Anotherblog

Jar Jar, you’re a genius!

I’m a little late to the party, especially considering I’m one of the people to come up with the phrase, but “Jar Jar, you’re a genius!”, a phrase that could not be detected on the interwebs until the recent Darths & Droids strip, has prompted a wee bit of a trend. First time I’ve ever been on the inside of one of these!

Ireland: Dublin, Athlone, Portlick

We arrived in Dublin, and dealt with our jetlag. I drank lots of coffee. They know how to do good coffee in Dublin. Jade used her secret Ninja power to cut her own jetlag clean in half. Don’t ask me how; it was too fast to see. Mum & Dad & Jen & Marco & Sofia & Sara were staying in the same hotel (the Jury’s Inn Custom House, quite decent) so Jade got to meet my sister and family for the first time, hooray!

We went to the art gallery and looked at Impressionist paintings, and met up with CB for lunch. Jade began to get used to the Shellshear style of organisation, which is to say: not much, but pretty relaxed about it. Then we moseyed around Dublin for as long as we could, trying not to fall asleep, went to a pub and got reminded of the rather stunning prices of food in Europe.

There was more moseying around on Thursday - a trip out to Newgrange (a 5000 year old monument, donchaknow), and a Hen’s night party for CB while Dad and I had a nice Italian dinner and tried to engage a clear exhausted Marco in conversation and beer, and on Friday we caught a train over to Athlone to stay at the eco guest house there - very nice indeed, but I had a cold that was clearly deciding to time it’s finale for Saturday, dammit. No ninja powers were going to save me from that one.

The whole wedding party stayed there, and we drove around running various errands (picking up wine, for the most part) then it was Saturday morning and we started thinking about heading over to Portlick castle for this wedding malarkey. Rumour had it that it was to start at 3pm - this was only a rumour, mind, and Jade was amazed and delighted that on the day itself, most of us had only the vaguest idea of what time things were happening. CB had her final hair arrangements while some of us (me and Sam and country Ben) headed over to the castle to deliver the wine and cheese to the chef, George.

George looked at the cheese.

“What’s this?”

“Well,” we explained, “It’s the cheese.” Rather than having a wedding cake, CB and Aodhagan were having a wedding cheese. Serves the same rough purpose; like having a cheese plate for dessert. Innovative and cool idea, though it took a bit of getting used to.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Um.” To be honest, we weren’t sure. We had just given George a huge box full of wheels of cheese - some large, some small. “We think you’re supposed to stack them. Like,” we added helpfully, “a wedding cake.”

“No, no, no,” said George. “I was told it would be a large construction. The cheese is supposed to be cut up and assembled into a towering toothpick-model. Something impressive. This isn’t going to impress, is it?”

He started slapping wheels of cheese on top of each other. “Look.” Slap. “What’s this?” Slap. “This is barely thirty centimetres high. This…” Slap. “is…” Slap. “Pathetic.” Slap. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

He stared us in the eyes. I had cleverly already backed away slightly, and Sam copped the full force of George’s accusing gaze. He visibly wilted.

“Um,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” said George. “You’re from Sheraton catering, right?”

“No, we’re guests. We’re just dropping this off.”

“Oh,” said George. He started to laugh. After a brief pause, we all did, with the kind of Oh-my-god-I’ve-just-been-Ramsied kind of relief. He thought we were the caterers. I bet this is perfectly normal chef-catering relations.

And it was all OK in the end. George talked to Aodhagan, and Aodhagan assured him that the stack of cheeses would be fine. We repeated the story - quietly, still in fear of George - throughout the rest of the day.

And that was only the beginning of the day, of course. The woman on fire was still 36 hours in the future…

Ireland: the flight over

Despite a brilliant reversion on Sunday, in which I slept in until 1pm, I’m just about over the jet-lag. I think.

We flew to Ireland via Abu Dhabi with Etihad airways which was great except for the very silly entertainment control unit, which is embedded in the armrest in such a way as to make it very easy to accidentally turn the screen on or off, or press the overhead light button. The unit spent most of my flights dangling from its cord over the edge of my seat. Oh, and the theoretically brilliant inflight noise-cancelling headphones (!) also had problems - if I nudged the plug, it would reward me with an ear-splittling crackle and several minutes of absolute awakeness. Between the headset and the control unit, I was encouraged to sit *very, very still*.

It used to be a fairly reliable rule of thumb that movies watched on planes would be awful. Reasons included the noisy environment, small screen, airline censorship, fixed film schedule, and limited choice of mediocre films. Nowadays, that’s changed completely - with the larger selection and better environment I really look forward to watching films on planes, often because it means I watch films that I normally wouldn’t. So it was that I watched “Enchanted” (lovely), “Meet the Robinsons” (excellent), “7 Zwerge - Der Wald ist nicht genug” (very silly, surprisingly fun), “Vantage Point” (daft), and “Penelope” (sweet, rambling). I’m beginning to wonder whether the rule of thumb should be reversed.

