JamesX

I don’t know what it is, but as I’m getting older, Christmas seems to just creep up faster every year! It was only four days ago that I finished work for the year and it’s already here! I can already smell the turkey and ham in the oven ready for the traditional family Christmas lunch - the aroma is making me more hungry by the minute.

In about an hour (when Ed is forced out of bed), we’ll start to open all the presents around the tree. There seem to be an awful lot this year - maybe everyone is feeling extra generous. I hope everyone likes what I got them. :)

I also think that this is one of the coldest Christmases we’ve had in a while (it’s a mild 16 degrees at the moment). With the weather as it has been these last couple of weeks I’m not surprised either. It sure beats the 30 degree days we’ve had in the past.

In any case, no matter how you choose to celebrate the day, I wish everyone a safe and happy holiday. I’ll be back later in the week to write about my presents (not to mention the present I bought myself - yes, I finally got that TV!).

Cheers!

It seems to be the travelling time of the year at the moment. With mum leaving for Thailand last week and grandma off to Canada yesterday, it’s suddenly very quiet around the house. All Ed and Oscar seem to do is sleep all day, and all I seem to do as result, is clean up after them! Still, it’s good to have some quiet time, and it’s great that everyone is having a holiday. I’ll be heading up to Bright again in a couple of weeks time, so that will be my chance to relax. It’s a pity all the snow is melting at the moment, especially after such a great start to the season a few months ago. I love the country atmosphere anyway so even if there’s no snow, I’ll still be going up!

I have the day off work today so I’m using the time to catch up with everyone. All I need to do now is find time to take off the other 6 days of overtime that I’ve accrued over Fame and various other functions in August. It’s a hard life I tell you!

You can tell a production is on when everyone seems to go under the radar for a while and that’s certainly the case with me right now. There’s so much going on with work, and my other work, that there really isn’t time for too much else. Seeing as though it’s been about two weeks since my last update, I thought it best to make some semblance of an entry before things get even more busy!

Last week was my brother’s birthday. He turned 19 this year and I think he might actually be showing signs of growing up! I suppose as the older brother I might be slightly biased in that regard, but it’s good that he’s doing well and we had a nice family dinner to celebrate the occasion.

Last weekend I also made it up to Bright again. I seem to be getting up there more and more often lately and that’s because it’s the only place I can really be where I’m not being interrupted by everyone and, can actually, truly relax. I’m still not quite at the point where the people in the town don’t look you over and think “city boy” every time you walk down the street, but I’m working on it! My bogan acting skills still need some tuning…

What else, what else? Last night was the finale for Big Brother 2007. I know most of you are probably saying “thank god that’s over,” but I think that the show did reasonably well this year. That is of course if you don’t look at how absolutely terrible last night’s show was. It was a true example of how not to do live television - although ironically, that was what made it all the more intriguing. Even so, taking 4 hours to reveal the winner when you could get your act together and do it in 4 minutes still has me a little bewildered. How a computer “needs time to count the votes,” to quote Gretel, is well beyond me. It’s obviously beyond Beyond too and perhaps next year they might do it a little differently. I can’t help but think that something very fishy went on behind the scenes last night but I guess we’ll never know!

And finally, as always, I’ll shamelessly plug the upcoming production of the musical, FAME. It’s happening in mid-August and if you’re free you should come along. Seeing as though every man and his dog (literally, although cat in my case) are on Facebook nowadays, naturally you can get all the info on there. It’s shaping up to be a great show.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Time to go tend the animals. (If you’re as obsessed as me, that might even be funny!)

In case you’re wondering why it’s been so quiet around here, it’s because I’ve been on holiday! As I mentioned in my previous post, I headed up to Bright (with 12 or so of my closest friends!) for eight days of skiing and fresh country air. It was a great trip and everyone had an awesome time. The snow was really good, which was made better by the fact that last year was so terrible. The best skiing was down the Blue Ribbon chair, and most of us spent a lot of time there. It was also the closest to The General (that’s the pub) which was where we spent most of our time when we weren’t carving up the slopes! Thanks to Richie for the house (again), even though he was otherwise detained by RMIT for the majority of the trip and Penelope for letting me drive her tank (that’s the Prado for those who don’t know). And of course, thanks to everyone else for coming up and making it such a memorable trip - that’s Stuart C, Stuart M, Chris, Owen, Scotty, Brenton, Candice, Liv, Amy. It’s almost a shame to be back - I was enjoying it so much! I took a few photos so I’ll put them up in the gallery shortly.

