To most, this wouldn’t seem like a huge achievement, and believe me – I have a lot more ambitious goals and aspirations other than simply staying alive… but given the last 12 months (and the 30 years prior to that) it sometimes surprises me that, for the most part, I’ve managed to clumsily fumble my way through 32 years and 3 days (and counting) unscathed.

After a wall full of Facebook birthday wishes, dinner’s with parents and friends, cake at work and a few bottles of wine inbetween – it came to the birthday celebration I was looking forward to most – Good Vibes 2011.

Due to poor organisation on my part, the day started a little later than anticipated, but a healthy breakfast of KFC and a quick visit to the shops managed to get that all sorted and I was on the road.

The first thing that hits you when you go to any Aussie summer festival is the lack of clothing worn. There were sooooo many pairs of denim short short shorts around that if you stitched them all together you might just manage to make a full pair of jeans!

Now don’t get me wrong – I like looking at girls butts just as much as the next guy (and trust me, there were a lot of very fine butts to observe), but I just don’t see the appeal in these shorts. It almost doesn’t seem to matter how good your legs and/or butts are – very few chicks actually look good in them. Then there’s the pockets that hang out the bottom. The second you try and put things in these pockets, it looks like you’re sporting a colostomy bag. I’m desperately hoping that others agree with this because if not, I’m starting to sound like my hair looks – old.

Anyways, onto the festival – I arrived in time to see the end of Tim & Jean’s set and quickly headed for the alcoholic slushy stand. In 38 degree heat with limited shaded areas – it’s important to stay hydrated! Wandered around a bit more and caught some of Koolism’s set followed by another couple of very tasty slushies which lead me to a nice shady spot on the hill to listen to Hungry Kids of Hungary.

While sitting on this hill I found myself pondering the festival layout. Things like where the stages, toilets, bars, stalls and food areas were positioned and ways they could have been re-arranged for better access and accoustics. As I was playing my own little version of Sim Festival and enjoying the fumes wafting over from a nearby group of people smoking, I realised my latest round of slushies had vanished and I was starting to feel hungry.

A big plate of the Curry Hut’s Satay Special, a healthy dollop of hot sauce and now onto beer I was ready for some Friendly Fires and a bit of Mike Posner’s cheesy pop. Then over to listen to the mellow vibe served up by Kiwi’s with horns (you don’t see a lot of bands bring-out the brass these days) Fat Freddie’s Drop.

More beers and I think another slushy or two… by this stage I had lost count… Nas & Damian Marley came on. Marley has the longest dreads I have ever seen! But before they could finish, I wanted to get over to the main stage to get a good spot for one of my favorite groups of all time – Faithless.

This meant listening to the last few songs of Kelis. At one stage her milk shakes may have brought all the boys to the yard, but now it just seemed like she had run out of her own songs to sing and was just covering and mashing-up a bunch of other random stuff.

Once she had finished, I shuffled my way to the front and got myself a great spot ready for Faithless.

Before I go any further, I just want to try and explain how much I like Faithless. My taste in music is very eclectic and I listen to a LOT of different stuff. As a result, I always find it tricky to say who my favorite band or singer is. There are styles of music I like better than others and there are albums that mark definitive times in my life which can and will never be forgotten. But often as artists and bands evolve, their sounds change and sometimes I only like an album or two, which, in my mind, doesn’t categorise that group as being a ‘favorite’.

That being said, I like ALL of Faithless’ albums and their music has accompanied me through many experiences. Some good. Some bad. Some have been half-way around the world. But all very memorable and all very special.

So to finally see them perform live is something that is difficult to put into words. But I’ll try.

The stage was setup with a lights, projectors and a jungle gym of drums – one drummer seated, the other standing and often jumping around. Lead and bass guitars jamming out the tracks, back-up singers (which took the forefront on a few tracks) with Sister Bliss sparkling away behind her wall of keyboards and Maxi Jazz’s toned yet somewhat skeletal form shirtless with a suit-jacket.

