DANCING KITTY

Flickr

I have just discovered Flickr afterglancing at my friend Simon's blog

It's a new thing from Yahoo where you can upload your photos but also form networks of your own contacts if they sign up and other random people within various groups that have been set up. It kinda of works like virtual photo clubs but the groups are as diverse as you might imagine. Some of my favourites include the Sequential Numbers group and the Big Things group.

I've just signed up and will probably upload some pics soon once I work out what to put up there. If you fancy joining up and linking to me then look at my page then click on sign up and it should ask if you want to link to me in the signing up process.

Gym junkie pt 2

Had my first proper session at the gym tonight. Am still here.

Actually went very well although staying on those running machines is a lot harder than it looks. The guy who took me through my programme was actually a pomme from south london who came out to Australia about the same time I did and he also has an Australian girlfriend.

Am also doing well on my "going home on time is the new working yourself to death" philosophy and left the office just after 5 today. That said, the builders knocking a hole in our office wall about 10 ft away, all day long, might also have had something to do with it.

Gym junkie

I joined a gym last week which was a strange thing for me but it seems to be working. It's round the corner from our house and quite small and I didn't see any of the slightly off putting 'beef cake' types you sometimes get in gyms.

So today I went for my induction, health check thing and got tested for how fit or unfit I was. I was slightly disturbed when I filled in the forms and realised the last regular exercise I got was a year ago but I came out around 2/5 on the cardio fitness scale which is apparently not too bad.

I am also officially 'lean' with a low body fat index thingy and have good blood pressure so that's encouraging. I start properly on Monday evening with an hour on cardio and weights adn will be doing that three times a week.

Uncle Chris

My sister gave birth to a little baby girl on Saturday 15 October. Her name is Ava Grace and they're both doing very well.

I'm very excited to have my first niece and looking forwards to seeing her at some point in the hopefully nearish future.

New pics from NSW holiday

New photos are in the main gallery. These are from a couple of recent trips back to Emily's parents and our holiday in New South Wales. We went up for a friend's wedding and spent a week driving around NSW and checking out Sydney.

It was pretty cool and well needed as both os us have been manic at work. I've been to Sydney lots of times before for work but not had much chance to see it as a tourist so that was great.

Update pt. 2

Well I suppose an update proper is called for so here's a quick summary of things so far.

Living in Oz - I've been here 18 months now and still loving it. It's hard to explain the things that make it so great but mostly I guess it's the pace of life, the friendliness of the people and the climate. It's not hot all the time down here - I actually prefer having four seasons - but in general it's better. Take today for example, in the middle of winter it was a gorgeous sunny day and I was outside playing cricket in a t-shirt.

Home - well our house was getting quite nicely sorted out with some new furniture and a nice new (cheap) TV but now we'll probably have to move out because our landlord wants to sell it. So them's the breaks I guess. Hopefully we'll find somewhere nice in the same area.

Work - I've just celebrated a year in my job, as a product manager for a videogames publisher. Things are going really well and I have a great bunch of people to work with. This occaisonally involves dressing up as Sonic the Hedgehog but mainly involves looking after all the promotion, advertising, packaging etc and generally be the expert on the games I look after. I really enjoy the work and it has a couple of great added bonuses like travel around Australia and Internationally and also lots of games to play.

Travel - Em and I went to Tasmania in March which was great. We toured around the state for a week camping in various different places. I should have some pics up soon. I also took Emily to Adelaide for the weekend for her birthday which was really good as it was all unplanned and bizarrely we ended up listening to Germaine Greer give a lecture on needing to have more nomadic-culture values. In a couple of weeks we're going on holiday in New South Wales which should be fun although we haven;t actually worked out where we're going to go or what we're going to do yet.

Doing Other stuff - I haven't been swimming or playing frisbee or really doing anything too organised outside of work recently but will hopefully get myself back into some kind of routine for this sort of thing soon.

Update

So after finally getting broadband in our house I've managed to get back on to my blog and update it.

Now that it looks like I'll be here for the next few years at least I also wanted to approach it a bit differently and treat it more like a proper blog rather than a travel thing.

So I've posted some new photos from the last eight months in the Main Gallery - I'll just be putting anything new into that one from now on. Oh there are also some from my trip to E3 in the USA. There will also be some other stuff sooner or later.

August and everything after

Well, I guess I’ve been more lapse at updating this site than ever and suddenly it’s December and I’ve put nothing new up here for four months. So, here’s a quick update on everything that’s happened since August.

August was a big month for me job-wise. I was coming to the end of my three months at Scaffidi Hugh-Jones and also found a games industry job advertised.  I applied for the job – a product manager position – and after a number of interviews was told I’d got the job on my very last day at Scaffidi Hugh Jones.

It’s pretty much my dream job It involves marketing video game from a wide range of games publishers who don’t have their own operations in Australia. Most of the publishers are based in the UK so I’m getting to travel back quite often. The company also agreed to sponsor me and my four-year visa actually came through in the last couple of weeks so I can now stay in Australia until 2008.

