Varrqnuht.net

Ok, so Christmas was good. Lots of family visiting, everything went well.

Lou and I are both off work this week, both back on the 5th. Happy birthday for me, yay. We've spent our time visiting friends, mostly, with a fair bit of Golden Sun mixed in there as well. She's started taking over the controller when I'm out of the room, have I created a monster?

LotR:RotK was fantastic, an excellent end to the trilogy. The Taste of Tasmania has started and I've only been able to eat there once so far, yesterday when I managed to catch up for a couple of hours with a friend down from Melbourne with her partner and family.

New Years Eve tonight, and we're at the Taste again for the evening - this time with our own table, so we won't have to fight the crowds. Can't wait.

It's been way too hot for me the past week or so, around 30 degrees (or more) most days. That's not hot compared to many other places I guess - maybe I should move somewhere colder.

Oh, dial-up connections suck. I have known this for years, but I hate having to rely on one. I just wish broadband was cheaper.

Here ends my extremely clipped and disjointed update..

I used to love Christmas, and always looked forward to it.  Not just the presents, but the whole thing - there was a real spirit of Christmas thing going on in my house when I was growing up.

In recent years I've become progressively less excited about Christmas until I've reached the point where Christmas is the day after tomorrow, and the thing I'm most excited about is seeing Return of the King on Boxing Day.

We haven't been totally devoid of Christmas spirit though..  The last couple of years we (mostly Lou) have cooked our presents.  We both love cooking so we decided to make boxes of goodies for people.  This year is no exception except that we left it till the last minute, so the past several nights running we've spent hours each night cooking.  Lou figured out that we have to make over 800 little “things”, ranging from chocolate chip cookies to shortbread to gingerbread men to chocolates and so on.  Tonight should hopefully be the last night of cooking, because otherwise people won't get their presents in time.

As for New Years Eve, we're spending it down on the docks this year.  Rather than run rampant along with the other thirty-odd-thousand drunk people that turn up (like I used to as a teenager), this year we're doing it in style and have booked a table at the Taste of Tasmania with Paul & Jo and a few other friends.  We've spent the past 4 or so new years down at Paul & Jo's shack with them anyway, so it's almost becoming a tradition to do it together.  I like that, there isn't much tradition in my life these days and a little bit of it is comforting.

I'll definitely be taking advantage of the Christmas break to spend at least one afternoon (other than NYE) at the Taste - it's probably my favourite time of year.  Mmm, crepes suzette and raspberry chili beer..

Oh, one last thing - the photos I put up the other day arrived at the local chemist, so I picked them up just before lunch.  They turned out really well - I'll definitely be getting more done.  Even the enlargement is very clear, so as soon as I take another good photo I'll try getting one printed the next size up.  I'm glad I got a few extra copies of the picture of Emelia, because now I can give them (in frames) as Christmas presents to the other family members.  Now all I need to do is find time to use the camera!

I put up some photos in my last post, and it just occurred to me to have a look at the web server logs and see if anyone grabbed them from anywhere unexpected. Somebody in Ulverstone (or maybe Burnie or Devonport - I'm not sure) had a look, and I thought to myself "Weird. I've only told a handful of people about this journal".

So 'fess up, person-up-north - do I know you?

I’ve been wanting to buy a digital camera for years, but had been waiting until the quality seemed good enough and the price affordable. A couple of months ago I decided to take the plunge, and after a lot of hassles finally got my hands on a Canon Powershot A80. It’s a compact 4 megapixel camera that sits somewhere in between “just point and click” and “I’m serious about photography”. I like to think that I could be a good photographer, but wasn’t willing to spend the money on a semi-professional camera without finding out first. On the other hand, I know I wouldn’t be happy with something that I couldn’t spend hours fiddling with and reading the manual for, so this seemed like a decent compromise. I’ve barely touched the surface of what I can do with it yet though.