The set-list incorporated a good mix of their old classics like Insomnia and God is a DJ (both of which my feet barely touched the ground while they were playing), to some of their more political tracks like Mass Destruction and Bombs not to miss their newer (but just as good) songs like Tweak Your Nipple and Not Going Home.

It was pure energy, bliss and joy from the moment they walked onto the stage all the way through to their final encore of We Come One (which had the crowd waving their fingers and singing along with like a church choir).

Amidst all the rock-star energy and excitement, Maxi still manages to be one of the most humble entertainers I’ve seen.

For so many reasons – this will be a night I will never ever forget.

But what actually encouraged me to start writing again was the first few words spoken in the newish BBC Series – Sherlock (not sure if it’s going to be good or not yet, but the ads seemed ok).

In the first 5 minutes it has the modernised version of Watson seeing a psychiatrist to help him deal with his post-military trauma and trying to help him adjust to civilian life again. She says to him “Writing a blog about everything that happens to you will honestly help you” to which he replies “Nothing ever happens to me”.

Over the last twelve months I haven’t been blogging (or tweeting or facebooking…. or doing much in the social media sphere)… but it’s certainly not because nothing has happened to me. It has been quite the opposite.

This time last year I was in a long-term relationship with a son, a house and a cute little dog. Things may have seemed quite good and to be honest, they were. Although, like most products made these days – it was not meant to last – despite everyone’s best efforts. Well to be honest, perhaps not my best efforts, but hopefully not my worst either.

After eight years of ups and downs (like all relationships), we decided that it was time to move-on and split-up. The initial split didn’t happen quite as gracefully as the last sentence would imply, but despite a few heated words and some foolish actions (once again, on my part), the break-up was quite amicable. I still spend time with Caleb most weeks and Kristy and I are still friends.

I moved out, but had troubles finding a place to live for a few months and spent that time living between friends places and work.

Finally I found a place – moved-in and all was peachy… for about 3 months. Then the landlord decided to put-up the rent. Even though the increase wasn’t that much – I just couldn’t afford it.

Fortunately, a friend had just purchased an investment property nearby and offered to rent it to me while they fixed it up. The place needed some work and I didn’t have a functional kitchen for a couple of months, but the rent is affordable and they’ve been including me in the renovation process, so it’s actually been quite interesting.

Within a couple of months of moving into the new place, I had a reasonably major car accident. Fortunately no one was injured (other than my car) and unlike my admissions of fault earlier in the post – I can quite adamantly state that this accident was certainly not my fault.

It took the assessors a couple of weeks to determine whether or not to write my car off – during which time my insurance wouldn’t give me a hire car because if they decided to write-off my car, I wouldn’t have qualified for one. Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately) they decided not to write it off… but during the time my car was in the shop (and the build-up to that decision)…

I started walking a lot more and taking public transport.

This didn’t work-out too well for me (the walking part, not the public transport). I figured I was just drastically unhealthy due to the fact I haven’t done exercise for years and spend all my waking hours in front of a computer… and when I’m not working or dicking around on the internet I’m usually drinking or sleeping.

But my inability to walk the slightest distance without feeling faint started to cause some concern. I brushed this off as nothing serious until it reached the point where I couldn’t stay-up until sun-rise drinking alcoholic slushies, wine, scotch and various flavours of shots at my mate (and business parter)’s wedding. This was when I knew there was something wrong.

So I went to the doctor, who did the usual examination and suggested I get a blood test. A few hours later he called me back saying the blood results were in and I needed to get to a hospital ASAP.

Turns-out I somehow had two litres less blood than I should and as a result I was critically anemic.

I spent the following couple of weeks in hospital getting blood transfusions, blood tests, iron infusions, x-rayed, ultrasounded, poked, prodded and uncomfortably tested in ways I’d rather not discuss. Even after an endoscopy and colonoscopy they still couldn’t definitively establish exactly how I had lost the blood.

