It’s been a while since I blogged.
3 more days until puppies! 
Santa was good to me… I got a Stig t-shirt… a whipper snipper… the new Matthew Reilly and Ian Rankin books… gift vouchers to Autobarn and a couple of hardware shops… and various other bits and pieces.
Merry Christmas all!! 🙂
Well, we made our afternoon-trip to Geelong yesterday to check out the puppies. It was a lovely day, our Hyundai Getz rental car hummed from Melbourne to Geelong and back on $15 worth of fuel (I kid you not) and we were lucky enough to spend a couple of hours cuddling all different puppies from the litter and chatting to the breeder. We ended up choosing a lovely boy for us (Bradman) and a girl for Clare’s mum (who’s name is going to be Jess… we believe… although it’s changed a couple of times already).
This is Bradman
This is Jess
I took a heap of happy snaps with the camera and am sooo glad I upgraded, it’s far, far better than the Canon S2IS that I had been using. I’m still coming to grips with all the options, it’s a big jump going to a digital SLR and I fear it’s still a little bit too much camera for me a the moment. But still, with practice…
Well, we’ve actually managed to find a puppy it seems! There is a litter that’s just been born at a breeder in Geelong, and after speaking to her today we’ve decided to go up there in a couple of weeks (on the 17th) to look at them and potentially pick a couple out. Flights and car are booked… fingers crossed all goes to plan. Hooray!!
Ironically, the grandfather of the puppies is from the Kaparla kennel down in Hobart (Kaparla Loch Invar, about 13 dogs down) who is one of the breeders we’ve been speaking to locally.
In other news, I bought a Canon EOS 400D the other day. Twin lens kit, 2 batteries, 2gig SD card, etc – from eBay. Hopefully it’ll turn up this week so that I can start playing!!
Okay, so Clare and I have been wanting a puppy for a while now – a Golden Retriever. He’s even got a name but I won’t mention it until we’ve got him.
We’ve both got time off work booked between Christmas and January to bring him home and acclimatise him to our place before we start leaving him alone for longer periods.
Anyway… we’ve been talking to the puppy referral officer of the Tasmanian Golden Retriever Club about where to get one…. and we thought we’d get a puppy out of a litter that was due from one of their member’s bitches on the 31st of October. But today we got the sad phone call that the litter was born this week and there were only 2 puppies in it 🙁 As we were about 3rd or 4th in the queue, we missed out. So now we’re scratching ourselves wondering if anyone else has a litter due now! Puppies aren’t usually ready to take home until they’re about 8-10 weeks old, and we can’t take a puppy any earlier than Christmas… so we’re hoping we can find someone!
We’d much prefer to get one here in Tassie so we can view the parents etc… but I guess worst case scenario we can buy from the mainland. There’s a few different breeders advertising them in the Trading Post, etc. I have bought my last 3 cars from the mainland so it’s not like it’d be the first time I’ve bought stuff from the “big island”!
Well, I’ve changed hosts – the old one was driving me nuts. This one is much faster (and hosted in Australia) and costs around the same! Big props to Jumba 🙂
Got lots of things to say – none of them probably very interesting. Although I do feel a real need to muse on politics, what with the election coming up and all. And photography. And X-boxes with XBMC. And why hasn’t there been a Windows Mobile 6 update for the Palm Treo 750 on Telstra yet? Vodafone and 3 have got theirs… the rest of us are just using hacked ROMs 🙂
Must update WordPress to the latest version tomorrow too. Methinks it’s well overdue.
Well, I’ve finally done it – started a business. Again.
For those who are interested… the website is http://bendweb.com.au – my plan is to do a little bit of everything. PC hardware, web hosting and web design. I have a meeting with a potential client on Friday to do a site for her (Clare’s boss, as it happens) – I’ve got accounts set up with a couple of wholesalers (and have a few more in the pipeline) so it’s all good 🙂
Going to put a few links here to remind me later…
Thanks to Neil Crosby for this article it helped me get a web page past validation this morning.