The week after getting the job I had a visit from Hannah, Zoe and Sally, three friends from the UK. We had an incredible time doing all the touristy stuff I hadn’t done despite being in Melbourne for 6 months. There are quite a few pictures of the trip in the photo album so I won't go into detail here. However, it was fantastic to see them and highlights of the visit included the Japanese bathhouse, lots of cake, a trip to Ramsay Street and the Lambs go Bar – where there are over 100 different beers in the fridge.

I started the job the following weekend have been mad busy ever since.  A couple of weeks in I got to go to Sydney for a games event. I spent most of the time in the hotel or at the venue but managed to get some time to walk around and check out the opera house and harbour bridge.  I’ve just been to Sydney again this week for our Christmas press party and again I didn’t get to see much. On the upside though we stayed in a super swanky hotel in a penthouse suite overlooking the opera house so that was ok.

In October I got my first trip back to the UK for work. It was a six day whistle stop tour but I made it back home for a couple of days and got to see some friends in London. Coming back really made me appreciate Melbourne and Australia and the quality of life out here. London’s a pretty noisy, busy unfriendly place and even though you get used to it when you’re there I’m glad I left when I did.

I’m also quite used to the flight now and this time I flew Singapore Airlines, which was so much better than Qantas. The movies were really good and on-demand rather than scheduled so you can pick what you want to watch and pause it or whatever if you need to go to the loo.

The only downside to the trip was that the last leg of the flight back to Melbourne was depressingly over-shadowed by the announcement that the Liberal Party had just won the Australian federal election. The Liberals are basically the Tories by another name and the Prime Minister, John Howard, is something of a cross between John Major and George Bush. Unfortunately, Labour are pretty much in the same position as the Conservatives in the UK, i.e. they keep changing their leader, don’t have any real policies and are a pretty useless opposition. The whole election campaign from all sides was embarrassing. Check out the Chaser Decides for a sideways glance at it.

Anyway, moving on. October and November were quite quiet until Emily finally got her own dream job. She’s been there a few weeks now and still loves it.

Oh, one thing to say is that the Aussies are so sports mad that they have a public holiday in Melbourne (and only Melbourne) for a horse race. The Melbourne Cup is in November and is like the biggest thing ever. Everyone is off work and is either at the races or watching it in a pub. We chose the latter, which was a good thing as it pissed it down with rain. I backed second place but won my money back as I’d placed it each way. Actually November was a big horse-racing month for me as Emily and I had been to Sale Cup at the race course near her parents a couple of weeks earlier and we had a work trip to the Melbourne race course a few days after the cup. It all baffles me to be honest but it seems to be popular round here and it’s jolly nice having champagne and all that.

So I guess we’re nearly up to date. The last couple of weeks it’s begun to hit into summer and we’ve had some gorgeous days and weekends. For my bithday Emily took me away to a place called Daylseford about an hour out of Melbourne. They have a natural mineral spring there and she’d booked us in for a spa and massage etc which was exactly what we both needed as we’d been working flat out. She also managed to totally surprise me by getting our friends Vikki and Scotty to come up. We were sat in a pub ordering some food and one minute I looked up and there was a large woman standing in front of me looking at the menu. I looked down and then up and they’d jumped out from behind her. I’m not sure what the poor woman thought of my shocked expression, as she had no idea what was going on behind her.

It was a pretty cool birthday and weird having really hot weather and hanging out in shorts and t-shirt rather than 20 layers of clothes. Oh and Vikki and Scotty got me a coral gum bonsai tree and Emily made me a great denim bag.

This weekend we’ve been to a music festival at Meredith – a tiny town near the coast. The festival is at a natural amphitheatre in the bush and has about 9,000 people at it. It’s really nice and chilled out and the audience is a bit older than the big festivals like Reading so there aren’t too many teenagers passing out etc. We had a great time just hanging out with a big group or our friends and camping for the first time in years.  Today I’m relaxing and writing this so there you go.

Oh, I almost forgot, Christmas here is totally strange. I’ve barely hear any Christmas music in the shops, there are hardly any decorations around and Xmas shopping is a real bind as you’d much rather be out in the sun. I think the Aussies have really got it bad as the school year ends in December, it’s Xmas and the start of summer so all the good bits in the year to look forwards to come at once and there’s not a lot to be happy about in the winter apart from the fact that it’s raining so the farmers at least get a good deal.

June pics up

only a month late but photos from June are finally up, including my ridiculous pirate costume.

Click here to go straight to the album.

I've also put a few more shots of stencilling and sticker art. You can go directly to the album here

Oh and have been messing about with the design a bit to tidy it up and a have added a new set of links to some Australian websites you might be interested in.