Their best educated guess was that I had a stomach ulcer that had ruptured and slowly released blood into my stomach in such small quantities it was either passed without me noticing or possibly even dissolved by my stomach acids. Due to the small quantities of blood loss, my body didn’t realise it was missing, so it didn’t replace it.

This most likely went on for 6 (or more) months and over that time my body had slowly been adjusting to the limited supply of blood – until I started trying to do the most minimal of physical activity causing my body to give-up.

While they couldn’t gain a definitive answer as to where my blood went – they did find a bunch of other stuff wrong with me – including that I have a hernia placing a large part of my stomach somewhere in my chest. Fortunately this is quite common and hasn’t affected my day-to-day life (although I am booked-in for surgery at some stage in the next 12 months so they can put my stomach back to where it should be).

Since getting out of hospital a few months ago – I’ve been feeling better than ever. I’ve lost about 5Kg, I’m doing more exercise and feel a lot fitter and healthier than I have in years.

Amongst all this, work has had its ups and downs (unfortunately more downs than ups lately) and although there are still a few challenges ahead, things seem to be heading in the right direction… and Queensland has been hit with two of the worst natural disasters in over three decades.

So if you had of said to me this time last year that over the next twelve months you’ll come out of an 8+ year relationship, live out of a backpack for a couple of months, move house twice, nearly total your car, discover a very serious (and without attention, potentially life threatening) health condition, hire staff, fire staff, have your city resemble Atlantis and neighboring cities being blown away… I would never have believed you.

Makes me wonder what will happen over the next 12 months

I also realised that when we used to hang-out and drink together, it was always in a group situation. Nearly 10 years ago I’d spend most nights of the week drinking with a combination of Scott, Con, Gerard and a selection of other guys (usually bar-staff, bouncers or other figures from the clubbing industry), sometimes uni mates, other old school friends, neighbors and often a few people that I’d know to say “hi” to, but would have no clue as to who they really were or why they were there.

As you could imagine, from such a wide selection of people, there were always interesting stories and drunken adventures happening followed by hung-over recovery sessions around the pool. So while we all spent a fair bit of time together, the one commonality was the ‘group’ dynamic. Take the group away and the conversation sort-of dries-up after an hour or so.

This is what happened on Australia Day.

I tried a bit of mingling but that didn’t work-out so great as I discovered I’m really old.

The age factor has never really bothered me too much since I act like a child most of the time anyway and no matter how daggy I am, I still believe I’m ‘cool’ in my own special way (in the same way a blind person thinks they look good when they walk past a mirror).

However I found myself talking to one girl who asked how I knew Scott… so I explained that we knew each other from school and used to go clubbing a fair bit when we were in our late teens through to our early/mid 20′s. It was at this point you could tell she was trying to do some quick maths, then a startled look swept across her face and she said “Wow, that must make you like 27 or 28!” I replied “No, I’m actually 30… turning 31 next month” and she almost fell off her chair.

I think that was the first time I seriously felt like I was a pensioner who crashed a teenagers party.

Despite some awkward silences and some people clearly thinking I was in need of a Zimmer frame, it didn’t stop me enjoying a suitable amount of beer before I decided I’d head home in time for an afternoon Nana-nap

The rest of the week was, well, a standard work week.

Over the weekend that just flew past, we pimped-out our puppy George.

A friend-of-a-friend gave us a call recently and explained that one of their two female Maltese Shih Tzus was on heat and they were thinking about breading her. But they were lacking in the one crucial ingredient for this – a strapping male dog to step-up to the plate and sow his wild oats.

As they couldn’t find any dog that fit the description above, they thought perhaps our crazy little fluff-ball George might be interested. So, we pimped him out for the weekend in the hopes he can help make lots of cute little puppies that too will resemble the lint a giant may pluck from their belly button.

In exchange for George’s humping skills (which he regularly practices on anything that moves), we’ve asked if we can have one of the new puppies – this time a little girl dog.

So, if George did a good job with the ‘bow-chicka-bow-wow’, hopefully in the not-too-distant-future, he’ll have a play-mate to run around with and continue his legacy of destroying anything chewable that we leave lying around the house.