Also thanks to Nick Schoonen for this article – which helped me get my OsCommerce site set up to work with Paypal in AUD 🙂
Now I’m off to start working on a schedule of fees and charges…. joy.
PS Clare and I went to Melbourne last week and saw Phantom of the Opera. It rocked. But don’t ever tell anyone I said that or you will be disowned 🙂
Well, I’m blogging again. One of these days I really should get rid of all the spam comments and trackbacks… but anyhoo.
Am I the only one in the world who thinks that they can actually write really good material, but never does? I say this because I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a writer but never managed to quite… get around to it. And here I am, thinking I want to write something. For Clare. The problem is that you need to be suitably inspired to do it… and perhaps I’m only 80 percent of the way there. I have a few words to say but don’t quite know how to start saying them.
Things are quite okay at the moment. Not great, but okay. I hope they slowly work their way up into “great” territory again but at the moment it’s a day by day proposition.
I’m playing basketball once a week, and loving it. And for long time readers (there is probably only one of those, if he followed the domain change which is unlikely since I never told anyone about it) you will remember I was trying to lose weight – well – I’ve lost about 11 kilos since Christmas. All by modifying my diet, basically – I’ve only been playing sport again for a few weeks so it’s not that.
However, my knees and my ankles are hating me right now… I really hope they get stronger otherwise I won’t be able to keep it up!
And further to that original post – as of tonight I am back on the meds again.
The last few weeks have been pretty average between Clare and I – the situation with this other guy is not helping much. I’ve been trying to get over it like I told her I would but it’s not as easy as it sounds especially when she is constantly getting messages from him even while her and I were out together on Saturday night and at home on Sunday morning.
Now, after me being in tears at some point pretty much every weekend for the last 3 or 4 weeks, I walk out of her place early because I was so upset, and miss our regular Sunday dinner with her family. And today she tells me we can’t go on unless something changes.
Of course there’s more to it than that but she basically told me it’s something I need to fix otherwise we just can’t continue. And I guess I can understand that.
So it’s back on the meds for me… at least in the short term. I hate the side effects but I did feel happier when I was taking them, certainly happier than I feel now. If that’s what it takes to keep this relationship together then that’s what I’ll do. She means too much to me to lose over something like this.
And many of the things she said today echo some of the things Cas said to me years ago… she just can’t be the strong one all the time. Why haven’t I learnt from my mistakes? I have an absolutely wonderful woman here. She is just about perfect in every way. I just hope she can forgive me and we can work through this or I don’t know what I’ll do.
Or as I said to her today, I just wish I could be a different person.
WHY CAN’T THINGS JUST STAY GOOD FOR A CHANGE!
Work is giving me the shits at the moment, they have me trying to do three different jobs and I get no thanks or encouragement at all. Clare is spending way too much time with another guy who has been making advances towards her, yet I’m supposed to just put up with it – and all of a sudden she is talking about how we’re going to break up eventually and it feels like she’s given up on us.
I’m also running out of money… although it breaks my heart I just can’t afford to keep the ute any more so it’s on the market.
A lot of good things have happened in the last few months of course.. it’s just that when bad things happen you can’t see anything but what’s in front of you. And doing that is just bringing back a lot of the old self-destructive thoughts again. It’s awful but I feel like I can’t keep fighting them forever, and the things I want in my life just seem to be forever out of reach. So what’s the point. *shrug*
Well the blog is back!
I’ve just changed webhosts… decided to let go of my principles and go offshore – the savings were too much to ignore.
Everything seems to have been moved across to the new home without much difficulty, although somewhere along the line the formatting seems to have got a bit screwed up. No idea how to fix that other than manually…
Too tired to post much tonight, gotta go watch the first couple of episodes of 24 – new season just started! 😀
Well… it’s true, they do!
I’ve been listening to Hoobastank – The Reason (the album I mean, not the song) quite a bit lately… not bad at all. Some of their stuff is kinda hard rockish in a poppish kinda way, if that makes any sense. But I really like that one particular song….