Foxtrotting to the Chilli Peppers

July

Emily’s birthday is the 5th of July and it was the first of our birthdays we’d spent together. Despite going out for nearly a year and a half now we’d managed to be in different countries for both of our 27ths.

I’d been collecting bits and pieces for her present for a while and spent most of the first weekend in July locked away preparing the presents and designing her card. The centrepiece ended up being a photoshopped picture of her in the bad apple costume she wore to her friend Vikki’s party. I hung it on the wall and didn’t tell her about it and it took her hours to notice it. She’s not really sure about having a picture of herself on the wall but I kinda like it.

The other main present was a book on knitting. Em’s really keen to take it up and has been having lessons from her mum. Now it sounds pretty uncool but apparently knitting is having a bit of a comeback and I managed to find a really good book aimed at the younger (adult) knitter. So far Em’s only been knitting squares but I’m determined to have a pair of mittens by Christmas.

The night of her birthday we went to a pub in our neighbourhood called the Napier. It’s a bit of a gastro pub and they serve huge meals. Vikki and Scotty came and also her good friend Anna Steggall, who had returned from the UK the week before. It was really good to see Anna again, particularly as she became a good friend of mine too. She also used to work at Buckingham Palace and is a fashion expert in a Trinny and Susanna way, only nice with it.

I’d not had time to make a cake so I desperately searched around for a cake shop and eventually ordered this strange mousse cake from a shop in china-town. They spelt out “Happy Birthday Emily” on it and I had also sourced a musical candle. On my way home I snuck into the pub and left the cake with them to surprise Em later. When it eventually came out I sort of regretted it though as the music candle wouldn’t stop playing happy birthday and everyone was looking at us.

Later that week I eventually got my act together to go play Ultimate Frisbee. For those who don’t believe Frisbee is a sport check out this site. It’s bloody hard work, especially for someone as averse to physical exercise as me. To make matters worse I didn’t do any warm up or warm down and pulled nearly every muscle in my body. I could barely move for the next week without being in some kind of pain.

Not one to be daunted, however, I’ve since been going nearly every week and am getting much fitter and less sore each week. I’ve also started swimming lessons at the main swimming pool. So far I’m mostly swallowing water but I seem to be making progress.

Another highlight of the month was a trip back to Emily’s home-town for the local football club ball. Em’s dad is President of the club and the whole family was going to support him. Now I thought this would be a quirky kind of formal ball with some Aussie country eccentricities. When we walked in I discovered it was closer to the sort of high school prom you see on bad TV shows like Saved by the Bell or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact some vamps would have been good to take care of the competent but misguided band playing nu-metal and soft-punk covers to the largely under-age crowd.

The whole thing was pretty hellish although it was worth it for the sight of Em’s parents foxtrotting along to the sounds of the Chilli Peppers and Green Day.

It was a good month for home furnishings as when we loaded up the car the next day Em’s parent’s revealed that they had bought her a microwave for her birthday, which has come in very handy and looks lovely on top of our fridge.

Emily also took a few days off later in the month and went home to see her folks. Whilst there she went to a clearing sale and bought us a fantastic little extendable dining table. Alan Partridge would have loved it. We had to get it delivered though and when it eventually arrived the delivery people just left it outside our house without calling us or even leaving a message. Fortunately it wasn’t rained on or stolen and is now sitting pretty in the corner of our lounge.

I haven’t been into Triple R much this month as they’ve started to get busy for Radiothon, their big fundraising event. However, imagine my surprise when they called up to say they had a pair of tickets to go see Belle and Sebastian in one of their first-ever Australian shows. I’d written off the gig as tickets were about $75 so I was delighted. So delighted in fact that immediately after picking them up I went out and bought the new albums by The Polyphonic Spree and Kings of Convenience. And a hoody. And a woolly hat.

The gig itself was fantastic although a last minute clothes disaster meant we were quite late and missed local support act Architecture in Helsinki. They were playing in a huge theatre called the Palais, in St Kilda and we had some great seats up in the balcony. In all they played for about two and a half hours and did many of my favourites, despite focusing on the new album. The absolute highlight had to be the dancing in the aisles by some of the more ‘dedicated’ fans. B&S are renowned for attracting somewhat obsessive outcasts as some of their most ardent fans and the crowd certainly didn’t disappoint.

Errr. This is all getting to be quite a long post so should wrap it up. Other stuff done this month includes buying mint condition vinyl copies of the Flashdance soundtrack and Samanta Foxx’s ‘Touch Me’ at a garage sale, a trip to Preston market, Anna going through Emily’s clothes resulting in a cull of nearly 1/3 of her wardrobe, watching the excellent Being John Malkovitch, a disappointing post-lock stock Aussie crime caper called Getting Square, the also disappointing Big Fish by Tim Burton and the extremely thought provoking but flawed Farenheit 9/11.

Oh, and I’ve just bought a Japanese badge maker on eBay, which I’m very excited about. It’s shaped like a chicken but looks pretty cool.