Chances are this will probably be as successful as my last attempt to create some form of blogging enthusiasm (the 365 project)… Which didn’t even last a week… But I think it’s important to try new things regardless of the end-result.

So after the Christmas / New Years hype, it was back to work. The first week was a little less productive than usual since Con was still in town and we spent some time catching-up. Some of this time may have involved a few quiet drinks

The night before he left, we had dinner over at Con’s folks place. Con’s sister and her hubby joined us and it was great to catch-up with everyone. Growing-up, Con’s family were more like an extension of my own and I can’t believe how long it’s been since I saw them all.

The week that followed consisted of lots of boring (but far more productive) work stuff and outside of business hours we spent our time cleaning and tidying our house and yard in anticipation of our Annual Australia Day Party.

Despite our best efforts (and the genuine belief we were totally prepaired for the event) when the day rolled around we found ourselves running around like blue-arsed flies (not entirely sure if I got that idiom correct but felt it was essential to try and squeeze-in some form of Aussie coloquilism).

Even though it didn’t fall on the true Australia Day (since it was on a Tuesday and we wanted a day to recover before having to head back to work) we held it on the Saturday before it was a great day.

Highlights included the green and gold jelly shots that had to be consumed whenever Rolf Harris’ song “Tie me kangaroo down sport” came-up in the shuffle of Triple J Hottest 100 songs from the last 5 years; The slip n’ slide; everyone’s effort to dress in aussie attire.

With the lowlight being me getting rather drunk and thinking it’d be a good idea to demonstrate how flexible i was (although Vicky started it by doing high kicks and the splits)… Which we then followed-up with an undie-run around the yard.

Overall was an awesome day.

As stated at the start of this post, I’m currently on my way to another Aussie gathering that my old drinking and clubbing buddie Scott (who I recently was reaquainted with) invited me to.

In true Scott form, I don’t believe it’s actually his party but that’s never stopped him before. Furthermore, despite being my age (aka old) Scott has and probably always will be 18… So today should be interesting. I’ll try and do another update over the next few days to let you know how it went.

The app is still undergoing some development and with the most recent update, it looks like my Lancer didn’t quite beat Kristy’s X-Trail

See, what the app doesn’t take into consideration is that despite my car having no modifications, is still (in my mind) a highly tuned sporting beast, not to mention how awesome a driver I am… meh, who am I kidding… I know I’m a crap driver, which simply probably re-enforces how much me and my car sucks

Ok… that’s enough shameless self promotion…

Tomorrow I’m heading-off for a relaxing weekend away with the family at Bunya Mountains. A few years ago my brother discovered this beautiful relaxing holiday spot and decided to share it with the rest of the family. So for the next few days, I’ll be off-line in a huge log cabin, drinking lots of red wine, sitting around a fireplace playing board games and other crazy shenanigans with a dozen people I proudly call my family.

Over the last few days I’ve only found a couple of random internet finds interesting enough to share…

For those who like to apply mathematical formulas to every-day situations, then click through a bunch of the quotes/equations on the New Math site.

And here’s a little video I found a while ago, but really liked it (I know it’s long for a YouTube clip, but if you have the time, watch till the end):

If you’ve got the time to watch another long YouTube clip, then here’s another one that always makes me feel good:

Up until now, my tee collection is primarily made-up of Threadless designs. Threadless are an awesome online Tee place where users can submit their own designs and if the community votes for them, they go to print and you can then buy them. As it turns-out, the guy from Glennz has had a bunch of his designs printed by Threadless, so he thought, why don’t I just start my own store.

He gained some assistance from the guys at Despair Inc which is another brilliant online company. Many of you will be familiar with the motivational posters – the ones with a picture of some puppies or a sunset surrounded by a big thick black border with a motivational quote written underneath?… well Despair were the first place to switch that around and create de-motivational posters. This concept grew virally and now every couple of weeks I get some funny motivational-styled images emailed to me.

