5 weeks to go until we go overseas, but who’s counting?

We are – and not just the weeks, the days or even the hours, we are second counting at the moment. As I write this, we just tick down below 49,000 to go before we step on the plane and leave our woes behind for 9 solid weeks of soul recharging and world exploring. Sometime in those 49,000 seconds though, we still have to finish fencing and landscaping at the Aldinga house, move into it, find tenants for the Magill house, and hold down full time jobs. Furthermore, my job, which in a nutshell is to ensure that pipelines only have one long hole through the middle of them and no more, is quite stressful at the moment. This is because some of the pipelines in my jurisdiction seem to be ignoring the one hole policy that my friends at the government seem to be so hell bent on.

So, at the moment we feel like we are running a marathon and the finish line is in sight, so we are sprinting towards it. But it’s the Boston Marathon, and it’s uphill. And there’s a headwind, with rain. The sweat’s in our eyes, lactic acid pumping through our muscles and we are about to hit the wall. The wall is a unique condition experienced by distance runners, where their body runs out of fat to burn and starts to burn muscles. I have often pondered just how far I would have to run to reach this point, its hard to judge but I think it would be measured in light years. But I digress. For the purposes of this analogy, let’s call fat tolerance, and muscle sanity. In layman’s terms, we’ve had a gut full and are starting to go insane. If we were in the get on holiday Olympics, Bruce McEvaney would say something like “It’s a special moment, these two athletes are displaying remarkable ticker against massive odds”, but we’re not so I will stop whinging at this point.

We managed to catch Shrek 2 last Thursday night. Absolute champagne comedy, and its one of those films that is chock to the brim with references to popular culture. I think that films make references like this are enjoyable because you think you ‘get’ them better than everyone else. It’s like a game. I saw the nods to Ghostbusters, Alien and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in there and I felt like a winner, as if everyone else was too stupid to spot them. It’s like an in joke between you and the film. This is, I guess, why Quentin Tarantino is so popular. It takes a particularly sad type of film geek to spot that Uma wears a yellow tracksuit in Kill Bill because Bruce Lee wore one in those 1970’s badly dubbed Karate movies, like Fist of Fury or the Big Boss. Anyway, Shrek 2 is recommended viewing.

Well, Karen and I sure have been busy lately.

Busy planning our round the world trip, which is, I might add, only a little over 6 weeks away, as well as busy trying to finish off our investment house at Aldinga. I spent the weekend down there in the rain and mud installing a storm water system, and quite frankly, plumbers can keep plumbing - too much like manual labour for a lazy bastard like me. I will stick to the bigger, steel oil and gas pipelines installed by machines that I usually get involved with thanks very much.

Anyway, readers will remember that these two items are related, in that the purpose of the investment property was to fund the overseas trip, since we are no good at actually saving. However, like so many of the schemes that Karen and I dream up, they start with an initial idea and then get refined somewhat during the execution. For the following example, lets just assume refinement is the same as complication. The particular scheme in question started as, 1. buy block of land, 2. build house, 3. piss off OS with the profit. However now, due to the fact that the house is not going to be finished until a week before we go, which doesn't leave a heck of a lot of time to sell it, and also due to certain taxation advantages we can garner, the plan is as follows...

1. Finish house a week before OS trip. 2. Move in! Yes - you read right, move in. 3. Rent out house at Magill. 4. Enjoy Aldinga for a week and then leave to bum around OS for two months. 5. Come home, live at Aldinga while we get it ready to sell in the summertime, when hopefully the beach will be a bigger factor in the sale price. 6. Sell Aldinga, trying to time sale for when lease runs out and the tenants leave Magill. 7. Move back to Magill. 8. Pay off holiday and chunk of mortgage. 9. Maybe buy some toys as well but that will depend on the sensibility/temptation ratio at the time.

Such a simple plan what could possibly go wrong? (For those who don't know me, that was sarcasm)

The photo below is of my friend Louise.

There is a lot of things about Lou that you have to love. Smart, friendly, funny, has a cool car... the list goes on and on. But, most people, when quizzed, will say that the two things that stick out most about Lou are her left and right breasts. They, in Louise's own words, have a postcode each they are so big!

The coolest thing about Louise is that there is no one else I know, whose breasts I would freely blog about. It just wouldn't be the done thing, but our Lou is so cool with her boobies that now the time has come for her to have them reduced to a size that most women have enlargements to get to, does she quietly slip into hospital and then come out with a new look? No - she holds a going away party for them!


Pretty little cupcakes 

And what a cracker of a party it was. It was a bit of a rude food party, with cupcakes as above, little wiener sausages and the like. Hilarious. The pun's were flowing as freely as the wine, such as "all the breast" and "thanks for the mammories" being the favourites. I heard "breast wishes" a few times as well.