It’s come to my attention that a few people I know have found this blog by accident. That’s one reason I haven’t been using it much, among others… Now I’m not ashamed of anything that I’ve written here, but I do hope that the casual reader would realise that some of it is quite personal and I’d prefer it not to be spread around to every Tom Dick and Harry that comes along. Aside from the fact that most of it would be quite uninteresting to most people anyway, I’m sure there are far more interesting things to read on the web than some of the stuff I talk about here. Not only that, I found out through a third party that others were aware of it, which is a bit disappointing really… I mean, if you found out that someone had been reading your diary, wouldn’t you prefer they said to you “hey look, I’ve been reading this stuff you wrote” rather than telling their friends about it behind your back…. It’s not like I’ve ever given out the URL.
I mean the blog has a comments system… you can leave a comment there to let me know you’ve read it.
Anyway… the fact is that what’s done is done. I stand by what I’ve said and I’ll continue to blog… in all honesty I couldn’t really give a rats what anyone thinks any more, and if they think any less of me after reading my writings here, then they weren’t worth being friends with in the first place.
Everybody has their own problems… nobody else knows what it’s like to be me, just as I have no idea what it’s like to be somebody else. But what I write here is my perspective and nobody else’s.
Don’t really have much more to say other than that… I need to go and visit a friend this evening. Tomorrow is my birthday. I’m getting old. This week is going to be good, I can’t let it be anything else… in 2 weeks time I’m moving house, and another 2 weeks or so after that I’m changing jobs – finally got a rough date on when my promotion takes effect. Really life is pretty good.
But one should never forget what hard times you sometimes have to go through to get to the good ones… and never forget how easy it would be to fall back onto hard times with just one or two bad decisions, or choosing the wrong attitude when you get out of bed in the morning.
Never forget it.
Haven’t been blogging much, have I!
🙂
Guess things have been a bit out of control here, I’m caught up in a (rather nice) whirlwind at the moment. Don’t think I have too much say in what happens…
To recap on my last post – her parents are really nice. Didn’t spend much time talking to them other than at tea – spent most of the evening chatting with her brother and his girlfriend – both really nice people. Daniel is a bit crazy in some ways – reminds me of me a little bit.
Anyway the whole experience wasn’t half as horrible as it could have been, I don’t think I embarassed myself too much, and they seem to think I’m okay. Next weekend they’re going away so I’ll be staying at their place with Clare and will probably have dinner with them next Sunday, they’ve suggested we make it a regular thing, maybe monthly. I guess they figure that’s about the only way they’ll get to see their daughter on weekends since she’s been here pretty much every weekend since we got together… but anyway I’m keen to find out more about her life, she’s lived in my weekend life for a little while now and I haven’t managed to scare her off yet.
This week I bought myself a Nokia 6230i which is a rather brilliant phone. I’m very happy with it indeed, and staff pricing just rocks 😀 Now all I need is to go and get myself a bigarse MMC card for it and start loading up mp3s…
I’d bought a 3230 from a customer about 10 days or so – it had a couple of annoying limitations and was quite a large phone. Anyway I bought it only because he was offering it at a bargain basement price, but I managed to onsell it to another customer the other day at a small profit so it wasn’t a bad thing in the end.
Work have asked me if I’d like to train to become a corporate sales rep – I’ve only been working for them as a salesperson for eight weeks. Very scary but very flattering at the same time 🙂 So anyway.. a small promotion, and another exciting time in my life continues to get more exciting.
And I’ve just come back from another wonderful weekend in Hobart with Clare (we went down there last Sunday as well). I am loving her more and more as we spend more time together – it’s a little scary but I’m OK with it all and she seems to be too.
And I’m almost off the medication. I halved my dose (with doctor’s permission) as of 10 days ago – and I’ve forgotten to take it for 3 of those days – two of them being yesterday and today. So far, I feel pretty good. Must remember to take it again in the morning though… my moods have started to change a little bit. But I’m happy to say that the annoying side effects are completely gone.
Anyway I’ve rambled way too much. Life is good. Live it. Smile. Be happy.
Be a loose lily floating down a stream.