So to cut a long story short (very unlike me) this guy (Glenn from New Zealand) started his own online store, with the design quality you’ll find on other leading T-shops such as Threadless by teaming-up with another brilliant online business concept Despair and is now selling some awesome T-shirt designs, so check him out and buy some shirts… I know I’m going to!

To give you some examples, here are a few of my favorites I read today:

Today, I received an email from my boss telling me how appreciated I was and how valuable I am to the company. I wish I hadn’t scrolled down to read the included conversation where he asked his boss whether to lie to me about how good I was or not. FML

Today, I tried buying a video game that was rated “M – for mature”. The Cashier told me “you have to be 17 to buy this game”. I didn’t have any ID on me. I’m 25. FML

Today, I was looking at this site when my wife called to ask what I was doing, I told her I was looking at a website called F*** My Life and she hung up. I called her back and got yelled at because she thought I was using a website called F*** My Wife. FML

There were a lot of other funny ones and as I was reading through the list (and remembering how I arrived there in the first place), I came-up with a FML of my own:

“My friend forwarded me a link to fmylife.com… Is this her polite way of trying to tell me my life is f*cked? Then I started reading through some of the entries and found 2 on the FIRST page that applied directly to me. Perhaps she’s right. FML”

Before I dive into it, I’d just like to do two quick things. Firstly a warning – if you aren’t particularly interested in long, waffle-filed, stories about me, then turn away now as this post will be both long and full of a lot of pointless information.

Secondly, I’d also like to acknowledge the inspiration that encouraged me to get off my butt and write this post instead of going to bed (which is what I’d much rather be doing as my sleeping patterns are all screwed at the moment… more about that later).

I was going to write this post yesterday, only to discover that I had broken my internet connection by trying to upgrade the firmware on my modem in an effort to get my voIP phone to work with my router’s firewall setup (in retrospect, I should have realised that when I try and do technical things as advantageous as this, it never ends-up well). As I couldn’t seem to roll-back the firmware upgrade, I went-out and purchased a new router only to find that due to a conflict with my wireless network card driver, it crashed my laptop with a blue screen of death. It took me most of Saturday just to discover that the problem was a driver conflict as the machine would either get stuck in a reboot cycle crashing as soon as windows would start or if it did manage to boot in safe mode, it’d end-up crashing after a non-specified amount of time (but inevitably always before I could check my error logs to help diagnose why the errors were happening in the first place). Anyways, I digress…

The motivation for this long-winded update really came down to two people – my Dad and Con.

When I dad lunch with my folks a coupe of days ago, Dad said he wrote his first blog post (Mum argues that it wasn’t a proper blog platform that he was posting to… not to mention the fact that I’m astounded Mum could make this observation) but the simple fact that he’s giving it a go is truly admirable. To be honest everything my parents do (and have done over the years), is a shiny beacon of inspiration and without it, I doubt I (or my family) would be where we are today.

The second piece of inspiration came from my best mate Con, who is also quite inspiring in his own special kinda way, although unlike my parents, his most motivational words are usually preceded by copious amounts of alcohol.

He called me on Saturday morning and although I can’t remember a bulk of the conversation as I was still half-asleep, I felt pretty bad as I’ve been incredibly slack with keeping in touch. A blog post certainly doesn’t make-up for personalised one-on-one contact with friends, but at least it is still a way of sharing stories and events which at the time may have been quite entertaining, but are often forgotten a few weeks later when you’re on the phone and are asked “so… what’s been happening lately”.

Heh, there goes just over 550 words and I haven’t even started talking about what’s been going on… this IS going to be a long post.

A few weeks ago Mel and Joe had their engagement party. It was great to catch-up with Mel’s family and some old familiar friends that I got to know when Mel and I were flatmates. I didn’t know any of Joe’s friends, but let’s just say that some of them were quite interesting (and I don’t mean that in a bad way… I just can’t think of adequate words to describe a couple of them… one of which was offering me beard and moustache advice while policing the entrance to the function room so well that invited guests weren’t even sure if they were allowed in).

