Wedding
August 25th 2003 -
Wedding
Alix and Dave-from-Wellington should be getting married just about… now. Thanks to a thoughtless celibrant having an inconveniently-timed stroke and no backup, the wedding ceremony (held in a park on Rowes bay on a bright, warm, windy day) didn’t have quite the legal impact they were hoping for. A quick bit of signing this morning, and everything should be back on track.
Townsville
I wasn’t really expecting to be able to make it to Alix’ wedding in Townsville, as I haven’t a lot of spare time from work, but the combination of the wedding, frequent-flyer points, and grandma being in Townsville at the same time, lead to a last-minute booking. Anna and I headed up on Thursday evening and had such a packed schedule we didn’t even have time to see any friends except at the wedding. I really should have suggested to Sandor & Marco that they gatecrash.
It’s an odd combination of “I haven’t been at work for ages” and “That time went very quickly indeed”. Everything old is new again.
Resolutions
Obviously, I didn’t manage any writing in the time away, as I still haven’t bought a laptop computer despite the deep discount offered by work. I could probably have done something on the old laptop, except that I gave it to Anna and she now uses it for work stuff.
But I did a bit of thinking. I’ll have to admit I’m stung by Dave’s repeated jabs at my lack of progress (ignoring for a moment the fact that this is coming from Dave) and I’m quite keen on getting more stuff out there on otherleg. The list of my incomplete projects include:
- editing Bullethole, Once Upon A Time, Elder Sibling, Society Cookery 2
- mixing the latest two Spit albums
- finishing my post-Spit-session song
- editing Lotus
- finishing Dark Forest
- writing Fork
- creating more Cesura
- writing other movie projects – Dave the Headless Chicken, Leaf Heist, Swap, Swapya, Orange People, Dancing Ghosts
- finishing my Morse Code computer game
- turning Amoeba into a proper card game
There’s probably more. The point is, it’s a nice set of projects to dip into, but a worrying indication that my procrastinating powers are getting on top of me at the moment. Hell, I’m barely replying to email nowadays. What to do? The obvious answer is: drop some projects, or put some on indefinite hold while I finish off others.
So far, I’ve been driven purely by my changeable enthusiasms: at the moment, my only thoughts are on how I might revamp sections of otherleg to use xml/xslt instead of hand-coded html – maybe create an area with a couple of lists in it; favorite movies, books, music, and so on.
So yeah, dunno what I’ll do. Still hovering. If only I enjoyed discipline more.
Events
Given that there’s been a good two weeks of non-posting, you’d think there’d be a bit to talk about, wouldn’t you?
You’d be right.
Guitar
Guitar practice has been much fun. Last Tuesday I learned the major, minor and major 7th barre chords, which has opened up (at least in theory) a whole lot of guitar possibilities. I was amazed at how easy they were. Oh, sure, there’s a lot of practice between now and me-playing-anything-decent, but I can finally see the point at which it will happen. Even better, I’m finally beginning to be able to hear music and have a stab at the chords that make it up – I’ve been relistening to a even more of the Spit back-catalog and making a go of them, though I’ve noticed that Ev doesn’t usually make much use of barre chords himself.
Filming: session 1
In the absence of any other volunteers, I had agreed to do the main acting role in Tony’s short film. We did the first bit of filming on Friday, the 8th of August with me, Tony, Anna, and one of Tony’s friends, who I (of course) have forgotten the name of. I will use my usual scheme and name him Marlon, thanks to a faint resemblance to Marlon Brando.
I had been unable to organise any of my friends to help out in time – Jon Blum was busy with his “Prisoner” book, Carey was sick, and Paul was unwilling. I wasn’t keen on calling in any favours for this shoot as it was pretty much a favour in itself, so we made do with just the four – I figured it would be fine (and it was) as the shoot was fairly simple. I showed Tony how to use the camera and Marlon the sound gear, we sorted through the shots and made sure we had a decent shot list, we set up the lights, and we went for it. It took a while. As it turns out, Tony had a very good idea of what he wanted – he’s a confident director, which is great, but it ended up taking so much time that we didn’t get any of the outdoor scenes done. By the time 11:00pm rolled on, we’d done all the indoor shots and were too pooped to try any outdoor shots, which would have been a hassle anyway because it had rained earlier in the night.
