On Top of the World

OK, so most of you won’t care, but I think it’s pretty cool - it’s a game controller for my PDA! Yeah, I know… “what?” Since the buttons on Sony PDAs are completely useless for game playing, Sony thought they’d benefit from their lack of foresight and sell an accessory to make gaming easier.

So I found this on eBay and since it was only $20 including postage from the UK, I thought why not! I’m not planning on getting rid of my PDA any time soon, so I may as well dress it up a bit. It’s fun to accessorise.

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In other news, my throat is giving me trouble again. It’s not the same thing I had last time, it’s just really sore and is giving me a really bad earache. It started yesterday, and I went to the doctor tonight. He said that it was a viral thing, and gave me a medical certificate to stay home for the rest of the week since it could be contagious.

When I told M that I’d had to wait half an hour to see the doctor I wanted (it’s a bulk billing practice with several doctors, but I’ve found that you can see the doctor you want to if you ask) when I could have gone in straight away if I’d been willing to see the first available doctor, he said, “Oh well, you got the outcome you wanted.” (ie the days off work). I’d actually been hoping for some drugs, but this works too.

I’ve got a couple of photos for this week’s theme, because I couldn’t decide which one to use.

The first photo was taken on our way to Ireland, and I liked it because of the shadow of the plane in the clouds, which I didn’t notice until I looked at the photos when we got home.

The second one, as I’m sure you know, is the Eiffel Tower; I took this photo when we went to Paris in October last year. The tower is lit up all night, but every hour tiny little lights all over it flash on and off, turning it a beautiful sparkling blue. You can even hear the crackling of the lights while they’re flashing.

I’ve been making a bit more of an effort to go to the fortnightly Auslan workshops, which is where we get together with other Auslan students and practise our signing. Last week’s workshop was held at DeafSA, and since it was a Friday, quite a few Deaf people were there having some drinks and just generally hanging out.

The guy who runs the workshops likes the night to be a bit educational, so he passes around some handouts with some stuff for us to practise. This time it was a list of sentences in English, which we then had to change into Auslan. We were going through the sentences, and then we got to one which was something like “I went to the doctor for a sperm test because my wife was having difficulties getting pregnant.”

We hadn’t come across the sign for “sperm” before, so the guy showed us what it was. So 35 of us were sitting around a table, all signing “sperm sperm sperm sperm”. I’m sure that would have been a lovely sight for the people who were trying to enjoy their drinks.

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After having a 5-month break from our driving trips, we thought it would be a good time to start up again. And since today was an absolutely perfect day, we thought we’d go to Ardrossan again. The photos are here.

This is a picture of my cat, Jack (on the left), with his brother, Noah, when they were 12 weeks old. Unfortunately Noah was run over when he was only 6 months old Jack looks somewhat different these days!

My computer is really pissing me off. Virtually every time i turn it on, I have to turn it off and back on again because it doesn’t turn on properly the first time. I’m worried that one day it won’t start at all, so I’m in the process of burning all my photos (and eventually other important stuff) to DVD. I’ve lost everything off my computer once before, and I don’t want it to happen again so now is the time to pull my finger out and get organised.

The first disc has been burning for a bit over an hour, and it’s still got 19% to go. Then there’s another disc to burn, which will probably be another hour. Bah, waiting sucks!

But, once the burning is done, I’m going to get stuck back into my photo gallery (there’s a link in the sidebar too)! I’ve moved it to a subdomain and upgraded my version of Coppermine, and I think the transition went very well indeed. *pat on the back for me*

I’ve got photos all over the place, and some duplicates I think, so I’m going to put everything in the one spot, even though it’s going to take forever. Most likely I’ll do 60% of it and think that’ll do because there’s only so much photo manipulation you can do before you start getting bored. But something I will do is put up photos of the overseas holiday we went on last year! Yes, we’ve only been back for 10 months - have some patience, ok? I’ve set up the albums, so now I just have to resize everything and plonk it on.

Yesterday afternoon, M got an SMS from his nephew, asking him to tape Family Feud for him because the family of a friend of his was going to be on it. We’ve met the friend a few times, so we were interested to see whether he was going to be on it. He was, so we watched the show. I don’t normally watch it because I can’t stand the host, but it’s always different when someone you know is on! It was pretty funny, because we were expecting big things from him, but he didn’t come up with a single answer that was on the board, so I think it’s safe to say that he didn’t contribute a single thing to the show. Despite that, his family won!

So they got to the last round, where two family members have to get 200 points or more, each answering 5 questions. Fortunately, the guy we knew wasn’t one of the two people. So one of his sisters went first, and she did really well, getting 148 points. If she hadn’t said that a deer was one of the animals in the Zodiac, no doubt she would have got even more. Since three of her answers were the top responses, they were playing to win $25,000.