On top of the privilege of sharing such a milestone in Mel and Joe’s relationship, highlights of the evening included meeting some really great people, with impressive cocktails (none of which I can remember the names of, but the headache the following day confirmed they must have been good at the time), some not so impressive, but rather effective shots, beer and scotch, all helping to lubricate the conversations and mingling which we often don’t do much at parties.

On top of dealing with a hang-over the following morning, we also discovered that while we were sleeping, our house had been broken into. One of the back, kitchen windows was forced open causing the glass to break (enough to cause damage and require the glass to be replaced… but not quite enough to wake us… although the big night prior probably dulled our senses a little more than usual too).

They didn’t stick around long, nor did they target any larger items. Just grabbed Kristy’s handbag and purse off the dinning room table and then they were gone again. Kristy thought she heard some footsteps, but figured that it was most likely my Dad as he has keys to our house and its not uncommon for him to come over to mow the lawn or do odd-jobs.

We were about to call the police when they pulled-up next-door and it turns-out that a number of houses in the street were burgled and the school a few blocks down the road was vandalised. It was reassuring to know that we weren’t the only ones that were hit, plus our insurance covered the costs of replacing the window and reimbursed Kristy for some of her personal possessions from the handbag… but none of this makes-up for the inconvenience of having to cancel credit cards, update bank account details, get a new drivers license etc. etc.

Not to mention that once you know that a stranger has been able to gain entry to your house (and although unlikely, could re-enter at any time), every time the house creaks or you hear an unfamiliar sound, you start wondering if someone is trying to get in. It’s really quite an unsettling feeling which I’m sure will pass as time goes on, not to mention that we are now a lot more mindful of home security and are looking at getting better locks and screens on the windows when our budget permits.

The following weekend, Kristy and Caleb went to see a local performance of the musical ‘Cats’. I wasn’t particularly interested which turned-out well because there was a trivia night at my parents life-style village. Our team consisted of Mum, Dad, my brother Brett and the last-minute addition of sister Leanne and her husband Bob.

I didn’t hold high-hopes for our team (the Knew Some’s) because even though I love trivia, I’m pretty crap at it. Fortunately I paid attention to Voltron at an early age, so with our powers combined… we ended-up surprising ourselves and came second out of all the teams (along with winning some other lucky door prizes throughout the evening).

The next weekend, it was Vicky’s ‘Girls Night In‘ which I was hoping to catch-up with some of the guys, but due to my poor organisational skills leaving things to the last minute, everyone else had plans.

Normally I would have been a little saddened by this, but as I recently purchased Guitar Hero III on the PS3 I had the house to myself where I cranked the volume, dropped the dacks and rocked-out harder than Tom Cruise in Risky Business.

This brings me to the week and weekend just gone which is really the biggest news. Let me introduce you to George – He’s an 8-week old Maltese cross Shih Tzu puppy.

He’s the cutest little ball of fluff and since he’s still so young, we’ve been staying with him all day (both Kristy and I have worked from home a couple of days and since I effectively work by myself most of the time, I’m able to bring him to work with me).

He’s slowly getting used to going to the toilet outside (but will still require more training and patience) and over the last couple of nights he’s slept right through without waking us for a toilet break at 2am. He’s still been awake at 5am each morning, so I’ve been a bit cranky as I’m not a morning person… but, I can’t really complain too much because Kristy’s been going through the same treatment and is dealing with it a lot better than I am.

The newness of having a little puppy and not knowing what to do has had me reading every online article, forum, blog and any other source of doggy information I can find. So when you combine my lack of knowledge with an information overload, topped off with very little sleep for the last week, you end-up with me freaking-out a lot. I’ve been following George around Googling everything he does… “is he supposed to be doing that?”… “what does it mean when they do this?” etc. etc.

In a few weeks he’ll be starting Puppy Preschool which covers basic obedience training plus the opportunity for him to mingle with other puppies which is also crucial to their development and hopefully by then I will have had some sleep and settled-down a bit.

In the meantime, here are a few pics :