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.

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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.

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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

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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:

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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!

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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”

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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 :

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Did you know that one in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer before the age of 85 and in 2004 a total of 2,641 women died from breast cancer and that was just in Australia!

I also thought that breast cancer was something that only happened to older women, but 25% of breast cancer cases apply to women under the age of 50 and what knocked my socks off is the knowledge that men can also suffer from breast cancer. It’s not as common as in women, but one in 763 men will be diagnosed with breast cancer before the age of 85.

And here I was thinking that the only times my man-boobs needed to worry was when I’d contemplate going for a job, but now they quiver with a whole new awareness of terror (actually no, I think that jiggle was caused when I got-up too quickly). But you get the idea.

So in an effort to raise money and awareness, the Cancer Council has started something called The Girls Night In. The idea behind it is that instead of going out and spending money on drinks, cab fare, cover-charges etc. girls could get together for a ‘night in’ and donate the money saved to the Cancer Council.

Vicky is having such an evening and I’d like to help her promote the cause because she’s a good friend, an avid follower of this blog (even if it is only because her work has blocked access to most other websites, so this is all she has to read when pretending to do work) and I too think it’s a very worth cause to donate to.

So if you have a few spare dollars, Click Here tomake a donation.

While the ladies are braiding each other’s hair, having pillow fights and bitching about us boys, I’ll be getting together with the guys for a B-Grade horror movie night which I’m really looking forward to. Scotty and I have been talking about doing this for a while and just never got around to it, so this will be the perfect excuse to watch dodgy horror and drink beer.

I’m also hoping that all the crass terms relating to breasts at the start of the post will attract a few more clicks on the blog in order to raise more money for the cause. So boys, if this applies to you, get your hands out of your pants and donate now!

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Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

Last year (when Blog Action Day was first launched) the topic that everyone blogged about was the environment. This year, on October 15, the theme is poverty. In order to explain a little more clearly, I’ll borrow a quote from their website:

There is no simple, clear answer [to poverty]. By asking thousands of different people to give their viewpoints and opinions, Blog Action Day creates an extraordinary lens through which to view these issues. Each blogger brings their own perspective and ideas. Each blogger posts relating to their own blog topic. And each blogger engages their audience differently.

So coming-up in roughly a months time, you’ll be able to read a couple of posts about poverty – one post from a search engine optimisation perspective (on my work blog) and one on this blog discussing some of my personal thoughts on the issue.

If you have a blog, or know someone that does, I strongly encourage you to participate – just go to BlogActionDay.org and register.

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