We didn’t do any filming on the Sunday, as Tony was unwell.
Sickness
There’s been something going around. On the Thursday and Friday of the 14th-15th of August, I was sick enough to take two days of work and lie in bed the whole time. I called Tony to cancel the second filming session on Friday, which was just as well because Tony had been unable to arrange the location he wanted. We agreed to reconvene on the Sunday.
Filming: session 2
So it was that last Sunday at 11:30pm, I found myself in a strange suburb far from home, doing the last scene of Tony’s short film, standing outside the front door of Tony’s girlfriend’s house wearing no trousers.
It was a cold night. We were quite some distance from the road, which was nice, and I had very bright lights on me, which warmed my legs nicely and made me rather more visible for the video camera, and passing cars. Tony and three of his friends stood around in various attitudes of embarassment while I tried to remember the lines and not think about how, the previous night, I had been to a party in which I had been introduced as a porn film-maker.
Once again, the shots took quite some time as we worked hard to get the lighting right. One of the difficulties of this film shoot has been (and will continue to be – we have quite a bit to go) that we can’t film below my waist, as the punchline of the film is that I wasn’t wearing any pants during the course of the film. It’s a fairly obvious punch-line, so we’ve been concentrating on distracting the audience (which I think the script does a fairly good job of doing – for most of the film, the point seems to be that events are conspiring to make him late), and of course if the shot choice is too unusual, it’ll be a dead giveaway.
Squash
I haven’t been improving much, but had a surprisingly good session against Ted last Sunday, and a reasonable go against Dad this Sunday. Volleys continue to be the main issue – Dad’s lob serve is as devastating as ever, and most of the games consisted of volley practice for me. Perfect! The trouble with the Townsville games were mostly that the weather was so hot and humid that I got exhausted well before I got exercised. I would get through a point dripping with sweat and run-off-my-feet, having done something as trivial as run from one side of the court to the other. A minute later I’d be fine again. By contrast, playing against Ted in Sydney, we’d be running all around the court, get exhausted, and still be feeling it three days later.
Golf
Played a bit of golf with papa on Friday morning, and discovered that my driving has completely gone to pot. Ya boo sucks. We were playing ambrose, and the rules of the competition (for it was a competition) were that we each had to contribute two drives. Fortunately, my iron shots were going as well as they have ever gone, so I contributed two five-iron-onto-the-green-on-par-3. Fantastic! We even managed an eagle on one hole, in which I contributed the putt. Happy. Though I doubt I’ll be playing golf again until I line it up with Sandor and Marco. Maybe that golfing holiday we’ve been talking about for years.
Walk to work
I’ve decided to try and walk to work once a week. It’s about 20k. I did it on the 11th, and it worked pretty well apart from all the blisters – I set off at 6:15am and arrived at 9:30. I’ve bought some decent shoes now, I hope, so the next time it’ll be a little easier.
Japanese
I got the Pimsleur language CDs for Japanese a couple of weeks ago as well, so I’ve started chugging into those – up to lesson 4 at the moment, thanks to the odd drive-into-work and the walk-to-work, of course. Walking into work looks like it’ll be the best solid batch of language learning time – given that it takes about 3:15, that’s six lessons (actually, two lessons done three times each). Worked really well last time.
The Japanese CDs have the same format as the Greek tapes, of course, but what makes them particularly amusing/tricky is that they are teaching the same phrases in the same order. A couple of times, I’ve caught myself answering the questions with the equivalent Greek phrases – I suspect that things will get increasingly confusing as time goes on. Anna admits that when she was learning Japanese, she was switching between English/Japanese/Greek throughout, and George-from-work says much the same thing. You’d think that English/Japanese/Greek would be an unusual combination of languages, but I now know two people who are fluent/semi-fluent in this combination (without knowing any other languages). It kinda makes sense – both Anna and George know Greek because they *are* Greek, and learning Japanese is getting more common in Australia.
All hail multi-culturalism!