The cigarette smell makes me feel quite ill.
Brisbane Update
I had a long email from Anji, excerpted here:
"We have been here 7 weeks now. Unbelievable! The time has gone really fast.
There isn’t a lot that needs doing on the inside of the house (except rotten housework- polished floorboards are awful to keep clean...shows up all the dust...bugga!). Maybe repaint the kids rooms to be a bit nicer. Caitlin’s is blue, she’d like pink of course. And some new curtains. etc. The down stairs rumpus/study area is a hideous pink that I would dearly love to banish. But it’s probably the last on the list. The decking/external stairs and door frames (lots of them) need sanding, painting and sealing quite badly. (Steve has been out there creating a lot of noise and dust) A lot of work needs doing in the garden for it to be how we would like it. There’s a lot of wasted space at the moment. We are having a pool designer coming next week to get a design and quote for a pool in the backyard...which is really steep, so it will be interesting to see what he comes up with, one’s thing for sure it won’t be cheap. Steve’s decided that while we have a big debt a ‘bit more’ won’t make a lot of difference. I want to get my favourite fruit trees growing. I had to leave my beloved fijoa and tamarillo trees behind. You are probably saying ‘what are they’. A very New Zealand thing. They are my favourite. However, all the chores and the wants take time and lately we have been busy beavers doing other (but relatively boring) stuff.
The kids are demanding and consume most free time. Particularly on a school day. Start at 8:50, but we get there at 8:30 to get a parking space. (It’s too far for Caitlin to walk to school and too hilly to ride) Do the shopping or whatever before coming home, entertain Ryan, he may have a sleep, and then at 2:30 (early to get a park again...it’s a mad house at the parking lot) we get back in the car to collect Caitlin. It’s 3pm finish here (not 3:30 as in Vic) and so between drop off and collection there isn’t much time in between. Then we go off to after school activities twice a week. I do reading at the school on Fridays (the kids read to me, if you were wondering), while Ryan runs around distracting all the kids and being a pest, but the teacher doesn’t seem to mind. Better than having no one to read with the kids. It seems a lot of them don’t do it at home. Caitlin is a brilliant reader for her age. She’s the youngest in the class, but is certainly in the to p half of class with reading.
I went in the Bridge to Brisbane 12 k not much fun run Sunday, August 1st. It was an early start, a long wait, a tough event, and a tiring day all up. Set out from home at 5:10am to get across town. Parked the car and had a 1km walk to the start line. Was at the start area at 6:15am and my section didn’t start until 6:55. Lucky it wasn’t cold. At 6:50 my section (about 12,ooo people) moved up to the start line and then we were off. The first bit was the big steep climb of the "gateway bridge", and then the steep descent the other side, the rest of the trip was pretty flat. I walked and jogged and was glad to get to the end. I was pretty sore in the knees and ankles but over all not to bad. My time was 1 hour, 32 minutes and 45 seconds, which I thought was pretty good considering I didn’t train at all. 6769 placing out of nearly 19000 people. So I will have to better it next year. BUT...my legs didn’t want to work for a few days... That’l learn me to stretch before and after.. . but I don’t think it would have made a difference. OUCH!
As of Monday Ryan is beginning in an activity group called ‘criddle bugs’. I think it’s like gymbaroo...but not... i’ll let you know. He hasn’t been around many kids his age since we’ve been here. He’s a funny boy, getting quite a quirky personality. He’s now decided to go off eating breakfast. It’s a real chore to get him to eat more that a few mouthfuls. Lucky he has enough weight (blubber) on him to keep the starvation away. He’s saying quite a few words now. Not phonetically correct, but we know what he means. Beees for please, Ca for Cat, Car and even Caitlin, Ta for Ta, Bem for Prem (dog), and the usual mama, dada, buba, etc...and then the general babble that no one knows what he’s saying. He had his very first haircut...ever...a weeks ago. It was really long and wild. And really white. He’s gone from looking like the ‘mad scientist to looking like a 17 year old pop star’. He’s crook at the mo...as we’ve all been...very congested, ear aches etc. no good."
Virtual Update
Ugh... feeling SO awful that I'm good only for hanging around online.
In Project Entropia I was poking around in the interface, and because I'd read in the manual that a disciple couldn't terminate a relationship I never expected that I would accidentally do just that. I was horrified. When I logged on next day Equi IMd me and plaintively cried, "Why did you leave me?" I thought that was touching. Anyway, now I'm mentor-less which is too bad. I was collecting teleports in a rotten city named Hadesheim, and ran into goog, from Sydney. We paired up and ran around. We killed some snabelsnots and tried to kill an argonaut, which promptly killed us both :-) Oh well, good experience. Yesterday I met someone named wadda (I think it was) and we ran into some really quick nasty beasts that we got away from (he had no weapon so fighting was not just a pointless waste of ammo but impossible for him) and then a giant mutant, which chased me down and killed me. I was revived at the same pit I'd just left, took off running again, reached the teleporter at Zychion (another horrid place) and wadda was there. He said he'd been killed, too, but if he was sent back to where I was sent back to as he said, he must've run pretty fast to get to Zychion first (with no idea where he was going). I tp-ed to Billy's Spaceship Afterlife and shot snabelsnots for a while, then looked at weapon stats as I'm a bit fed up with my extremely weak newbie rifle. With a weak rifle you can only kill weak animals with low loot value, so they hardly pay for the ammo.
Second Life -- My gallery has had a lot of visitors, and I've sold a lot of tattoos. I IMd Jeff on Wednesday to ask him to remove the teleport cube in the water by my house as I knew it had no cube at the other end -- I'd tried it and teleported and got locked into a sit gesture. And I wanted to thank him for the chat bubble script he'd put on the forum. He came and we hung out talking on my roof. He's a scripting wizard, in my opinion. He showed me his place above Java, and his very funny log-off zone. There's a cage, and when he logs in a side falls off and it says he's escaped again. Log-off -- side goes up and a picture of him appears. He's a blue dragon. He also gave me a swimming animation, which is cool.
I tried a different tack in making tattoos as it was hard to get rid of the white halo. I make the tattoo in black, invert the colors, cut and paste the white tattoo into the alpha layer, and leave the tattoo layer plain black with no picture at all. That works famously, but I haven't yet tried it with very small tattoos.
I've been neglecting There. I haven't been there for days. All these worlds have unique flavors. There is playful and full of humor. Second Life gives residents the tools to be very creative if they choose. Project Entropia is absolutely humorless (it's Swedish) and rather angst-ridden. The usual thing in these worlds is to have levels of skill. In Project Entropia the levels are newbie, inept, poor, weak, mediocre, unskilled, green, beginner, novice, amateur, apprentice, initiate, qualified, trained. Hah! In There the levels are the American-way-sounding casual, avid, expert, renowned, and legendary.
At the moment my highest level in P-E is weak :-)
In There it's renowned.
I'm philosophically opposed to the idea of skilling -- especially in P-E hunters, as it's a stupid waste of ammunition. In There it's free but seems pointless. I heard people are trained by TSO to feel they need to skill-up constantly. But I don't really know.
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PLZ LEEVE A MEZZAGE KTHNXBAI