On Top of the World

M and I went to the beautiful beachside suburb of Semaphore a few days ago, because M was having his hair cut (he likes his regular guy!). While he was having it done, I went for a walk down to the beach, and to pass the time, I thought I’d take some photos.

I took a few panorama shots, and shots of the jetty, and then I thought it might be cool to take a closeup of the seagulls. There were some sitting in a group, so I edged closer, trying not to scare them off. When I got within a few feet, one by one they calmly stood up and walked off. Well, fine! So I approached another group, only to have the same thing happen, all very casually of course.

It was actually quite amusing, and in the end I didn’t really care about the pictures, but it was more an experiment to see how close I could get before they got up. They made no hurry about going, it was just as if they planned all along to get up at that moment, and me being within their personal space wasn’t the issue at all. It reminded me of when I was waiting at the bus stop a couple of months ago, and a guy kept edging closer to me, and I kept walking away, but trying to make it look as casual as possible.

A friend of mine recently bought some land down south, and I went to visit her on Wednesday. She has two horses, one of which was already at the land, and she was moving the other one there that day. They’d never met before, and she wanted me to take some photos of them for her. The meeting didn’t go quite as well as she was hoping - the female went up to the male and sniffed his butt (as you do when you meet someone), which was met by a swift and strong kick to the chest. Damn, that was a hard kick - it produced quite a hearty ‘clonk’. Luckily horses have stronger chests than we do - after that, I made a point of not going behind him! A friend of ours got kicked by one of his horses, and the bruises he got were awful. Yeeeouch.

I took lots of pictures, but this was my favourite by far - it’s just too cute! The one in the picture is just like a puppy - he follows her around everywhere, and nuzzles her - it’s adorable.

M and I went into the city yesterday, and while we were there we thought we’d go and see some of the Tour Down Under. I’ve been to at least one of the stages every year it’s been on, and it just wouldn’t have felt right if I’d missed out on it totally this year. It was good fun, although it was quite hot in the sun, and since we didn’t have a hat or anything we didn’t stay long. I had my camera with me, though, and took some photos, which you can look at here if you’re interested! I’ll eventually put a link to them in my sidebar.

Here’s something that happened this week that really pissed me off. I was going to blog about it at the time, but I was so annoyed that anything I would have written about it would have been laced with profanity. Which is how I usually talk anyway, but I’m sure that not everyone who stops by here wants to read an expletive every second word. Now I’m cooled off enough to just wonder “why?” about the whole thing. Anyway.

M’s father died a couple of months ago, and M has been renting out the house since the end of last year. The new tenants moved in, and everything was fine. A couple of weeks ago, one of the tenants rang up and said that there was some mail for M that had been delivered there, and wanted an address so they could forward it to us.

So last Tuesday we got the forwarded mail from the new tenants. I had a glance at it, and apart from a couple of things for M’s dad, there were three envelopes, each addressed to “The Relatives of the Late *M’s dad*”. I asked M if I could open one, and he said yes. So I opened one of them, and started reading. The letter started out with how sorry they were to write to us during such a difficult time, but they heard that M’s dad died and thought that we might like to give them some money for a memorial. Huh? All the letters were worded very similarly - they all knew his full name, and where the funeral had been held, and wanted us to fork over some money during our “time of grief”. What the fuck? Any spam is annoying, but really - this kind of spamming just seems a bit crass to me.

So I went from zero to pissed-right-the-hell-off in a matter of seconds. First, how did they get the details? Do they spend their time scouring the funeral notices in the papers to see who has died and where their funeral is being held? Or do they have a deal with the funeral directors where they buy the details of the deceased? I understand that selling memorials is a business like any other, but I think it’s extremely inappropriate for them to advertise by sending out letters containing specific details which they’d obviously had to look up. Funeral directors have advertisements on television - why can’t they? You don’t receive letters from funeral places saying that they’ve noticed that Joe Bloggs has just celebrated his 95th birthday, and since he’s 20 years older than today’s male life expectancy, does he want to think about arranging his funeral?

Do they have deals with hospitals as well, sending out letters to people who have miraculously survived some operation or illness, to see if they want to buy a prepaid memorial, so that in the event of complications, their relatives will have the peace of mind of knowing that they will have the tribute that they deserve?

I think that any spam which has been specifically addressed to you and contains any personal details that you haven’t given them to be a gross invasion of privacy, but surely the line should be drawn somewhere. Obviously there’s no such thing as spamming etiquette.

