheshire cat.

Mum and Dad are thrilled and so is Gene. Nic was the first to hear the news because he messaged me just as I was about to call Gene.

Definitely no more wallowing now!

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.

Yesterday's Post

So much for writing again later! After getting distracted by Gene during his hour and a half home for a "nap" I ended up lounging in bed finishing off the last half of Kushiel's Chosen.

That took up the majority of my night before I ran out of the house to meet Gene at the Mudfest Festival Club. I was surprised to see the band still going but they apparently ran overtime. Good to see they had an audience too.

We ended up going to Felix Club for one of Gene's boss' farewell drinks as he's going overseas for a few months. It was okay but the drinks seemed a little watery. Maybe that's just because I pour strong drinks. I'm willing to leave it at that. There was this old guy at the bar who had rather a bit to drink that night and he was making friends with everyone - including the floor at one point. He was actually really lovely though and completely harmless. Just kept asking if you were having a good night. After that it was off to McNicks for food.

Home at 2:30am and slept about a couple of hours later. As a result today has been rather unproductive but will largely consist of catching up on my history homework and a bit of pilates and a bit of chocolate. Moderation is the key :)

Interruptions

My textbook arrived today which I was happy about. It was rather unceremoniously dumped over our front gate which I was less happy about but thankfully the book was undamaged.

Gene's behind me saying "hey now, hey now, my boyfriend's back" so I think he wants some attention so I'll write later.

Just before I go... this blog's mirrored on MySpace.com because that's where Naomi has her blog and I've got a few friends who are on there fairly frequently. It a cute little community although the timestamp on the blog is attrociously incorrect most days.