Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Too much

Sometimes when I look at a tree or a hill or something I might think “Gee, that looks realistic, I wonder how many megapixels they used for that.” This probably means I use too much computer and watch too much tv. I guess it’d be more worrying if I looked at something outside and thought “that looks fake, it’s photoshopped.” Particularly since I really dislike it when people do that online.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Sometimes you gotta let your mind wander


My father, my brother and I (mostly my father) had a go at fixing my car's seat today, it was leaning back too far because the moving frames which help you adjust the seat's position were in different places, and one of them was completely unattached to the front of the chair. We got that right I think. The other problem was that the seat was sagging, I thought a spring had broken, it turned out the seat was help up by a fairly inflexible net made of plastic attached to some rubber strips which were quite stretchy. The rubber on one side had torn in a very straight line leading to a loss of support. We had a go at pulling it back together with some wires, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to need a new net thing. That is much better than having to get a whole new seat, which I can't get from anywhere. Can somebody with a Toyota Carolla from 1986 please crash their car a little bit so that I can easily get replacement parts next time something goes wrong?

We got a new old car, a Daihatsu Charade, I think the best part about it is the name. It's a few years younger than my Toyota, but it's mostly not as good. Today something with the clutch stopped working properly, so I can only put it into gear when the engine is off, which isn't very helpful. Right now we've got two undriveable cars at my place... I should probably walk or ride my bike more often anyway.

Lately I've been enjoying bread a lot more than I used to. I love bread now! Used to be that I'd get a sausage in bread and I would throw the bread away, I only wanted the meat. Now I almost enjoy eating the bread more than the meat. Almost, but not quite. I can't think of the last time I said no to bread, but toast doesn't count in that. Toast is a terrible crime against bread kind and against humanity too. If you're toasting your bread because it's stale then stop, make some soup and dip your bread in that instead of ruining it! If you're toasting your bread because you just like toast then you're mad! We've been having some awesome bread rolls with dinner lately, they're cheap and they taste particularly good warmed up and spread with butter so that the butter melts. Then again, I'm pretty sure melted butter makes everything taste good. I think the best bread I've had was a pumpkin bread, but the pumpkin flavour was very light. I particularly liked the pumpkin seeds on top.

People have begun complaining about mosquitoes again, I generally don't notice them though. I have killed a couple of them in the last couple of days though. I think they've been breeding well what with all the rain of late.

Sometimes I play Hexic on my Xbox. I never played it when I first got it, but my mum saw my brother playing it and decided she would play it too. For a while she was the one who played that game the most, my brother was discouraged by the fact that Mum was better than him at it, but I decided I had to be better than her. I started playing it. I usually give Mum instructions when she's playing now. The other day I managed to win! I took ages, 121 minutes. Check it out:
I'm pretty proud of myself really.

Blossom falls slowly
Like a snowflake down to earth
Landing silently

Champing at the bit
With Jockey cracking the whip
Ready for the race

I wrote some haiku the other day while I was waiting for something, those were my favourites.

Also about poetry, for uni I had to talk about a rad poem:

Strange Fish
(Alice Springs, September 2006)
an abandoned school of silver shapes, partially imbedded in
the sandy skin of the Todd River. These 'strange fish' seemed to
have perished in a pack, almost Lemming-esque, when the river
disappeared into the dreaming of evaporation. Back in the city
we know these strange fish by urban-zoological nomenclature:
Goonius baggas. Vessels for cheap wine, the most distinguish-
ing feature, a white bulbous plastic eye, like a Cyclops. But
here on the Todd these eyes are permanently fixed on the desert
sun. Eyes that once held magic! Eyes that were once the gate-
ways of inebriated souls, and now their souls are bled too.
Shiny bodies, awaiting fossilisation. Suspended in animation;
a sad reflection of a past tide, caught in the immortal sands of
this winding, broken, hourglass...
Samuel Wagan Watson

I like it.

I've been doing some gardening lately, the most recent being a small garden in the front yard, I dug out all the weeds and planted some sunflowers. It's looking good, they're going to be massive. They've been loving all the rain. I'm totally going to eat seeds from my flowers. Maybe some homemade bread with sunflower seeds on top, and maybe pumpkin seeds too. That'd be rad.

Also, I caved and am now on twitter. One of the guys I went to school with convinced me. Well, I can't hate myself too much, all my productivity will be out the window. Ha. What productivity?