So anyway Lou, good luck and get well soon, and B1 and B2, the world awaits your new look!

Australia. Constitutional Monarchy. Who cares? Nobody really, except for around this time every year when we get a public holiday in honour of the Queen's Birthday. Yay! The funny thing is that Liz's birthday is actually in April, but April is already stacked with days off, with Anzac day and Easter and all, so June it is.

So here we are, Monday evening, on the come down from a fairly big long weekend. Saturday started with building fences in the mud at our Aldinga property (it's for sale remember, click here), which was on the whole exhausting work. So exhausting in fact that we just ended up watching a movie on TV Saturday night and going to bed early. The film of choice for the sad bastard evening was that iconic 80's classic, Trading Places. I can remember watching that in my teens and thinking it was absolute champagne comedy, but watching it now, I realise that it wasn't John Landis' finest hour. Certainly not in the same league as American Werewolf in London, Coming to America or Blues Brothers for example. Even though it's no Kentucky Fried Movie, it's not all bad though, I mean Jamie Lee Curtis gets her mighty nice breasts out a couple of times, and no one, not even Samuel L. Jackson, can say mo-fo quite like Eddie Murphy. Furthermore, everything in this world is relative. And relative to the second movie on Saturday night our mates at channel 9 decided to show again for the 15 bazillionth time, Trading Places is Citizen Kane. What movie could be so shit to make this so? Only one - Tango and Cash. Crap of the highest order.

Moving along from the 1980's, on Sunday we had planned to do more work at the house. But the weather really sucked. I mean really, really sucked. Rain, gail force winds, you name it, so we were left with no option than to spend the afternoon at the Sea and Vines festival. A whole lot of fun it was too, down at Richard Hamilton's winery, drinking wine, eating, catching up with friends and dancing to a the very funky Blues Brothers and Sisters of Soul, featuring Karen's work colleague Jack on Bass. We left at about 4:30, grabbed a quick shower and can of red bull each, and then it was out to the pub for my sister Naomi's birthday. A nice dinner as usual from the Maylands, and then we had a few people around to drink at our home bar, which has been newly named the Dog and Slobber.


Karen and Louise with thier party pants on! 

So after a solid 11 hours of drinking yesterday, today has been a recovery day. Karen went to work and I stayed home, and watched a movie that I have been meaning to watch for a couple of years now, Brazil. I need a bit of time to absorb it, maybe even give it a second viewing before I pass comment. Give me a few days and I will post my review.

Oh, one more thing. I am out of our Big Brother Sweep! Fricken Merlin......

I have been keepin' it real this week. I have been doing one of the most grass roots tasks of pipeline engineering this week, and that's analysing pipeline failures. Hardly a spectacular failure granted, more like a tiny pinhole leak, but a failure enough to put some oil to ground which had to be subsequently removed. Once the contaminated soil was out of the way, I could go and analyse the failure and try and work out why it happened. In the interests of keeping my job, that's as much detail as I'm going to put on the internet, but below are some amusing pictures. The first is the innocent little tag on the shutdown valve on the pipeline which so elloquently describes why I spent two days this week in the middle of the desert, 700km away from the nearest capital city. The second photo is for those people (you know who you are!) who think that I am a soft cock office boy. There I am, in a hole, scrubbing sticky oil off a pipe to find the hole in it. There you go... recorded evidence of me engaged in manual labour.


The tag on the shutdown valve that landed me in the desert 


Me keepin' it real in a hole 

Ok, just a quick update on the status of the investment house Karen and I are building down at Aldinga. As you can see from the photo, it actually now looks like a house. It just needs a kitchen, some tiles and some paint and we're done. Yippee. Of course, it was supposed to be finished a month ago, so we would have time to sell it so that we could use the money on our little world tour coming up in August/September, but as they say in the construction business, shit happens. Never "sorry we ran over schedule, even though you bent over backwards getting stuff organised so we could start on time", just "shit happens". Perhaps if your lucky you will get "what are you going to do about it" as an addendum, but that's it.


The house as it stands 

One thing about the house, the foundations have cost a fricken fortune. The soil is active to say the least, and it is full of Uluru sized rocks, which digging contractors generally hate trying to remove. Now having started the fencing and landscaping, I can sympathise with them. Check out this sucker I had to dig out. This was one rock that I had break in half with a crowbar just to fit on the wheelbarrow. Sheesh. It is so big I considered growing some moss on it to use in the garden, but unfortunately the stuff it reaction got me and I just threw it in the skip with the rest of the rubbish.


check out the size of this baby 

Other happenings over the weekend was a bonfire night, held by our friends visiting from Canberra, Ben and Beck. Ben's folks have retired to a ranch in the Adelaide Hills, and so what better way to spend a winters night than drinking port with old friends around an open fire. We did take some photos, but frankly they didn't turn out that well so I haven't posted any. You know what we look like, just imagine us in front of a fire...

