Pretty Pebbles

I collect all sorts of weird junk (just wait until I start posting some of my Video game figurines).
One of the things I like to collect are rocks. Not just average-looking chunks of gravel, mind you, but rocks that are pretty.

Like these:

I found the three blue stones at the Sunday market a few weeks ago, for about $3 each. I thought the smaller stones with the gold flecks were Lapis Lazuli but it turns out they are merely Sodalite, which is slightly different. However, the plain blue stone could in fact be Lapis Lazuli - it's hard to tell when you don't have a lot of experience with minerals!
The small purple stone is most likely Amethyst - it looks different in this photo because I haven't got the hang of setting up lighting yet, but it is the typical purple colour.

I have some other stones to show off, and I'll post pictures when I have them.

Icky Encounter

Remember back a few months ago, when I mentioned something about the White Tail spider not being as poisonous as people thought?
Well, it's now December, the weather has turned warm, and it's brought the spider population out of hiding. Spiders are cold-blooded, and only become active when they are warm enough, unlike we humans who carry our own heat internally.

Anyway, the other night I stepped out of my bedroom, looked up, and -
That's a White Tail spider, all right!

Now, I know that close-up picture is misleading (btw, the macro setting on my new camera works very well!) so I took another one to give you a better idea of scale:This spider was about 2cm long (legspan), which is about the largest these spiders will get. Nothing too scary.

Except, once I'd taken the photos, I put the camera back in my room, stepped into the hallway again - and it was gone. It was almost as if I'd captured it inside the camera!

And then, I saw it scuttling along the floor... ick!
So I caught it in a jar, and put it outside.

eXcemas

AAAA! The curse of eXcemas... is over for another year.

And, actually, it wasn't that bad.

I managed to get gifts for all the people who mattered, and what's more, the majority of them were bargains. Like the funky colour-changing lamp that looks like a plain white rectangle when it's off, but turns into a miniature disco-floor when you turn it on! That one was a gift for my sister and her man, and it was about 30% of the original price!

I also had to fetch some glassware from Target that my Ma and stepdad had suggested to me.
I had to go in three days before eXcemas, while Target were open until midnight. An unfortunate clash of schedules meant that I spent most of the week before eXcemas doing close shifts - and I was too sleepy and lazy to go during the day.
I made it to the store with about 10 minutes to spare, and went straight to the homewares section, frantically looking for the glasses they wanted. I found... something... that sorta looked like the one they named, and I took it to the counter. Luckily, it was really dead in the store that close to closing time, so I was pretty much in and out within minutes.
I got the box home, and opened it up to show it to my housemates - and OH NO! One of the glasses was busted!!!
So... the next day, I had to quickly pop back in to get them exchanged. This was reasonably early in the day, and I didn't have to wait too long that time either. We just grabbed another box and swapped over a glass, and I was ready to go!

The worst part of that procedure was, turned out I'd grabbed the wrong set of glasses. The one they wanted had a similar name, but was totally different! Oh well, they liked them anyway!

So... eXcemas itself rolled around.
At the stroke of midnight, my sister decided to give out her gifts to us immediately, because she couldn't be bothered with carting them all over to Ma's house the next day. I'd left all her gifts over at Ma's, so she unfortunately had to wait. Ha ha!

The next day, I woke up at about 9.30, and everyone else was awake. I went over to Ma's place, and everyone else was waiting for us to show up so we could get to the gift-unwrapping already!. Everyone was there, but... where was my sister?
She had just hopped into the shower! ARGH! We had to wait about 30 minutes before she was ready! It brought to mind the time Ma made us wait until we'd had breakfast before we could eat our eXcemas lollies - never mind the fact that we'd seldom had breakfast the rest of the damn year...!

Eventually, my sister came over, and PRESENTS!!! were shared out. I got to be Santa's helper again this year, probably because I'm one of the last with functional eyesight. Ha ha!
I forgot my elf's hat this year, so I had to make do with Ma's angel halo instead... and I really do NOT want to show off the photos.
Oh, all right then. There's one to the right. Click to make it bigger and more humiliating.

Everyone liked their presents.
We even managed to include some gifts sent to us from Dad this year, and they were well appreciated. I liked the box of wooden puzzles they sent to me, though one of them had me struggling for about ten minutes - and that was trying to pull the damn thing apart!