So, my Mum’s birthday was two days ago, and we took the shiny new camera over to have a play with. My sister came along with her husband and daughter, so I snapped a few pics. Actually, this is another reason I wanted a digital rather than film camera.. In about two hours I snapped 73 photos without trying - I’m just a tad snap happy. It’s liberating knowing that it doesn’t matter whether this shot will turn out or not. Just take it and see. I feel free to experiment and take as many shots as I want (bought myself a 256MB flash card to replace the 32MB card the camera came with), knowing that I can sort through them later to find the handful that are good.

Here are a couple of pictures I took. Click on the thumbnails for larger (but still download-friendly sized) images.

Here’s my niece, Emelia - isn’t she cute?

This is my mother and Emelia. I took both of these shots facing a window with afternoon light coming in behind them. I was trying to get their colours right and let the background be overexposed to sort of wash it out and get a soft halo effect. I took a stack of shots and I think these worked out pretty well.

This is Mt. Wellington. It dominates the scenery from just about anywhere near Hobart, the city I live in. I’ve grown up here most of my life so I rarely notice it, but everyone who comes to visit comments on how remarkable it is. Driving home from Mum’s place I saw the sun setting behind the mountain, so we pulled over and I took this shot. I think it’s pretty nice - maybe I should get outside more often.

I’ve sent these pictures off to an internet print service which lets me nominate a store for pickup - there’s one just up the road from my work, so hopefully I can grab them during a lunch hour next week. The originals are 2272×1704 in size, which is pretty huge - larger than my monitor can display without reducing them. I got one medium sized enlargement of the shot of Emelia on her own to see how clearly it comes out. They should turn out pretty clearly, so if they do I’ll probably be getting more shots printed from now on, and will try the larger sizes as well.

In other news - the Christmas concert with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus went very well. I managed to come down with a bit of a head cold the day before, so I wasn’t at my best. Still it was exhilarating to sing Handel’s Hallelujah chorus from the Messiah with a 70-strong choir and a symphony orchestra. Filing off stage afterwards I realised how much I need to be doing this. I’ve neglected it for too long, but no more - barring some sort of emergency I’ll be doing every concert with them next year.

Saturday I was meant to be playing cricket, but instead I spent the day at work. You can imagine how happy I was about that. It was a really hot day though, and I was pretty relieved not to be standing around in the sun all afternoon.

My 10-year high school reunion was on Saturday night. I managed to convince Kris to come along, and Lou was willing to drive home so that we could have a few beers. It turned out much as I expected, slightly better though. I caught up with a couple of people who I'd got on well with in high school and had a good old chat. It was great to catch up with Sarah in particular, as we had some experiences in common. We'd both gone to the same church with our parents while we were growing up, both went to high school together, and both left the church not long afterwards. I hadn't seen her in about 9 years, so it was interesting to see that she'd wrestled with many of the same ethical issues as I have. Plus, we both had a good time hanging shit on our classmates. Fun.

Yesterday we had an old friend around for lunch. Jeffrey was on the audition panel for the first non-school musical I auditioned for, and after hearing me and finding out how old I was he told me to get singing lessons (and hooked me up with my singing teacher). He's the nicest bloke you could ever meet, and elderly English gentleman with a fetish for pipe-organs and a wicked sense of humour. He's also (in his own words) "so square he's cubic" - he stated that his musical tastes were decidedly non-pop, and I'm pretty sure his definition of pop includes everything written in the past hundred years. I found this a bit hard to believe, so I sat him in front of the DVD player (I'd taught him a week earlier about the menu key on his DVD remote after he complained that he couldn't see the point of having six episodes of Red Dwarf on one disc if you had to watch them all in order) and stuck on Queen - Greatest Video Hits I. He hadn't heard of Queen. He thought the name "Freddie Mercury" sounded vaguely familiar, but wasn't sure which one he was. He actually nodded off during the second song. It was great having him round though, and we had a good lunch.

Finally, last night I was just going to sleep some time after 11 when I heard somebody washing something down with a hose. Lou and I wondered incredulously if it could be Michael washing his car, so I got up to check. Our next door neighbours are nice, about our age and fairly quiet. Michael washes his car at least a couple of times a week, but I've never known anybody to get home at 11pm and immediately start washing their car before. I think he might be mad.