It was such a nice day today that I thought I’d make the most of my new camera and take some photos outside. I put together this panorama shot of the view from my backyard.

Last night M and I went out to dinner for my birthday. Yes, we already went out for my birthday, but the initial plan had been to go to an Indian restaurant, but since we couldn’t get a booking for Tuesday night, M booked it for Saturday instead. So the dinner on Tuesday was so that we did something on my actual birthday.

So we went to a place called Tandoori Hut in the city, and it was quite good. We ate fairly early, getting there at around 5:30. There weren’t that many people there, and I commented that I found it hard to believe that he couldn’t get a booking for Tuesday night if there were so few people here tonight. He merely said that they’d ‘had something on’ on Tuesday.

The meal was nice, and afterwards M suggested that we find a café on the riverfront for an after dinner drink. So we walked towards the Torrens River. I couldn’t think of any cafés offhand. As we walked past the Festival Theatre I saw big banners up for The Mikado, which had opened here a few days ago. I said to M, “Look! The Mikado!” since he knew that I’d wanted to go and see it. M replied, “BOOOORING”, but with a smile on his face.

He led me into the Festival Theatre, and I thought something was a bit fishy. We walked around to the stalls entrance doors, and I said, “Oh shut up, we’re not going to see The Mikado!” He said that he just had to get something out of his wallet, and produced two tickets for seats in the centre of the front row. Heeeee! I felt tears come to my eyes - this was just too cool. That’s the second time he’s given me a theatre-related surprise!

I love Gilbert & Sullivan, and it was fantastic to be able to see the show, especially since HMS Pinafore didn’t work out. Of course, it was great - I loved it! We bought a programme, as I always do when I see a professional show because I like to have a souvenir.

It was such a nice night, I’m so lucky to have a guy who gives me such wonderful surprises As it turns out, he’d bought the tickets at the end of November, and had to keep the secret all this time.

M and I went to have a look at some land at Auburn today, which is in the Clare Valley. We’d heard an ad on the radio for land being sold there, so we thought it might be worth a look, particularly as I was keen to go back to Clare after the last time I’d been through. Since Auburn is on the way to Clare, we went to Clare for lunch, and thought we’d call past the land on the way back.

We had quite a nice schnitzel at one of the pubs, and then went to see the land, which turned out to be quite a disappointment. Oh well. In truth, I didn’t actually expect that we’d come home as new owners of a block of land, but it was worth a look anyway, and the drive was nice! The two photos here were taken in the car on the way home.

Before today I thought I might like to live in Clare, but I have now changed my mind because a) it’s a damn long drive to work, even if I work on the north side of town, and b) there are just too many slow-driving tossers using the road. It was ridiculous - stupid slow people holding everyone else up and not even pulling over to let people pass. Use some gas already!

Oh, something I’ve been meaning to mention for a couple of days and which all of you who comment will already know about, is my new comment code thing. Sorry if it’s a pain for some people, but I was so sick of deleting 300+ junk comments each day, I had to do something. Most of them were being filtered out and didn’t actually appear on my blog, but sometimes they sneak through and it’s just such a pain. I just know that one day I’ll be writing an enormous comment in reply to other people’s comments, and I’ll forget to put in the code and lose the whole thing. I’m trying to get into the habit of copying it all to the clipboard before I submit, just in case I’ve put in the wrong code or something!

I used to love Basil Brush when I was a kid. And Playaway. They didn’t show Playaway for very long, but what they did show I thought was great. I found something really cool today, and I can’t remember how I stumbled across it, but it’s so cool! I was looking through the list and thinking, “Oh my God! I remember ___!” Playing the title or a couple of clips brought back all the good memories. It’s just like when you’re reminiscing about when you were little, and all the great cartoons you used to watch, like The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and The Herculoids, before all the shit cartoons started. Aaah the good old days! What cartoons/TV shows did you like when you were a kid?

The Brits make some pretty good TV… in fact, I think most of my favourite actors are from Britain - Ian McKellen, John Hannah, Nigel Hawthorne, Robert Carlyle…

I’ve seen this on a couple of people’s sites - Blog Clicker. The same as Blog Explosion - nothing like a little healthy competition.

Thank God it’s the weekend. First week back at work is over, and I’m ready for another holiday.

Since I’m feeling rather snap-happy at the moment, I thought I’d post a picture of my boy, Jack, in one of his more immature moments.