Oh, and I got revenge on my Ma for wrapping my Abbey Road keyring in eleven layers of paper! I bought her another keyring, and wrapped that up in as much wrapping paper I could find lying around. Every layer was properly wrapped - no newspaper filler! - and I even put labels and ribbon on some of the layers! It took about an hour to do it all up.
I gave the gag gift to her first (before the proper present, which was jewellery) and... well, let's just say by the end of it, everyone was anxious to see what the end result was!
I lost count of how many layers I'd used, and it turned out there were about 40.
She preferred the jewellery, though she spotted straight away that one of the earrings was missing a stone - this from a woman who has to wear glasses to read! She really knows her bling!

As for my haul, I mostly got what I'd asked for:

• a memory card for the GameCube, because the 251 card I have is almost full to capacity, thanks to my sister's "Sims" space-hogging save file.
• some sleeves for my DS games, which is strange since I keep my games in the original hard cases.
• the usual puzzle books and games - real original, guys! Honestly, why is it that all of my friends and family think to get me these things every year?
• a little music box thing that plays Hey Jude. :)
• some CDs - a couple of Beatles discs, and the second part of the U2 Best Of that I needed.
• two video game discs - Intellivision: Greatest Hits, and Atari: Anniversary Edition. Haven't tried them yet. Kinda don't want to tell Ma I already have a bazillion vintage games on MAME...
  
• a big canvas print of the Beatles, which Ma found in a discount shop :P
  
• some T-shirts that had prints of MarioKart, Sonic the Hedgehog, the Beatles and Alfred E. Neuman on them. The surprising part was that they were handmade, that is, Ma found the pictures on the Internet, and used some DIY T-Shirt transferring kit to make them! They are AWESOME and I will wear them until they fall to bits!
• socks. No underwear, though.
  

Everyone had a wonderful time...
We had a barbecue for lunch, and people had a good time checking out their gifts and playing games. The weather held up very well, as it was warm, but not really hot this year.

Unfortunately, the fun was short-lived, because... I had to go to work.
Dammit, even though I'd tried to wangle my way out of working on eXcemas this year, I still got snookered in to doing an eight hour shift.
I managed to eat a bit of lunch, and then I had to run in and relieve the people who had opened the shop. Sigh - well, I guess I wasn't the only one put out this year.
And it was pretty bad when I got there - we'd run out of BBQ gas bottles, we'd run out of ice bags, and it had been really busy for most of the morning, so hardly any of the jobs had been done. GROAN

...Yet, the rest of the day was pretty quiet. We had a reasonably constant supply of customers, but nowhere near as many as we'd had over bEaster shudder. I guess people were a lot better organised that I gave them credit!
Ma told me she was going to bring me some dinner, but I asked her if she could bring an extra meal, as the other person I was closing with couldn't get to their family for eXcemas this year. She brought two plates, but it turned out that they had made plans for after work, and didn't need the dinner after all!
So, I thought, "What the hell am I gonna do with this food?"
But then, one of our regular customers, a taxi driver, came in complaining that they had been so busy ferrying drunk people about that they had missed their eXcemas dinner, and I said, "Well, it just so happens..."
So that was my good deed for the day. :) Aside from actually showing up to work, that was.

Anyway, I finished work at 10pm, and returned to Ma's place - only to discover that it was all over bar the shouting. Everyone was ready to tuck up into bed! BUGGER!!!
So, I just came home, and played on the Wii until 4am.

And then... I had to go to work again...
(but not before I got to see my Nanna. She came over to Ma's place for the day, and we all got to have another catch-up on things... well, I did as much catching up as you can do in about 50 minutes, because... um, I'd been on the Wii until 4am the night before.)

So... that was Christmas! I mean, eXcemas.
And though it wasn't perfect, it wasn't at all bad. I'd give it four stars ˜˜˜˜.
I hope yours was good as well! Merry Christmas!

PS. Sorry for the long post - considered breaking it up, but can't be bothered. Will post again after NYE!

The Family Gathers

...at my mother's house, in preparation for eXcemas... and also for my older sister's birthday. She's thirty... something. I forget the exact age at this point.

I would have included some lovely photos of the proceedings, including a funny video of the balloon fight we had in the living room - there's something about that room that is oddly conducive to such games! - but... the SD card in my camera chose that particular moment to die.
That is, the same SD card I got with my camera for my birthday, less than a month ago.
VERY unhappy, though it is the photos and footage I miss more than the card.

Never mind, we still had a lovely chocolate mud marble cake. It was yummy!