Last weekend during my visit to Perth, I got along to see a preview screening of Morgan Spurlock's Sundance Film Festival winning documentary Super Size Me. Just in case you have been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks, the film centers around Morgan's experiment to eat 3 square McMeals a day and see what happens to him.

There has been a lot of comparisons between Morgan and that other doco maker currently embedded in the pop culture zeitgeist, Michael Moore. The comparison in styles is obvious, although Mr Spurlock's film is much less confrontational and generally more even handed than Bowling for Colombine or The Awful Truth. When you commentate on the quality of a documentary, I guess you have to judge it on two fronts, the impact of the argument presented as well as the entertainment value as a film.

In terms of film making finesse, Super Size me is well edited, punchy and entertaining. It's perversely amusing to watch Morgan, boyfriend of a vegan chef, haplessly try to scoff his way through the McMenu, and blow up like a balloon and nearly do irreversible liver damage in the process. However, I found the cuts to Morgan trying to contact someone in senior mcmanagement on the phone throughout to be just a little cliche for my liking. On the other hand, the obligatory vox popping of people in the street, and then only including the most clueless ones for your film is an old cliche, but one that I must admit I love. You've got to love a man with enough sense of humor to edit his film in such a way to make his countrymen look fat and unintelligent.

On first impressions it would seem that the message of the film is that McDonalds is fattening. "Well duh", you think and this is a point acknowledged by Spurlock before the closing credits. On a deeper level, the film is more concerned with the impact of the big food company's blitzkrieg of advertising at children, and the obesity epidemic it is ensuing. There were some eye opening statistics presented, but the epiphany for me, a person who is always that bit on the chubby side was that doctor who presented the hypothesis that food was an addiction. More often than not you eat because you are addicted to the hit from sugar or caffeine than because you are actually hungry. This little factoid has jumped in my head a number of times this week as I've passed the biscuit barrel at work and stayed my hand.

In the summer of 98/99, following a drunken late night meal at the golden arches, a few friends and I got into this habit of putting mc in front of everything, including people's names. I still use the handle mcjimbo in some places on the internet as a result of this period in my life. But after a while it got a bit old, and we just went back to normal english, as opposed to Mcnormal Mcenglish. However after seeing this film, and it's mchabit of doing the same mcthing, I have started again! I caught myself using the expression McF*cked this week for the first time in a while. I am sure Karen will get Mcsick of it soon enough and give me a well deserved Mcsmack in the Mchead.

The other thing I wanted to share just quickly was a bit about James Bond. Lets get this straight from the outset, I love James Bond, and even though I think that the rampant product placement is ruining modern bond flicks, I will still see every new picture in the first week. Goldfinger would easily be one of my top ten films, how can you not love a female lead character called Pussy Galore? So you can imagine my excitement when, while rustling through a box of books at a scout jumble sale recently, I found a pile of yellowed copies of Ian Fleming's James Bond book. 20c each! Sensational.

So on the plane to Perth this week, I read Casino Royale, which marked the first time the world met Bond, James Bond. Its a great pulp read, but jeez, I know Bond is supposed to be a bit misogynist, but I'd like to see someone print this in a book these days and not get lynched. This was Bond's musing as he rushed off to rescue a female colleague.....

"This was just what he had been afraid of. These blathering women who thought they could do a man's work. Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave the men's work to men".

Ouch! Ironically the rescue goes wrong and our mate James ends up getting tortured by a bloke tying him to a chair and smacking him in the nuts with a carpet beater, and only survives the ordeal by virtue of the aforementioned female being a Russian double agent. Inevitably Bond and his penis recover so he can end up making love to her. I know I just spoilt the ending, but most people know the way 007 stories go now so I don't think it matters.

Here, as promised is a photo of the newest member of the Hogan family, Lucy.

Reminds me of a nursery rhyme.

Lucy Lockett lost her pocket,
Sally Fisher found it,
Not a penny was there in it
Just a ribbon 'round it.

There's a few more photos in our photo gallery. Just click the link down to the right.



Lucy Mae Hogan, age 4 days 

Just got time for a quick update, but our very good pals Leanne and Jon are the proud parents of a bouncing baby girl. Lucy Mae Hogan was born on Sunday 30 May 2004. I will post a photo and some stats soon I promise!