And then...

Several days have passed.  The dog doesn't know this.  He thinks everyday is Thursday because that's the day Jennie gets home from gymnastics at 7pm to hear him woofing at the garage door.  Not that he is entirely proficient at telling time either - his clock only has two temporal divisions - nap o'clock and bark o'clock.  Last night (and the night before that) we (Lach and I and the Twins) have slept (on mattresses - a form of camp-in) on the lounge room floor and have had the privilege of listening to our middle aged miniature dachshund talk in his sleep.  Lach (who regularly stays awake until dawn studying maths, history and zombie killing at his PC) confirmed that Pippin habitually mixes his nap-and-bark o'clock discernment in the wee hours, and that this is not just an expression of his sorrow at having Taffy (and Jen) missing from his bark o'clock hours. I miss them though.

Let sleeping dogs snore

Fifty days into the year 2014 saw me re-enter the dismal and forbidding doors of Dan Murphy for the first time since the last days of the year following 2012.  My purpose is this diversion to the house of liver abuse (following a lovely Club Saffron Indian visit) was to procure a bottle 18yr old Macallan scotch whisky.  Now - most whisky experiences are best experienced with passion and anticipation of exquisite flavours and subtleties of palate, and the Macallan range is no different.  I usually work my way up through a distillers range from youngest to eldest in order to comprehend what the master in-charge of blending has tried to achieve.  So I skipped the 18yr old, and also the 15 and bought the modest 12 Fine Oak.  To my nose came grasses and peach, the palate has green fruit with slightly oily herbs, and the finish is shortish with mixed spice.  It was shortly after that I discovered two disturbing facts:  the first was that 100ml of this (or any other) whisky has the same kilojoules as a large Hungry Jacks fries. The second is that I had already bought a bottle of 12yr Fine Oak in November - and I could have skipped it and moved onto the 15yr.  Oh, for a good memory.

4 mattresses, but not stacked

This blog is not a weight-loss journal.  I have another blog for that.  I added to that one 21 times in four months several years ago, for a grand total of 16kgs lost bringing my BMI back into the low 20s.  A year has passed since then, and I have lost a further 8 kg.  I also put 12kg back on in between, so it's not all roses and cappuccinos.  But it's fun to have only jeans that fall down on your hips like a teenage rap delinquent complete with a backwards baseball cap.   I hate rap.  Purely for the selfish reason that I've never heard an example that vaguely interests me.  I think the spread of such music is a wee bit like an Emperor cat-walking a new very shear outfit.  Youngsters (and some oldsters) profess to enjoy it because it's in fad, and they don't want to appear square.  Either that, or I'm just an old bastard with no tolerance for change.  I like metal music - old and new, gothic and doom, thrash and speed, NWOBHM and viking.  It doesn't even have to come from northern Europe - but it helps.

Within Temptation - the best.

trouble and strife

What I need is a soul screaming, lava fired, full-on bitchin' mid-life crisis. They are available in numerous colours, but the only good ones are of green pedigree with a black and purple heart. It all stems from not being able to choose one's own crises. Where's the fun in chewing out duodenal stress craters just because we cannot dance the steps demanded by a syncopated lunatic employer who inherited their position of corrupted power by virtue of the rule of continuing ineptitude. And that's just the breakfast cereal. No, I say. No. We must stand up and be counted. Some people are, of course, taller lying down than standing, so they may still participate from the supine position should they choose. The point is: if you must have a truely great crisis to believe in, then you must by your own volition, grasp it about the throat, look it steadily in the eye, and headbutt it until you see more stars than a month of astropod. Fit ya nut n brind im, see yur jimmy. etc. No more than 600cc, you understand, and about half as many wheels as is normally considered safe. The chances of the war office bankrolling this one? Who needs to look for a crisis then? I think I'll have another bowl of cereal.

live stretch

Genna got a stretchy leg today. It's the same purple as my Honda, and the same as her nighty. Cerebral palsy is associated with hypertonal and shortened extensor muscles and tendons. A bit of botulism toxin injected into the gastrocs to relax them, and later on a few weeks of serial casting in forced flexion to re-stretch out the affected bits allows her to keep up with her twin sister again, for a few months at least.