She bought me the Little Book of Calm and gave it to me last weekend. She listens to me dribble random stuff on the phone for hours. She lets me cuddle her all night. She loves british comedy – this afternoon we discovered that she has heard of Stan Freburg. I HAVE NEVER MET ANYONE ELSE WHO HAS HEARD OF HIM BEFORE!!! I had a cassette of his stuff when I was about twelve and haven’t heard it in well over ten years – tonight I discovered that she has the same tape (well, some of the same material anyway) and loves it! She has also heard of the Goon Show – her grandfather has the tapes (my granddad introduced me to them!!)!!
She loves Red Dwarf and Lord of The Rings. She cooks a pretty decent chicken out of a jar. She has great dress sense, wears Doc Martens all the time, and loves underwear. She has a lot of the same insecurities as me. She’s just plain gorgeous and doesn’t know it (or won’t admit it) – no matter how often I tell her. Seriously, this is probably starting to sound like a lovesick rant now, but:
Oh my goodness, where did this woman come from and how do I make sure she sticks around?!
Oh, and did I mention – next Saturday night is now officially P-Day.
Yes, that’s right folks – it’s Meet The Parents time! Going over to her place to have dinner with the family.
I’m nervous already. But, have a deeply rooted belief that everything’s gonna be fine.
Once more I find myself blogging, the evening after a female visitor has left.
She truly is amazing.
This morning I told her about the anti depressant medication I’ve been taking – it seemed to early to tell her before now, and the side effects have been causing us both a little bit of frustration (without going into detail… Zoloft has been known to cause delayed orgasm in men). One would think this would be a good thing, depending on severity… but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be unfortunately!
Her reaction was, well, quite unperturbed. And she just held me for a while, while I got all teary about it. It’s one of the things I’ve been stressing about telling her, I guess – so that part is over at least.
I have a doctor’s appointment this week, and I’m going to see whether it’s possible for me to try something else or get off Zoloft altogether. I’m constantly tired and getting headaches, as well as the aforementioned problem. Perhaps it’s not worth the hassle – although I’ve seen positive effects, my life has improved a lot in many other ways since I started taking it and perhaps it’s no longer necessary to have that crutch…
Can’t believe I’m finally in some sort of routine.
Changing jobs from retail management into retail sales, aside from the fact that it meant a pretty big pay cut, was the best move I ever made.
I’m now working for a mob that isn’t open Sundays. Hooray! A weekend is actually… a weekend. I have every third Saturday off.
To top that off, I have an amazing girlfriend who lives out of town, and for the last 3 weekends has come down on Saturday, spent the night with me, and spent Sunday with me. Her diary, apparently, is free on weekends until Christmas. So as you can probably imagine, weekends are… really nice.
To top all that off next weekend is a long weekend. And shock horror – my new employer aren’t open on public holidays either! So… next weekend, even though I’m working Saturday, I get two blissful days away from work, and two nights with a gorgeous princess. Who has only just left my place… despite my protests :p
Next weekend is shaping up to be a huge weekend actually.
I have a 21st birthday party on Friday night…. work Saturday, then another 21st birthday party on Saturday night. Then on Sunday, going to watch a drift event at Symmons Plains and then catch a movie Sunday night.
And a lovely sleepin on Monday morning, too… I can’t wait. But right now I guess I should be focussing on the week ahead.
All I can think about lately is how lucky I am, and how fate and circumstance seem to have conspired to turn my life into something enjoyable again. It’s lovely.
I had a day off work today.
Slept in till 10:30 am. Called a guy about doing a photoshoot for our club at a racetrack. Went out, looked at some shirts for the club, and had lunch with a beautiful girl.
Came home, watched the latest episode of Doctor Who and napped.
When I eventually got up, I just sent a few emails, bummed around on the computer and generally acted lazy.
So, this is the story of my day…
Life is good.
Well I suppose I should elaborate on that last post.
She told me she loved me… and I liked it. In fact, I said it back.
That’s not a normal thing for a relationship this young – even for someone as insecure and clingy as I am. Normally I would wait a lot longer. But it just feels… right.