PS. This entry is post-dated, because I was having trouble getting Internet access at the time, due to many mechanical and logistic problems. Oops.

The Making of Mii

Okay, we've had the Wii for about a week now, and I've discovered something interesting: Making realistic representations of your friends and family from memory is a LOT harder than I expected.

One of the features of the Wii is the ability to create miniature in-game versions of yourself and your friends, which are called Miis. These work a lot like the avatars used in chatrooms and web forums, such that you have a graphical representation of yourself instead of just a bunch of anonymous text.

Because the Miis are used extensively in some of the games, it is useful to create not just one for yourself, but as many recognisable Miis as you can think of. I've gone through the list of just about everyone I know, starting with all the people who are likely to come and visit us to play the Wii.

But, there is a problem. The interface for creating Miis has many different customisations for face shape, hairstyle, eye type and etc. but it never seems to have exactly the one you want. Getting a recognisable hair style is hard enough (would it have killed them to include a curly hair setting?) but when you get to subtle details like how the eyes are set on their face, or the actual eye colour... Gah!
The worst part is having your subject take a look at your handiwork... and go, "Oh come on! I look nothing like that!!!"

Anyway, I found a Flash program that lets you design a Mii on-line - though you can't actually use your created Mii with your Wii games. It's basically a demo version of the real thing. And I've used it to create an approximation of my actual Mii. The real one looks very much the same, except the eyebrows are fuzzier and my eyes are not solid black. I think that black eyed look is really ugly.

I have also acquired a copy of WarioWare: Smooth Moves, and have played through most of the challenges. The only two bad points of the game are:
a) the non-intuitiveness of the mini-games. "I have to do WHAT?"
b) the random sensitivity of the Wiimote. "I'm waving the thing at the screen, what more do you need?!? OH NO! Now I've LOST!"
Now I know why so many Wiimotes get damaged... >gleep<

Being Thirty (Part Three)

I did mention that I had one more birthday celebration coming up, didn't I?

My friend-ish party was originally scheduled for last Friday, but I had to reschedule because a) I hadn't time to organise anything, and b) I was really too tired to do it after having worked several early shifts that week. I was knackered...

So, I postponed it until the 12th. Which meant I had ample time to tidy the house and prepare the food. Yeah, right. Have I ever been well organised?
Turns out, I have. I even managed to clean up the kitchen and living room, and prepare some foodstuffs including a lovely little plate of crudités. ie. those little sticks of carrots and celery and cheesy lumps and whatnot.

I only invited a handful of people over for the gathering - basically, the people I used to live with, a couple of friends from high school and one from the mural painting project. I told everyone to show up at around 5pm. Yeah, right.
I had to wait until 5.30 before I could even leave the house to collect one of my friends (who has no personal transport and lives two towns away), and en route the weather decided to break, and dumped a whole bunch o' rain on me - and it was this time that the windscreen wiper decided to stop working properly!
I had to pull over and fix the wipers three times between departure and returning home. GRRR!!! I made sure I fixed this problem before I returned my guest to his place!

But, once I'd come back with friend in tow, I learned two important facts:
1) one of my other friends had shown up in the meantime;
2) we now had a Nintendo Wii! (bought from a friend of a friend for $350!)

So, we ordered pizza, ate snacks, drank fizzy stuff, played a few rounds of Mario Kart: Double Dash for the hell of it, and then tried out some of the WiiSports. Bowling was a hit, as were Golf and a very dangerous game of Baseball (Slink, you really don't have to swing the Wiimote that hard).
While we were playing, two more of my friends showed up a little late, but they stuck around much longer than they expected 'cause we were having so much fun. They had to bring their two kids along as well, but they were both young and very easy to look after. One of them stayed asleep pretty much most of the time anyway - how hard is it to look after a sleeping bub?

And Ma even came over for some birthday cake - another sponge, but this one had flakey chocolate frosting... mmm! Cakey cake, but I'm glad I waited a week before I had another one, because three cakes in one week is seriously pushing your luck, birthday or not.

The only person who couldn't make it (caught that damn flu that's going around) sent me a birthday card with $30 worth of scratch lottery tickets inside. I won $16, which is slightly more than a 50% return (and kinda made me wish they had just given me the cash instead! :D )

We all had a lovely time.
I got to catch up with everybody I'd missed at the other parties, and we all had lots of food and fun, well into the night. Luckily I don't have to do an early shift on Saturday!

