anto's Journal: It's been too long / Isnt it good to live in Australia

It's (obviously) been way too long since I actually posted anything here.
My excuses are: (not that *I* need excuses mind you :)

1) I have been enjoying / dying through the Austrailan summer - as some of you know its an El Nino / La Nina (I hope I got that right) season which means we get quite interesting weather - no rain (at least in the southern part of the country) and hot dry days. Locally we have been on manditory water restrictions for a few months now (although at the current restriction levels it hardly affects me at all as they are sensible water saving measures wuich I pretty much follow normally) All this leads to spending a fair amount of time in a nice air-con enviroment or trying to find a way to live underwater.

2) My work load seems to be enormous and never ending - I finish one rush job only to have it replaced by 2, I have been doing some amazing levels of overtime causing me to not be at home in front of the PC all that much.

3) My SO seems to think that me sitting on the couch reading /. while she watches some *awful* TV (mostly she likes good, decent things - but there is the occasional show that I find awful) isnt exactly quality time - which I am a little inclined to agree with.

4) I converted my KB to dvorak - which has been a huge boon. I am now actually touch typing properly and not getting the 'you have been typing too much' wrist soreness. It is quite amazing the number of english words you can type without moving your hands off the home keys. BUT!!! the conversion was *brutal* I had to force myself to use the damm thing. For a while I was averaging about a character every 2 seconds (as I would not look at the kb.) after flying along with a 6 finger typing effort on querty it was amazingly frustraiting. While phoning in a support call to a company I don't normally deal with I was asked to type in a url - I can just imagine what was going through this guys head as a supposed IT guy is typing in a url with click.......click..... etc. Oh the shame.

5) We Moved offices *again* this time I didnt take any crap from subcontractors - and basically got everything I wanted done - now we have telco capacity to burn (which we will probably never use :)

6) 500+ houses burnt down in my city. I went out of town for just 2 days and all hell breaks loose. It was quite a scary time - my SO's suburb was put on 'high alert' (with her naughty cats not coming home like they should have when a suburb is about to be consumed by a fireball) My parents battled a grass fire about 40 meters from their house. Just a few houses down were places that literally burnt to the ground. All this was quite stressful while I was literally a 6 hour drive away (we only found out after the drive)

Oh and I am still spending loads of time at the jym. My Brother stopped coming to boxing with me - which has worked out quite well - most of the hime I end paired up with a fairly big ex-services guy. We get to *really* pummel each other - its good to know your partner will take pretty much whatever you throw at them. Occasionally one of us still manages to knock tho other over - its all part of the fun of it. In addition you got really interesting looks from people walking past :)

welcome back

[Em Emalb]

I thought you were a goner.

Good to see the .au still represented.