I have a new job, a new girlfriend, and I’m poorer, yet happier than I’ve ever been. What a crazy mixed up world this is. Oh well…. let’s ramble about something else.
I just bought a new lawnmower today – a Victa Schappelle. It comes with 4kg of grass and has a 20 year warranty. Buy now and get a free boogie board!
OK, that was random – but it came in an SMS tonight, and I had to share it 🙂 Poor girl… maybe. Or maybe she’s a drug kingpin and deserved everything she got. If she’s guilty. Which I really have no idea about – but I definitely don’t think she’s squeaky clean, there are just way too many unanswered questions.
My hand hurts from being attacked by a crazy cat called Calais. I think he has a severe identity crisis – he’s just a kitten (maybe 6 months old) but he thinks he’s a fully grown lion. When he gets excited he loves to attack my hands and arms, biting and clawing them – he’s only playing but quite often hurts and occasionally draws blood!
He’s a gorgeous cat though. He just walked into a friends place one night (while we were all over there getting on the piss) about 6 weeks ago, and they’ve adopted him – I was over there tonight getting attacked some more. Surely I must have a masochistic streak….
Oh, here’s a picture of Calais the miniature lion – on second thoughts, I can’t bloody find one (there’s a couple floating about on the net but I need to find the links to them)…. might find it later. After sleep. 🙂
She told me she loved me…..
Wow, what a week it’s been.
Work has been hectic as anything. I now have a key to the store (after 3 weeks in the job) so they obviously feel that I’m trustworthy and doing well. Worked six days this week, got today and tomorrow off (well today’s almost gone, really).
I mentioned a girl in my last post – well I don’t want to elaborate too much – but things are going amazingly well. It was her birthday yesterday – we went bowling last night to celebrate with a whole bunch of folks from the Commodore club – got a goodish turnout considering it was only organised a day or so in advance. Then we stayed the night here and spent the day together, drove to Hobart and back.
She just told me in an SMS that she “more than likes me” – which has really blown me away. She is just so amazing – I can’t really explain it. We’ve been sort of dancing around each other for weeks – a little standoffish and inhibited, but when we kiss, it’s like there’s this incredible electricity between us – it’s different to other relationships I’ve had. Anyway… I can’t wait to see her again. There is a serious connection there which has happened very fast – even though it’s only been a couple of weeks, and we’re still in the honeymoon stages of our relationship.
We’re both getting very attached.
Again, it’s amazing how fast things can change.
All I need now is to come into a large sum of money! Maybe I should buy a lotto ticket, yeah….
Amazing how life can turn around really. One minute you can be wallowing in the deepest darkest depression and
the next you can be floating on a cloud of happiness where anything is possible. Right now, I’m somewhere in between the two, of course, but things have been relatively good the past few weeks – in stark contrast to a little over a month ago.
I’m not sure if it’s the Zoloft or the change in jobs or the fact that I’ve met a girl who seems to like me… or a
combination of all three. But things are okay.
I wish I had something more interesting to write about than my life. But what I will say is this – there are a small group of really wonderful friends who have been there for me when I needed them most. I won’t name them here (most of them would be completely unaware that this blog even exists) but over the next few weeks, I really, really need to do more to let them know how much I appreciate them.
I don’t know what else to say really… other than the fact that I’m just about DVD’d out. In the past 18 hours I have watched Anchorman, National Treasure, Soul Plane, Ocean’s Twelve, as well as the entire first season of Black Books on DVD. I’m *cough* backing up *cough* the first four as we speak…
Anchorman was hilarious. National Treasure was quite OK for a Disney action flick. Soul Plane was funnyish, but I’ve definitely seen better black comedies (and I mean that in the racial sense, not the sense of humour sense). Ocean’s Twelve was a little disappointing in comparison to the original, but that may be because I wasn’t paying all that much attention during the movie due to the presence of a pretty girl in my lounge room! Black Books, well.. anyone who knows me knows what I think of that.
Anyway – didn’t really get enough sleep last night. Perhaps I should have a nap.