And, now that it's all over:

To all of my friends and family who helped
make my 30th Birthday so much damn fun,
I give you all my love and extra special thanks!
And to those who missed out on the action, I offer you...

Enjoy!
And may I hope to see you all at my 31st,
whenever I get around to celebrating it...

New Camera

An interesting development! I now have an actual digital camera! A worthy successor to Dinkycam! snicker

My folks got me a FujiFilm FinePix camera as a birthday gift, so now I'll be able to take photos that contain recognisable subjects! Hoo-freakin'-ray!

So, expect to see a lot more photos appearing on my bloggie...
PS. Nope, still aren't gonna see any nudie shots, btw...

Being Thirty (Part Two)

So, here's what happened when I actually turned thirty.

Well, the story continues from the Sunday before... when I overslept and nearly missed opening the shop on time. I managed to get there about five minutes before we were open for trade, and I quickly raced around getting everything sorted out in time! It brought back horrible memories of when I used to open up the shop in Traralgon every weekend... ooer. ugh.

I worked for about six hours, then I headed to the Sunday Market (first time I'd been in months!) and picked up a few CDs and Sega games. The guy who sold me the games recognised me from the last time I'd been there, and tried to get me to buy a few more games... but I haven't even tried out the last few games I've bought from him! Well, I've got the Sega stashed away somewhere...

When I came home, I was getting really sleepy, so I went to bed for a nap - and woke up at about 11.30 pm, almost in time for my age to click over!
After the clock ticked over to Midnight, my sister gave me her gifts, which were a kilogram of Jelly Belly beans (ooh, just typing that hurts my stomach) and a bunch of pretty coloured markers. Heh, maybe someday I'll actually get around to using those!

I stayed up most of the night, because I'd been asleep for so long already, so I spent most of that time just browsing on the Internet and working on my games. Then the others woke up and went about their business, and when they came back they asked me if I wanted to do anything special for the occasion.
I thought about it for a while... and while I was thinking, my eyelids started getting really really heavy...

So, I went back to bed.
Yep! THAT'S HOW I HONOURED MY 30th BIRTHDAY. TAKING A NAP.

...except that wasn't the end of it.
I kept getting interrupted by phonecalls and wellwishers, so eventually I just got up and joined civilisation again. Besides, Ma had dumped a handful of confetti all over my bed so it wasn't exactly the most comfortable place any more. :)

We had another cake at Ma's place. This time it was a cream-filled sponge, with multi-coloured sprinkles, and that went a lot quicker than the cheesecake from Saturday. I even managed to recycle the candle from the first cake!

Aaand... The birthday fun continues! Later this week I'll be having my friends over for a non-formal gathering at our place, which ought to be fun! I haven't had a get-together for a while, so I have a lot to catch up on!

Being Thirty (Part One)

Well, I finally made it to yet another milestone today.
And of course, I celebrated it appropriately... I FELL ASLEEP.

Okay, before I get too involved, here's what we did to honour my thirtieth.

Last Saturday, my sister came down from Melbourne so we could all go out to a restaurant for dinner. We went to Iimi's Café in Traralgon, a very nice café/restaurant place we've been to before. It was a small group, mainly the immediate family and a couple of other relatives.
Ma had asked me if I wanted my gifts that day, instead of on the actual birthday, and I said wait for the proper day... but she pulled out a big wrapped-up gift about the size of a big lunchbox when we got to the table! I unwrapped the paper, to find that inside was a big black box. Inside the box, I found another parcel... which contained another, slightly smaller box! Inside that box, was another smaller parcel -
Do you see where I'm going with this?
I went through six layers of paper and five boxes before I got to the "true" gift:

Very funny, Ma!
But the really funny part was I'd already bought myself one from the same shop the day before... I guess I'll have to pass that on to someone else for Christmas!

I took a bunch of photos with my little "happy-snap" camera - no, not Dinkycam, this one is a cheap film-based camera I bought a few years ago, before I even had a computer with a USB port... ah! the joys of having to wait to see if your photos even worked out properly.
The shots worked out reasonably well, but I don't have the scanner set up properly yet, so those pictures will have to wait for a while...

Once we'd enjoyed our meals including the one they'd forgotten to bring out we came home for some birthday cake - a lovely Mixed Berry cheesecake, yummm...! And that was merely the first cake I'd had this week!

Anyway - On to Part Two!

The Big Three-Oh(oh)

Yep.
Turnin' Thirty.
More to come when the pics are ready.