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.