The next person was another sister, and she gave a few good answers, but passed on one, and also gave a stupid answer for the Zodiac question - she said snake. What the?! The host was going through the questions, and by the time he got to the second to last one, she only needed 11 points. Since the last question was the Zodiac question, she had no hope of getting any points for that so she needed 11 for this one. The question had been “Name something you would find at a ski lodge”, and I was SURE that she said ’skis’, but when they put her answer up on the board it said ’skiers’. NOOOOOO! Maybe it’s because my answer would have been ’skis’ that I thought that was what she said, but I was certain she’d said skis. But her face didn’t change into a “that wasn’t my answer” expression (unless they edited it out in production), so maybe she did say ’skiers’ after all.

So we were waiting to see how many points she got for it, and it was… 6. D’oh! And the host said that the top answer was ’skis’! *slaps forehead* So they didn’t win their $25,000, even though I think they should have. The good news is they’ll be on again on Monday since they’re the carry over champs, so we’ll see how they go then.

For this week’s theme, the first thing I thought of was a photo I took soon after I arrived in London last year, but then I thought that it was pretty puerile so I changed my mind.

Instead, I have this photo, which I took when we went to Sydney last January. It’s not funny ha ha but I thought it was funny peculiar:

The main reason I thought it was odd is we have a very similar sculpture to this one in the city I live in, except it’s horizontal!

As I mentioned last week, it was our wedding anniversary last Wednesday, and on Saturday we went out for dinner to a very nice restaurant. Neither of us had tried it before, and we were both curious because something so expensive must be good, right?

We arrived and were seated at our table, which unfortunately wasn’t next to the window. Even so, we had a lovely view of the lights on the Adelaide plains (although we are a bit desensitised to it because we have a similar view from our house). A waitress came over and asked if we’d like some water, to which we said yes. She then asked if we wanted sparkling or still. Errrmm, I guessed that it wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to say ‘tap’, so I just went with still.

Nothing on the entrée menu really grabbed us, so we decided to have a main and dessert. I got a tenderloin, and M had venison. We also got 2 serves of vegetables and some mashed potato. When everything arrived, I thought I should have had an entree because my piece of meat was so tiny, but fortunately there was plenty of mashed potato, without which I’m sure I would still have been hungry afterwards. The main course was really good, but I wouldn’t say it’s any better than at our usual favourite restaurant.

For dessert, I decided to have the Magill Estate Chocolate Truffle Box. I was hesitant to order it because I’m tending to steer away from really chocolatey desserts these days, but there wasn’t really anything else that took my fancy. When it arrived, it consisted of a box with 9 truffles in it. I thought there might have been a variety of truffles, but they were all the same. The first one was divine - so rich and smooth, a lovely hazelnut praline. After the 7th one, though, I was glad to see the end (I gave M two of them). I’d actually been contemplating putting the box in my bag and having them later, but thought that might not be very good form, plus it would have been pretty obvious when the waitress came to take the plate and the box wasn’t on it any more.

We had a nice port with dessert, and coffee afterwards. There was a selection of petits fours with coffee, and thank God none of them were chocolate. So, all in all dinner was very nice. I don’t know whether we’d go back, only because it wasn’t really worth the price, although the food was excellent. I think we’ll just stick to Lenzerheide from now on.

I think that Australians are often told that our currency looks like Monopoly money, so I thought that this week’s Photo Hunt theme would be a good opportunity to show you. I like our colourful money - it makes it a hell of a lot easier to find the note you’re looking for if they’re not all the same colour.

Here’s a picture of all the notes together - well, all the notes I could scrounge from my husband’s and my wallets. There’s a $100 note but we don’t carry those around very often!

See? Nice and colourful and easy to distinguish. There used to be $1 and $2 notes but they were changed over to coins.

Here are all the coins. We used to have 1 cent and 2 cent coins, but they’re not in circulation any more.

And because you can’t tell their relative sizes from those photos, here they all are together:

Jack’s back home again. The vet got a sample this morning and we picked him up after work. Naturally, he weed in the box within 5 seconds of starting the car. The vet could have got a sample out of him right away if they’d just taken him for a drive around the block, rather than wait 24 hours for him to go by himself.

They should have the results of the test early next week. The cost of the testing was $80, and the food they gave me was $38, so there goes some more cash. Oh well, I’m really happy to have him home.

In other good cat news, we’ve found a home for the ginger cat that’s been squatting at M’s house. A woman from work has agreed to take it, so we’re going to pick it up tomorrow morning and take it to her house. I really hope the car trip won’t be too hellish, otherwise it’s going to be the longest half an hour of our lives.