My best mate Bravus does not enjoy whistling in the wind and needs the support of the masses to ensure its worthwhileness. Abraham had a visit from the Lord re: Sarah the post menopausal matriarch, and the destruction of Sodom et al. The Lord allowed the fire and brimstone bargaining to drop as low as ten, but still the show went on. Bravus is satisfied with a moderated six to continue his broadcasting, and that makes me happy also. I had three different blogs before this one. Two of these were unchartered atolls in the vast virtual extraweb ocean whose readers numbered zero that I knew of, and that was good. Search engines spoil a bunch of things, including anonymity. Gordon (both before and after we knew him by that name) is a hero of mine in that he gave me some of the ammunition I needed to fight a battle against the dark side (i.e depression). It was a combination of lifting my self back up by own bootstraps, realizing that by myself I could do nothing, and that the place I had got to was a state of mind only. Sounds contradictory I know but it worked well - you need to have been there. I wonder what disassociated agnostic theism actually is? - I thought it meant practicing what you preached live. I did get to visit my friend in the psych unit finally - he's cool, I hope the danger time is past.

blood sucker

A delightful week it has been. Onto the eighth box of crispy cremes, fourth case of guinness, and 95th hour of world of warcraft. These ingredients form the basis of power-leveling. About a million and a half xp I reckon, each. There were some sacrifices though. Sometimes we had to leave the room to eat stuff, or to drive to the donut and beer shops. We even spent wednesday treking around darling harbour, and crawling through HMAS Vampire (a Darling class destroyer in service from 1959 to 1986), HMAS Onslow (an Oberon class submarine, commissioned 1959, paid off 1999), and the HMB Endeavour replica. Coolness. Except for the weather, Hotness.

Onboard the Vampire

The Australian National Maritime Museum was also worth the visit. Ken Warby's 317.5696mph Spirit of Australia was the highlight. The kids liked the bus - train - tram - monorail sequence to get there, but the tram - train - thousand stairs in the mosqueto jungle were even better.
Built in his own backyard...

u2 war opening track

Don't be blue, be even. My pod stumbled onto maiden's a matter of life and death today and I've decided it's quite cool after all. Sometimes the better an album is, the longer it takes to get to like it. IM is, by definition, classical (metal) music, so when they appear to be getting a bit too prog, it's because they are inventing another metal genre (again). The astro observatory is booked for next month and I'm shivering in my boots in anticipation - mainly because it's likely to be well sub zero on the southern tablelands, especially in the wee hours.
Today was a massacre from dawn (well, lunch when I got up) til it was too dark to swing a sword, mace, axe, polearm, cat or wand. My NE sh Priest hit 32, Lach's ICBM hit 40 plated and mounted, and Taff's characters have a mean level of 62 with a SD of 0.5, could be twins except for the 5 foot height difference. Rooz spent the day entertaining four generations of relatives and hardly appeared in Azeroth - so he had a life. I could have had a life too if I had been called back to work, but I ain't complaining - spent an hour or two during a half dozen phone calls from Helen who was (very bravely) rebuilding her XP system on a new HDD.
My health has returned.

us or them

So big Bernie has decided that the US is out. What exactly does Indianapolis Motor Speedway chief executive Tony George mean when he says "After several discussions, Bernie Ecclestone and I were unable to agree how to keep F1 in Indianapolis for the near term" ? I would have thought that the US was an extremely important place to shove your face in, marketing wise. Surely Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, Renault, Honda, and even Toyota would be peeved by this decision - advertising exposure is WHY big auto business goes racing - the US is not a piddly market. Maybe eight years of traveling to Indy got boring for Bernie and he wants to go to Singapore instead.
I've been officially banned from playing any of my music within earshot of any family members, with the possible exception of the dog. This being sick and staying at home is very hard on them - any interruption to the hundreds of hours of continuous Bob the Builder, Strawberry Shortcake, and Freddy Fish theme music must be heart wrenching. I think I will move my PC downstairs and install a Guiness keg in the bar. I'll walk the line?

WoW, a discovery!

I've sussed it out. I have been sick for five weeks - coughing, sore throat, febrile, bad tempered (actually that's normal) and lack of appetite. Am on my fourth course of various antibiotics and also on my fourth sick day for that period. These are all symptoms of withdrawal, and as a coincidence - it was five weeks ago that I dropped WoW. I have run the gauntlet of adhesive mmorpg patches such as LOTRO and Freddy Fish: the monster of coral cove, but all to no avail. Just as an experiment, and with no personal gratification in mind, I will re-enter Azeroth via a Darnassian domiciled 22 NE shadow priest. Ahhh, I feel better already. If it doesn't work then I'll just give up again, somewhere around xmas.
I always enjoy the first week of Le Tour before the first hilly bits separate the men from the men who take too much EPO. Not that they do that anymore. Not even synthetic testosterone, or the real dangerous ones like Salbutamol. Makes you puff just thinking about L’Alpe d’Huez without at least a marmite sandwhich up your maillot jaune. If I desperately sick tomorrow then I may just stay up and watch day five tonight.