Naturally, while you’re away for a week, life goes on, and there’s a few things to report. Firstly, last Monday my final uni results were in and, perhaps unexpectedly, they were very good. I got a High Distinction for the Capstone Project and a Distinction for Flash animation. The Flash one was especially surprising though, I was expecting to only Pass that one. And so the degree finally over and I don’t have to worry about late night treks to and from the city anymore. I still don’t officially graduate until the end of the year. I haven’t worked out if I actually want to attend the ceremony - I might sleep on it for a while.

Also during the week, my brother went for his driving test. I’m excited to report that he passed with flying colours and is now free to drive solo on the roads. All he needs now is a car - ‘cos he isn’t driving mine anytime soon!

Yesterday, after the drive back from Bright, I headed out to work for “Chris’ 30th Birthday Party.” I say that with inverted commas because it turns out that Chris and Mel had a little surprise in store. It turns out that during the day yesterday they snuck off to the city to get married and so the party took on a dual meaning. Congratulations to you both and Happy Birthday Chris - at least you’ll never forget your wedding anniversary (well at least I hope not)! I also discovered a whole new segment of my blog audience so I should say hello to you all, and apologise in advance to Mel’s mum for the slowness of the page. :) All in all, it was a great night for everyone involved.

And so that’s where I’m at for now. I enjoyed a very long sleep in this morning after such a big week (you have to wake up early every morning when you want to hit the mountain!) and I’m begrudgingly looking forward to being back at work on Monday morning.

And so another week has passed us by and we find ourselves in another long weekend. It’s pretty much the last long weekend for a while, the only other one left is in November (I think). It’s weird how they all fall in the first half of the year really, but I’ve been trying to make the most of it by doing nothing. It’s a change from all the work I’ve been having to do lately which will hopefully come to an end very soon! Speaking of which, we’re down to only 12 days of uni remaining. Pretty exciting stuff and by my count, that’s only two assignments left to complete. Fingers crossed nothing goes wrong in the results department - I’d be gutted if I failed one of them and had to repeat!!

For a bit of a recap, in other news this weekend, it was time to hit the town for Penelope’s 22nd birthday. It was a great night and we spent it at Borsch, Vodka and Tears drinking every kind of vodka you can possibly imagine. I’d never been there before, and believe me, when the drinks menu is like three times longer than the food menu, you’re going to have a good time. A group of us chipped in and got Pen a digital camera (the Canon Ixus 75 to be precise). It’s long overdue so it’s good to have her in the digital age - no more wasting money on prints!

My vodka detox consisted mainly of watching back-to-back episodes of 24 season 6 - of which I’m now 17 episodes into. I have to say (and Chris did warn me) that for something that got off to such a good start, it’s really slipped back to the typical 24 “let’s make everything that’s happening so totally unrealistic it’s not funny” routine. But I suppose it’s still entertaining, if not completely frustrating. Maybe the last 7 hours will change that, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ve got some more uni work to do tomorrow so my relaxing weekend is going to come to an abrubt halt rather quickly. Ah well…

It’s been a huge week this past week. I haven’t really had time to think with all the Inheritance stuff going on. But after a long wait, last night was the opening night, and I have to say it went reaonably well. The main mistake being caused by Stewart himself, so he really doesn’t have anyone he can blame for that (he sent the mower on early). But, you know, it’s all fun in the end. I really don’t have much to do in this production, which is both good and bad. I guess I’m the “OMG what do we do now” guy that people run to when they can’t find the missing prop, or the cast skip 40 pages (yeah, it’s been done before). I did a quick calculation by updating the list, and this is my 44th production - very scary. Anyway, Fame promises to be huge, so I’ll end up having a big involvement in that one. It’s night number two tonight, and it should be even better than last night.

In other news this week, I finished my fourth Flash assignment for uni. They aren’t really getting harder, just introducing an extra concept each time. I’d say it takes me about 1-2 hours per assignment so it’s pretty quick in the scheme of things. This week my animation was entitled “Caterpillars” and had a couple of caterpillars climing a mound of dirt with clouds flying overhead. Nothing really exciting, but it demonstrates all the concepts learnt up to this point.

Yesterday was also Oscar’s 4th birthday. Not that we did anything special (he already eats better than all of us), and I wasn’t even home. But he got an extra cuddle from everyone at some point. I think he was enjoying the extra attention!