Regular jayneandmarty readers (you know who you are) will have noticed a lack of posts in the last few weeks. That’s because we haven’t done much except work, eat, and sleep.
In fact we’ve been talking about taking a week off to break out of the working week routine a bit – just staying home, maybe painting the kitchen and our bathroom, doing some gardening, having a surf and so on, but Jayne hasn’t got much leave owing so it’d just be me. She says do it, I say maybe: on the one hand I reckon my brain and body really needs it, on the other I’d rather we spent our precious leave days together. We’ll see.
We did break the routine a bit today, though … we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum at the movies. It was a good, exciting film and a nice change from our regular Sunday arvo routine of getting things ready for the week. We haven’t been to the movies for 18 months – we became a bit jaded with the quality of films, bogans making noise and spoiling the atmosphere, cost etc etc, but we enjoyed it today. Maybe our bad experiences are because our local cinema used to be Lowpoint (that’s Highpoint for the uninitiated).
On a completely unrelated note, I bought a spiffy new aluminium keyboard for the computer the other day. I don’t know what career plans you have Simon, but if they involve designing new products as beautiful as this then you’ll go far.
Do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?
If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.
According to the blurb that came with the email this was in, most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction.
I see clockwise and find it difficult to make her go the other way.
P.S. Kate’s maths question is here.
Jayne started to mow the lawn with our push mower this morning but we’ve neglected the it (the lawn) for a couple of weeks too long and it was too thick for the little Flymo to get through. I was prepared to hack my way through it all (and take four hours to do it, probably) but Jayne pulled out her Dad’s old Victa Concorde from the back of the shed and suggested we give that a try.
It’s been in storage for 15 years but seemed in good nick, so she filled it up with some petrol (also 15 years old) and tried to crank it over. No good.
Five minutes later I came out to give it a try … and on the third go it coughed, spluttered and turned over! I gave it another go and vrooooommmmmmmm – we were in business. Too easy!
It cut through our clover- and bindi-covered lawn like a knife through butter. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.
I was lucky enough to score a ticket to the Geelong / Collingwood final at the ‘G last night. What an amazing atmosphere! I’ve seen some good games of footy in front of some huge crowds and last night was up there in the top three for sure. 98,000 people and less than a goal in it. The roar when Collingwood pushed forward with 30 seconds to go was incredible, but it was dwarfed by the noise from the Cats fans when the siren finally went.
I was barracking hard for the Cats (seeing as we live here) and although they looked a bit dodgy at times in the third quarter they were strong in the last and I think they’ll go on with it next week regardless of who they play.
Thanks for the ticket Leah!
20 minutes before the start … ground starting to fill up
During the first quarter (I think)
Packed
This was the queue to get into Richmond station. Took 40 minutes to get through!
A selection of shots from her trip:
Jayne’s in Perth this weekend visiting Peter & Christine. Max and I are missing her heaps.
This afternoon she sent me this pic of her outside the Fremantle prison, where she’d just been on the tunnel tour.
“Step inside and do time” is the Fremantle Prison’s tagline. When she gets home she’ll be doing time herself – she left the iron on on Friday. I found out just now when I went to iron a shirt.
Lucky we bought one with an auto shutoff!
Took Muchacha for a spin today with James and Lou. Beautiful day but a bit choppy on the water, so we had to cruise rather than fly.
Fantastic to be back on the water though. Might even get in for a wakeboard next week if the weather’s fine again – the surf forecast is crap at this (early) stage.
I downloaded the trial of Apple’s iWork 08 today to test out its capabilities versus Microsoft Office for Mac 2004. It impressed me. Try to imagine Word, Excel and Powerpoint stripped back to the features you actually need (Word is a classic example of the 80/20 rule – 80% of users only use 20% of the features), then add a bunch of templates and themes that look amazing and are dead simple to use. Add in solid compatibility with Windows Office documents and you have a sweet little suite, so to speak. I think I’m going to buy it.
Anyway, it took me just over 20 minutes to create this slideshow of our walk at the beach last weekend. It should play without a problem in Windows Media Player and/or Quicktime.
Enjoy. (And expect more slideshows in the future.)