I know that Claire likes Bundy rum, so I asked at the duty free area whether I would be able to buy a bottle of bundy rum and not have it confiscated at Abu Dhabi. They said “Yes, that’s fine”, and I bought a nice expensive bottle of Bundaberg Rum Distiller’s No. 3.

It was, of course, stopped at Abu Dhabi. Apparently it *is* possible to get a bottle all the way to your destination, but you need a security bag and they forgot/didn’t know to give me one at the Sydney Duty Free. I put the bottle of rum on top of a garbage bin in Abu Dhabi airport (they didn’t confiscate it; they just wouldn’t let it through the security gate) and seethed with frustration until I fell asleep. Sydney Airport duty free now have the full story, and I await my refund with folded arms and tapping foot.

Nobody caught on fire on the flight over. That was later.

Jetlagged

I’d like to talk about the wonderful trip to Ireland for CB’s wedding, I really would… but despite my best efforts and a day off yesterday, jetlag is currently kicking my arse. So I’ll give a preview:

Irritating flight. Many relatives, some new. Grand craic. Sunny. Caught cold. Woman on fire. Jetlag.

Back from Tokyo

Wow, that was a really quick trip. It was good to catch up with Winston (and a pity to have missed the ever hard-working Ted) and I got a lot of good work done, but really, that was the kind of work trip where there was barely any time to look around. I am ever admiring of the efficiency of the Tokyo metro; the food was pleasant, I didn’t get sick. I’ll chalk that one up as a success, and lobby a bit harder to get a day off… and to take Von with me. Like on the trip to Ireland on Tuesday!

Trips, thumps.

Got a trip to Japan for work on Sunday, and then off to Ireland for CB’s wedding a week after that. It’s been long enough since the SVG working group that I’m actually looking forward to overseas travel again, hooray.

Meanwhile, our lunchtime group (or a couple thereof) tried out a drumming circle. It was fun, and not even too embarassing.

Rubik’s Cube: 2′10″

New best time is 2 minutes and ten seconds. I haven’t timed myself in a while (my last best time was about 5 minutes), but I’d guess my average time would now be about 3 minutes. Mr McLeish averages about 1′30″.

It’s not boring yet.

Wii Fit, Fire Emblem

I got a Wii Fit two weeks ago. The board is quite a bit better at doing balance related tasks than improving fitness, but that’s fine by me. I’m enjoying the yoga exercises in particular. The game gives feedback on your centre of gravity, and using that as a focus is quite calming for me.

One thing that bugs me, though, is that it relies on BMI. The game can weigh you and calculate your BMI given your height. The trouble is, for my weight of 84kg and height of 183cm, it claims that I’m overweight. And then makes my “Mii” (the Wii has avatar figures for players) rather pudgy.

Now, I could just suck it up and admit that I’m overweight, but on balance I’m quite happy with my weight and have no intention of changing it. I don’t feel overweight. From what I understand, BMI doesn’t take into account body type. But it’s a bit irritating: the Wii Fit keeps trying to make me commit to losing weight down to an ideal 73kg(!), which I suspect would be rather scrawny. I’d like to tell it to get stuffed, but there isn’t that option. My quick hack fix is to adjust my height to about 200cm, but I can’t even find the option to do that. And it feels like cheating.

Von and I have also been playing Fire Emblem, an unapologetically old-school turn-based strategy game. It’s a real time sucker. I suspect it’ll suck up a lot of the time that really ought to be going into wedding planning…

Car fixed

Yep, the car’s all better (thanks to a shudderingly expensive new clutch assembly), except for the fact that it now sporadically displays the “Check Engine” light. This has happened before, also just after a service, and is “fixed” in the same way that you would fix Windows: turn it off and on again. For this reason, I suspect it’s the warning light that’s faulty, not the engine, but I’m still taking it back to the shop. Some day when I have time.

Car troubles

I’ve been enjoying the delights of Sydney public transport the last couple of days, thanks to my car’s spontaneous decision to visit the mechanic. It was a relatively lucky way for it to happen: I was stopped at the second set of lights on the way to work on Tuesday morning. The light turned green, and when I changed from first to second gears, the clutch suddenly went flat to the floor and refused to do anything more. I knew - or rather, I thought I knew - what had happened immediately. I pulled over to the side of the road, and called my mechanic, who was fortunately quite close by. He was happy to come over and deal with it, especially since at that point I thought I’d snapped the accelerator cable, which almost never happens to a car.

I thought I’d snapped the accelerator cable simply because of the immediate loss of power (which was, of course, because I was in neutral and couldn’t easily get out of neutral). My delusion persisted until Peter (the mechanic) opened the hood, and asked me to press the accelerator, at which point I pressed the clutch, and started to get that sinking feeling of “Oh poop, time to look like an idiot”.

Anyway, Peter arranged for the car to get towed, kindly dropped me off at the station, and I took a train and bus (a slightly wrong bus, as it happened - it really was one of those mornings) to work and arrived an hour late. The car was well overdue for a service anyway, and as Peter pointed out, if I’d had it serviced at the right time they might have caught the problem. Stupid procrastination.